Hello, Gavin, thank you for the thorough response to my question. You know, I have had a few interesting conversations lately and you struck on one of the themes - sustainability, which is frequently couched in terms of a business model. You provided what I think could be the start of a useful taxonomy that could grow significantly. I think that part of this is about motivation. We can take this in all sorts of ways, but I am thinking a bit about some dialog that followed from Wayne Mackintosh's post (Section : Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource) last April when Richard Wyles wrote a bit about OER and some demand and supply issues that related to motivations, In part of one of his comments he included the following quote:
Part of the problem I see is that the cost of course materials is, more often than not, borne by the student in the form of text-books or course fees when digital library resources come into play.
Pointing out that there is little motivation on the part of faculty to assign AO/Fee Free resources to support their classes. This might relate to two other conversations that I have had this week. One was with a colleague here at Penn State, who is a local leader in OER. We were talking a bit about your (this) post and he raised an issue of conflict. Although his department sees no problem with OA journals per se, there are no OA journals in his discipline area with a high enough selectivity index to be seen as valuable within the tenure and promotion review process. You could imagine too that a graduate student who is interested in an academic career would consider this factor as she considers how search and selection committees review curriculum vita. I guess that the connection that I am trying to make is that if universities tend to bias faculty and students to publish in highly prestigious journals, and a majority of those journals are not OA will they (faculty) be predisposed to think of quality in these terms also and assign course materials from closed publications?
Please note that I am not suggesting that OA journals and journal articles are of lower quality than other publication types, or that there is anything inherent in the OA model that dictates that this must be the case. I am simply suggesting that the academic culture as reflected in its reward system could perpetuate this perception.
Is what I described above a common experience? And, if so, does anybody know of a department or institution that has activity promoted publication in OA journals? Perhaps there are examples of academic units that put some sort of additional weight on use of low barrier publication vehicles?
This is really an area that I have very little experience, but would like to learn more. Just a little desktop research indicates that Thompson Scientific's ISI http://scientific.thomson.com/free/essays/journalcitationreports/impactfactor/ uses citation in other journals as the primary indicator of impact, which strikes me as a bit self-referential. I also came across the Eigenfactor method http://www.eigenfactor.org/whyeigenfactor.htm 49 for journal ranking, which seems a bit more sophisticated that ISI. For example, it take into account a value factor, described as follows:
In collaboration with journalprices.com, Eigenfactor provides information about price and value for thousands of scholarly periodicals. While the Eigenfactor and Article Influence scores do not incorporate price information directly, the Cost-Effectiveness Search orders journals by a measure of the value per dollar that they provide.
Although this would factor in some access issues, the service http://www.journalprices.com/used for “Cost-Effectiveness” does not seem to include the few OA journals that I search for. Perhaps this is just a feature of how recent the OA phenomena is.
Any thoughts, stories, insights?
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