Karen Hellekson: Breaking the primacy of print

Wissenschaftler müssen daran interessiert sein, ihre Forschungsergebnisse in anerkannten Journals zu publizieren. Es wird unterstellt, daß in den Augen von denjenigen, die über Projektanträge, Berufungen etc. entscheiden, die Aufzählung der Journals in Zitations- und Aufsatzdatenbanken wie Web of Science oder Scopus zählt. Auch die Aufnahme in lizensierte Journal-Aggregatoren oder bibliographische Fachdatenbanken und -suchdienste  mag eine Rolle spielen. Was geschieht, wenn sich die Kriterien für die Aufnahme in diese Datenbanken und Suchdienste einseitig am Modell der gedruckten Fachzeitschrift orientieren? — Karen Hellekson, Herausgeberin des peer-reviewten Open-Access-Journals Transformative Works and Cultures schildert diese Misere sehr anschaulich:

„(… I)ndexing services seek to ensure quality by going down a checklist of current best practices in the journal-publishing industry and only listing journals that fulfill these criteria. Yet best practices have clearly not yet been able to adequately account for online-only publications, or online-only publications would not be treated differently by academic institutions during review for tenure and promotion.

When I fill out forms, surveys, and index submission forms related to TWC and its practices, it becomes clear how strongly the print model affects every aspect of what is considered the norm for publishing. I skip entire sections: I don’t know the number of subscriptions because we don’t use a subscription model. I can’t estimate readership because many of the user accounts are obviously spam accounts, and plenty of readers never create a user ID. We don’t offer different levels of access to different people. We don’t have office expenses because we don’t have an office, instead using freeware OJS to shepherd copy through the publication process. I can’t estimate readership for an essay because our copyright permits the author, or anyone else, to repost, which bleeds off readers and thus they aren’t counted by the software. We have no income from reprint or author fees because we don’t charge those fees. All the questions meant to assess readership and subscriptions are, with an open access model, nearly impossible to estimate. Ironically, the traditional journal-publishing world seeks to maximize impact by minimizing access, even though study after study has shown that people are far more likely to read and cite publications available in full online.“

via Breaking the primacy of print « Symposium Blog.