The Parachute: Journals of Nature and Science

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-10-09

Summary:

"Joe Esposito's recent post on the Scholarly Kitchen prompted me to post the following proposal, which I have discussed with various people, but which has no takers yet. But who knows what the future holds... I called the proposed system JONAS (for 'Journals Of Nature And Science' – working title, obviously). It is, I think, a new approach to open access publication of peer-reviewed scientific literature. If it isn't I've missed something (entirely possible) The core of the JONAS system would effectively be to have OA journals with a low-cost structure, with superb and highly optimized technical quality of the published articles. The principal difference with other OA journals would be the pre-arranged open peer review ("peer-review-by-endorsement"), organised by the authors themselves, according to a set of rules that ensures a reasonable level of assurance against reviewer bias (because of its openness and non-anonymity, actually more assurance than is provided in the usual anonymous peer review as widely practiced). Since arranging peer review is one of the major costs of any publisher (mostly staff costs), leaving that part of the publishing process in the hands of researchers and the academic community can make a great difference to the cost of publication. So far, efforts to reduce the cost of publishing have been concentrated on technical issues. Changing the mechanism (emphatically not the principle) of peer review offers much greater scope for cost reduction.  What JONAS' job would be is to take such peer-endorsed articles and make them into professionally published and complete (including data and metadata) documents, adhering to all the technical, presentational and unique identifier standards, in a number of formats, linked and linkable to databases and other relevant information, human- and machine-readable and suitable for widespread usage, for text- and data-mining, for structured analysis (incl. semantic analysis) and further knowledge discovery, and, crucially, for long-term preservation in repositories and archives of any kind ..."

Link:

http://theparachute.blogspot.com/2014/10/journals-of-nature-and-science.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.costs oa.gold oa.peer_review oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/09/2014, 07:21

Date published:

10/09/2014, 03:21