RE: Does Dramatic Growth of DOAJ Signal Success or Market Dysfunction?

["Sally Morris" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

Not sure if Scott's question was serious or not, but it's 
actually an interesting one.

Seems to me that there are a number of aspects of 'success' in a 
journals system.

The most crucial one is economic sustainability (which perhaps 
was what Phil meant by 'economic success' - he'll no doubt 
clarify).   Without that, the whole edifice collapses.  This 
doesn't necessarily mean making profits for shareholders (though 
it may do), and some of the inputs may be in kind - voluntary 
labour, use of accommodation, facilities, computing, etc - though 
these still have a cost to someone, somewhere.

Another is satisfying the needs of authors - getting their work 
out there speedily to the maximum number of (relevant) readers, 
with whatever quality markers they consider important (e.g. the 
'imprimatur' of a well respected journal) and whatever editorial 
improvements they value.

Yet another is satisfying the needs of readers - making it easy 
to find relevant work, which has passed whatever quality controls 
they consider important, and which when found is clear and 
understandable (and can be reliably cited and found again - 
unchanged, or with any changes clearly indicated - by others).  I 
would think that the certainty that the citations in a given 
article are accurately linked to the originals to which they 
refer was pretty important to readers, too.

Then I guess there are also the needs of institutions, funders 
etc to consider

I'd be most interested to know what others think are the criteria 
of success in a journals system

Sally

  Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing,
West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of T Scott 
Plutchak
Sent: 20 December 2010 04:28
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Does Dramatic Growth of DOAJ Signal Success or 
Market Dysfunction?

Please define "success".

T. Scott Plutchak

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
tscott@uab.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of David Prosser
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 5:22 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Does Dramatic Growth of DOAJ Signal Success or 
Market Dysfunction?

>From Phil's post:

'But does this type of growth really indicate economic success in 
open access publishing?  Or does growth simply point to a system 
gone awry, like the growth in unemployment or the proliferation 
of spam?'

There is just about no metric of success for OA that Phil can't 
spin into bad news.  Of course he doesn't actually say that OA 
journals are like spam - just leaves the words floating there.

David

On 17 Dec 2010, at 03:47, Philip Davis wrote:

> Two new studies that analyze the distribution of journals in the
> DOAJ come to opposite conclusions. see:
>
> For Open Access Journals, Size Does Matter:
>
> http://goo.gl/fb/Qpkwd
>
> --Phil Davis