Dear All,

Following the very important developments over at Lingua, mightn't now be a good time for the LAGB to rethink its association with CUP (they charge a painful £1780 per article for OA) and set up and support a fully OA journal.  It is true, of course, that CUP subscription prices are nowhere near Elsevier prices but there is a more general (partly moral) case to be made.  It is a well known case that does not need to be rehearsed here again.

Any thoughts?

G.

If there is broad support for this (and I can't imagine anything else), it would be well worth contacting Johan Rooryck directly for advice.  He hasn't just founded Glossa, but also has a founding role in ling-OA (whose aims go way beyond Glossa).  He would know better than anyone how to manage the transition.

The main consideration in OA publishing is not money but time. The ongoing costs can be quite small if there is a team of people willing to give their time and e-expertise to a project for something other than money. In a profession like ours, where kudos is often a bigger driver than cash, all that would seem to be needed is a different approach to "amateur" online efforts. If it wasn't for impact factors (a weird system in which value is judged by sympathetic magic) and peer review (a good idea, but all too easily turned into a papal curia) then the "professional" journals would have died years ago. All they really bring to the feast is a system that used to work - and their attempts to adapt this old model to the new world have hardly been stellar.

However, to really make OA publishing work for us (and not the accountants) we need to revisit some fundamentals in our profession. For instance, take peer review: does it matter that bad ideas get published with the good? The good ideas will get the citations, the bad ones won't - until, of course, it turns out that they weren't such bad ideas after all. Yes, there will be more raw material for us to wade through, but that only means that papers which set their ideas out simply and effectively will get cited, and rambling efforts will not. We already curate our students' reading with lists and bibliographies, so we already have peer review after publication - do we need it before publication, too?

Academia should be at the forefront of e-publishing, and it is only a conservatism based around the mystique of what we already have that seems to be holding us back. Could we harness (and value) the indirectly academic skills in our profession to better effect?

I agree about the editing; but editing and peer review are two different processes (at least, I hope they are). However, neither of them need a formal process, there is nothing to stop people from asking friends and colleagues to act in either or both roles.

I do not think that an academic publication can work without an editorial team, but those are usually powered by kudos, not cash. However, the editorial role need be no more than final gatekeeper, saying whether something will or will not be published. In the end, it should be the court of citation that determines success.

The problem is that we have a need (publication), but it is currently wrapped in a set of interlocking conventions which basically lead back to money. If we want to remove or mitigate the money element then we need to revisit whatever is causing the costs. If we want to generate a new publication model then everything in the process should be reviewed. The traditional publishers have tried patching the old model and it hasn't really been successful.

Another "for instance" to think about: currently we cite papers with the journal they are published in. What purpose does this serve now that we have search engines, except to give the reader a spurious indicator of quality?