Excellent article on Open Access in the Wall Street Journal
I just came across this article in the WSJ (via open…). From the piece:
In the future, it’s likely that a new, more flexible model will develop in which some scholarly papers, published under the banner of an online journal, will be peer-reviewed, while others will appear without any such apparatus, destined to rise or fall based on their contents and their authors’ reputations. The challenge, in the coming new world of open access, will be keeping the best of the current system while jettisoning the rest. Maybe some scholar would like to study the question — and publish his findings for all to see.
I’m pretty sure the differences between publishing in an open access journal vs. saving your paper in an institutional or disciplinary repository are already being assessed, but the the author is spot on in his evaluation - both approaches can co-exist peacefully. Journals will increasingly mean ‘reviewed’, not just ‘published’.