Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

This starts looking like publishing at the turn of the century -- 
a college-centric model of dissemination where titles like 
'Bulletin of the College of Agriculture' were the norm (and still 
exist in places like India).  These collections of collective 
faculty output gradually faded when subject-centric models of 
publishing became the norm.  They faded because researchers can 
create 'invisible colleges' [1] of other like-minded researchers 
from other colleges, and because these new communities (lets call 
them 'journals' and 'societies') become much more salient than 
one's home institution.

To use Joe's business term, 'brand', a college or publisher is a 
much weaker brand than a journal or society brand.  The Harvard 
brand carries a gatekeeping stamp [2], since it necessarily 
filters out everyone who cannot (or does not care) to be part of 
the Harvard faculty.  Yet, it is still stuck in the 1920s model 
of college-centric publishing.  Now someone will respond to my 
post and claim that it is possible to create 'channels' or 
'layers' to provide some organization to this shoebox model.  Or 
alternatively, that when enough colleges do this, we could create 
'information streams' that would facilitate a democratic 
participatory model of subject-focused publishing.  Folks, you 
have just reinvented the modern journal.

--Phil Davis


References:

[1] Price, D. J. S. (1986). Collaboration in an Invisible 
College. In Little science, big science...and beyond (pp. 
119-134). New York: Columbia University Press. Originally 
published as: Price, D. J., & Beaver, D. D. (1966) American 
Psychologist, 21(11):1011-1018 Crane, D. (1972). Invisible 
colleges; diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. 
Chicago: U. Chicago Press.

[2] see: Crane, D. (1967). The gatekeepers of science: Some 
factors affecting the selection of articles for scientific 
journals. American Sociologist, 2(4), 195-201.

Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1967). Scientific Communication 
as a Social System. Science, 157(3792), 1011-1016. Zuckerman, H., 
& Merton, R. K. (1971). Patterns of evaluation in science: 
Institutionalisation, structure and functions of the referee 
system. Minerva, 9(1), 66-100.


Joseph J. Esposito wrote:
> Some thoughts on one of the implications of Harvard's recent open
> access announcement--found here, at: http://pubfrontier.com.
> The title of the post is "Provostial Publishing."
>
> Joe Esposito