"DISAGGREGATED JOURNALS"

AmSci Ref.

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Anthony Watkinson wrote (in liblicense):

AW: "The quotation from Raym Crow (whose work incidentally I admire) needs to be taken in the context of his model in the same piece. To repeat - this disaggregated model leaves almost no role for publishers..."

Raym Crow's 2002 SPARC Position paper "The Case for Institutional Repositories" lost a lot of its potential usefulness because it made far too much of a completely untested (and, I suspect, ultimately incoherent) speculation (from J.W.T. Smith) about "Disaggregated Journals."

It is a great pity that a concrete, tested, and proven practical means of maximizing research usage and impact -- namely, authors self-archiving their published (traditional) journal articles in their own institutional repositories (aka archives) -- was conflated with a mere piece of speculation in what should have been an authoritative SPARC document.

Here is my original critique of Crow's paper (which I was, alas, persuaded not to post publicly in the American Scientist Open Access Forum at the time (2002), ostensibly on the grounds of maintaining solidarity among OA advocates; but that was a mistake -- it's always a mistake to remain mute about a flawed idea, even among allies). I archived it (without ever actually posting it) only 2 years later, in 2004, too late.

J.W.T. Smith's "Disaggregated Journal" idea had already been discussed extensively much earlier in the American Scientist OA Forum (then called the September-Forum) in 1999. The idea has been neither tested nor patched up since.

(So much of the slow history of OA seems to consist in recycling speculations and fallacies instead of moving ahead and doing what has already been demonstrated to be doable, and effective. Here we are in 2005, rediscovering the "Disaggregated Journal" -- and still not providing the OA that has been within reach for at least a decade and a half. -- I'm sure the pundits will now chime in with their wise saws about why it had be so...)


Your humble but impatient archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad