[Foundation-l] Black market science

Tue Jul 12 18:16:21 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Alec Conroy <alecmconroy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 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.

... we don't currently do traditional publishing, of journals,
encyclopedias, photos, or anything else.
It's not something we've developed expertise in doing. While it may be
a valuable service, that would almost be another top-level Project or
two.

On the other hand, PLoS (plos.org - the public library of science) is
a great journal publisher that reviews and publishes scientific work
under a free license.  [They impose even fewer restrictions on reuse
than Wikimedia, using CC-BY, which is a more appropriate license in my
opinion for novel and scientific work.]

So at one level, we should simply support PLoS and amplify their
visibility and effectiveness.

At another, we could serve as a public repository of works submitted to them.

> 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.

True; we should be improving ease of use for everyone.

SJ