If the sciences can do it… PLOHSS: A PLOS-style model for the humanities and social sciences <http://wp.me/p20y83-BF>
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) was founded in 2000 as an advocacy group promoting open access to scientific literature in the face of increasingly prohibitive journal costs imposed by scientific publishers. The group proposed the formation of an online public library "that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form." ... Why not create a PLOS-style mega journal for the humanities and social sciences? Admittedly, this is new thinking, especially for humanities scholars whose academic traditions are deep and slow to change. But if it is correct to assert that scholars (do and should) create their own reputation, and if in this online era it is the disaggregated but fully discoverable article not the journal that is really the currency of scholarly communication and reputation, maybe a hosting platform otherwise capable of providing credible peer review would suffice for exposing research to anyone who is interested, in the scholarly community or beyond. While it may not be able to entirely avoid using APCs, it would not make ability to pay a pre-condition to publication. Soliciting institutional sponsorships from monies already in the system, and leveraging the scale of a shared multi-disciplinary online service could make operations sustainable and per article costs low. ... Late last week I received a tweet from Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a lecturer in English Literature at University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. You may recall back in July I gave a hat tip to Martin for his excellent "Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide." The tweet linked to a post on his blog soliciting participants to help build a Public Library of Science model for the Humanities and Social Sciences. … Gary F. Daught Omega Alpha | Open Access <http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com> oa.openaccess at gmail dot com @OAopenaccess _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
