[Foundation-l] Black market science

Tue Jul 12 15:59:47 UTC 2011

>>> My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount
>>> of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a
>>> difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional
>>> repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians
>>> think that they will come to us and upload and "curate" their text?

I suspect the current population of scientists will need us to step in
and perform all the roles of a journal publisher, thus allowing them
to continue their workflow completely without any change to their own
scientific work.     If we're going to capture science publishing, we
have to be MORE accommodating than the for-profit journals.  So if  a
scientist's existing "upload" process is to just send it as an email
attachment, or even god forbid to print it up and mail it to somebody,
 we need to be able to accommodate that with all the ease-of-use that
their existing provider gives them.

Essentially, we need to steal somebody who runs one of the existing
scientific journal companies (or one of their free alternatives) and
get them to teach us and our computers how to do everything the
professional journal companies are doing--  so that the scientists can
then be free to just "swap" out their commercial publisher and switch
straight to us without ANY changes.

Alec