he following articles - recently-published online or in print, but coming to my attention too late to be included in the present iteration of Yesterday Once More - may be of interest to those wishing to pursue some of the issues raised in the present piece:
- Tony Barry and Joanna Richardson, Death of the Journal - Will It be Replaced by Document Delivery? (Draft 3, 1997)
"In the explosion of new technologies and experimentation associated with the Internet a range of services is starting up which provide direct network delivery at the article level and potentially bypass the journals."
- Stevan Harnad, "How to Fast-Forward Learned Serials to the Inevitable and the Optimal for Scholars and Scientists", Serials Review (forthcoming, 1997)
....[T]he transition of the refereed research journal literature to electronic form is both optimal and inevitable....[I]f governments and research institutions do not support this transition, it will happen anyway, as a much more Net-oriented generation is coming of age, but the delay will be a pity for the current generation of researchers, who will not be able to benefit from the PostGutenberg Galaxy. Their research lifetimes will be much shorter than they need have been, and we will all be the poorer for it."
- Mark Crispin Miller, "The Crushing Power of Big Publishing", The Nation, March 17, 1997, at 11.
[on our increasingly inaccurate association of editorial quality with printed works...] "The text today is often slighted...by proofreaders: not out of indolence but because they've been replaced by less-experienced freelancers; and the giants further "save" by skipping galleys, so that manuscripts go straight to page proofs. Typos abound...."
- Mike Sosteric, "Electronic Journals: The Grand Information Future?"
2 Electronic Journal of Sociology (1996)"...traditional publishers are trying to convince [scholars] of the impossibility of providing an alternative publication system by insisting on our inability to achieve rigorous publication, by decrying our motivation, by accusing us of sloppy writing habits, by suggesting that we cannot market our own information, and by generally painting us as amateurs and dilettantes...[These] arguments are based on biases and misunderstandings of the dynamics and power of electronic publication."
- John W.T. Smith, "The Deconstructed Journal" (delivered at the 1997 ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing)
"...Many authors writing in the area of new publishing models have described their work as incorporating a 'paradigm shift' but in many cases their new models are not new paradigms - they are simple (or complex) extrapolations or re-workings of the current model."