Firstly a big hello to you all, my name is Peter Bloodsworth and I am
currently a Research Student at Oxford Brookes University in the UK.
This is a very interesting discussion - here are my views. I believe
that Christian is correct in saying that electronic publication should
be the primary method as this encourages the dissemination of
cutting-edge technologies. I think that this is important because the
speed of development within mainstream Journals is often too
ponderous. Personally speaking it would be nice if there could be an
open exchange of new ideas encouraging a process of group
revision/comment that eventually leads to publication. I suppose this
would be a forum for collaborative research, that could run in
parallel with the Journals. When it comes to printed versions of the
Journals - might it be possible to provide a print yourself option. If
the online Journals were created to a very high standard surely any
laser printer will produce an acceptable hard copy which then can be
bound. Obviously this would depend on employing strong Journal
branding in the online version. I am not sure if this is possible but
it would solve certain problems. On the fees front, I see no problem
with what has been suggested provided that they are kept at a level
which does not prevent access to those with more modest means. Perhaps
one issue of the Journal a year could be completely open with no fees
at all?


Regards,


Peter



--- In open-research-society@yahoogroups.com, "masicilia"
<msicilia@u...> wrote:
> Dear all and dear Christian,
>
> I completely agree that paper publication must not be a cause of
> delays and restrictions on number of pages. In fact, the plan I
> briefly described was based on quick digital publication, with the
> printed versions coming afterwards as a secondary element.
>
> The "printing on demand" is a nice concept, except that many
printing
> services require a minimum order of 5-10 copies, but this is
probably
> not a big problem.
> Just to continue with the example I commented you, if we adhere to
> such "printing on demand", the fees result as follow:
> - Fee for EB members: About 20 Euros/year
> - Fee for paper published: About 10 euros
> - Printed copies: about 20 Euros.
>
> And a point I didn't mention is that the economic model *scales*. I
> suppose that the initiative of this Open-Research Society is to
host
> *many* journals as the BMC or PLOS (if I am wrong, please
Miltiadis,
> correct me :-)) so that the excedent in funding from one can be
used
> for other. However, I still think that the fee model is required,
> since the cost of management of the digital journals (specially for
> collections or journals) must be paid somewhat to guarantee
> continuity!.
>
> Regards,
> Miguel Angel
>
> --- In open-research-society@yahoogroups.com, "Christian Wagner"
> <christian@w...> wrote:
> > I too agree that a model with author fees is restrictive for the
> > publication of research. I would even go further and suggest
that
> any
> > "paper based" journal model stiffles research publication. In
paper
> > based journals, the marginal cost for every page printed is
> considered
> > and so an artifical scarcity is produced, resulting in a
"pipeline"
> > and publication delays.
> >
> > An open research model should better align itself with the
> publication
> > models of slashdot.org or kuro5hin.org, both of which have peer
> > review, yet fast publication, and large readership. Both are
> > electronic publication models.
> >
> > I would consider an alternate paper based model, where the
> publication
> > is essentially electronic, but authors could request (at their
> cost) a
> > "bound journal issue" (printing on demand) so that they can give
it
> to
> > their Dean at the time of tenure decisions.
> >
> > If you have not seen it, the University of British Columbia
offers a
> > free software for the management of electronic journals. You can
> find
> > it at http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ and it runs on a PhP/MySQL platform
> > (either with Linux/Apache or with Windows + web server).