RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

["Pikas, Christina K." <Christina.Pikas@jhuapl.edu>]

At the risk of restating Ehling's more eloquent comment on the 
post itself -- this brings us back to gaining participation in an 
institutional repository.  It is my opinion (which I know a few 
people share) that contributions to an IR benefit the institution 
and raise the social capital of the institution -- not the 
individual author. Individual authors need to get cited and get 
recognized and the easiest way to do this is to be found.  Your 
work is more likely to be found in ArXiv or other disciplinary 
repositories than in your IR due to size and co-location with 
other similar works. You might be one of two physicists working 
in an area at your institution - why would someone who wanted 
information in that area go to your institution's repository? 
Yes, search engines and harvesting, but many researchers still 
chain and browse and look at the "what's new" section.

More attention should be paid to virtual journals and a newer 
counterpart, the blog carnival.  When the new physics journal 
looks like a phone book (or Sears catalog -- does anyone remember 
them?) and with another physics publisher disaggregating their 
journals, to an extent, then these new aggregations should become 
more important.  Will the stamp of the editor or selector for the 
virtual journal become meaningful?  Will one large chemical 
society's refusal to participate in nano virtual journals lessen 
their relevance in that research area?

Who does look at the institutional imprimatur is the public.  I 
think this came from Gieryn in his work on the demarcation of 
science.  The public relies most heavily on the institution's 
reputation to judge the authority of scientists and scientists' 
work.


Christina K. Pikas, MLS
R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Voice  240.228.4812 (Washington), 443.778.4812 (Baltimore)
Fax 443.778.5353



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Phil Davis
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:07 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

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