Re: Does More Mean More?

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

For convenience, I am responding to this post, and also others 
oft the same tenor.

The real question is not how many journals are OA, or even how 
many articles are OA, but how many first-rate articles are OA. 
For OA to help readers, it must provide access to what they 
mainly want to read. In helping authors extend their readership, 
it is their best papers than authors typically want to make it 
possible for everyone to read.

The number of good articles is not affected by publishers, or 
libraries.  It depends on the number of scientists doing 
first-rate work, which is turn depends on the resources supplied 
for their education, their salaries, and their equipment. All 
that any publisher can do is shift the articles from one journal 
to another. And all that any librarian can do is to determine 
which journals are actually the most required by their users, and 
find the most effective way of supplying them with available 
resources. No publisher can create articles, and no library can 
create money.

But either of them can put obstacles in the way of authors or 
readers, in which case the researchers will ignore both, and 
develop their own system, with different merits and defects than 
the existing one.

>From where are Joe's surfeit of inferior articles to come? Such 
articles are already here, in the lower quality journals. 
Anything that looks like research can be published in some "peer 
reviewed" journal The people who find it difficult to write an 
article will not write more with OA. . Such journals are paid for 
by relying on the decreasing number of libraries witch are able 
to acquire them, at least in limited areas. (Thus the paradox 
that the best libraries are the ones supporting the worst 
journals.) Why should readers have difficulty finding them? 
Experienced readers select articles from the people they know 
typically do work worth reading, and they teach this to their 
students. (This is why advisors often co-publish with their 
students, to help them acquire a reputation.) I, for example, 
know to read and sometimes even respond to Sally and Joe.

Dr. David Goodman
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman@liu.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Morris (ALPSP)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>
Date: Friday, January 27, 2006 5:35 pm
Subject: Re: Does More Mean More?
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> I heartily support what Joe says.  One of the key values 
> publishers add, as well as 'quality control', is 'quantity 
> control'
>
> Sally Morris, Chief Executive Association of Learned and 
> Professional Society Publishers
> Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org