Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review

Thu, 02/28/2008 - 08:33 — Blake

Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review: A recent announcement out of Indiana hasn’t received the same attention, but may represent a larger challenge in the end to the traditional model of scholarly publishing, which has evolved to a system with expensive print and online publications and limited access for readers. A professor at Indiana University who is editor of an anthropology journal published traditionally has started a new journal — online and free — using tools made available by the library. After a one-year experiment, the journal is now officially launched and is already attracting many more readers than the establishment print model ever did.

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Thu, 02/28/2008 - 12:04 — Walt

New?

What may be new here is that the editor of a toll-access journal moved to create a comparable OA journal. There are more than 2,500 open access journals, free to readers; the earliest date back to 1989; and I'd guess that very few of them are available in print form (except as readers choose to print them out). And university libraries have been involved in such ejournals for a very long time as well...

Which is not to say that this isn't a good thing, just that it's not all that new.