Re: Raym Crow on publishing cooperatives

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

Heather,

It's wonderful to support new models of scholarly publishing, but 
as we do that we have to carefully define the "inequities and 
inefficiencies" of the system we are proposing to change--and, 
perhaps more importantly, add a third problem--the 
ineffectiveness of a great deal of scholarly communication.

I am not sure what inefficiency we are addressing. The 
traditional system is far more efficient in distribution than 
open access would be; those who need particular information 
purchase it, vs. a system in which scarce resources are used to 
make information available to the 99.9% of people who have no use 
for it. But perhaps you instead mean the inefficiency of journal 
production, and especially peer review. There's no argument that 
peer review is very costly and laborious for the uneven results 
it produces. It would be very interesting to explore new 
mechanisms, especially in clinical medicine, where alternatives 
like real-time open peer review are not appropriate.

The real question for me is effectiveness. Depressing little of 
what is published in clinical medicine finds its way into 
clinical practice in a timely basis. Information by itself 
appears to do little to change provider behavior; that takes 
real-time feedback, new reimbursement systems, etc.

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
pbanks@bankspub.com


On 9/13/06 8:53 PM, "Heather Joseph" <heather@arl.org> wrote:

> [we need to be] exploring new models of scholarly publishing 
> that address the inequities and inefficiencies in the current 
> models.