Re: Thoughts on Publishing Trends and OA scholarship

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Colin provides his usual perceptive comments and useful 
information here, and I agree with practically all of it.

Regarding emerging new models that are akin to what Colin 
describes here, I would draw everyone's attention to the 
innovative Quadrant project, funded by Mellon, at the University 
of Minnesota involving its press, Institute for Advanced Study, 
and several research centers and departments: 
http://www.upress.umn.edu/html/mellonnews.html.

Our Romance Studies monograph series, involving open access and 
POD, continues to develop, with three titles released at the end 
of 2007 and three more in the pipeline. My guess is that to 
succeed in the long run, our series will need to scale up to a 
multi-institutional enterprise. In the Internet age, as Joe has 
been pointing out, size matters.

My skepticism about IRs is not that they won't provide a wealth 
of new material to the general public; it is just that I don't 
see how anyone can attempt an overall assessment of the quality 
of a university's research output by looking at what exists on 
its IR. To my mind also, the increasing use of quantitative 
metrics is a mixed blessing at best. Ultimately, it is quality 
that counts, and that is not easy to measure quantitatively.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press