COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

From the point of view of the scholar, the journal is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end is the timely dissemination of results and ideas to one's peers via a channel that is recognized by the scholar's intellectual community as effective. This has traditionally been the peer-review literature.

From the point of view of the university, the end (one hopes) is both support for the activities of scholars and the efficient running of the institution (preferably in that order!). In this case, paying twice for research (once when the scholars perform it and once again to purchase the printed journal) seems quite contradictory.

From the point of view of the publisher (I suspect - I am not now, nor have I ever been a journal publisher) the journal is more of an end in itself, or a means to ensure commercial viability for the organization.

So much is self-evident. The real problem is that the various stakeholders have quite different agendas and quite different drivers for their decisions. The challenge is to move the current system (which works, sort of) to some new steady state system which provides sufficient incentives and roles for those stakeholders which the new system requires (these may not necessarily be all of the current stakeholders or in the same configurations as now).

In making this move, the real power lies with the creators of the intellectual property - the scholars themselves. Scholars can survive without journal publishers. The converse is clearly not true.

I applaud Mr. Koonin's suggestion and encourage his faculty and other university leaders to follow his example.

-- Andrew Treloar, Senior Lecturer, Deakin University, Australia (posted 9/15, 10:04 p.m., E.D.T.)

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