[GOAL] Re: If the sciences can do it… PLOHSS: A PLOS-style model for the humanities and social sciences
The idea of a PLOHSS is one I have discussed with at least one person who works for PLOS. Personally, I believe the PLOS solution is extremely important in that it contributes to separating scholarship quality from journal editorial lines. In other words, in a PLOS-like journal, if the work is well done, it does not matter whether it is a popular, or a hot, or frivolous, or a locally relevant, topic, and so on. The main issue with a PLOS-HSS journal is that HSS journals are strongly tied to editorial lines. In HSS journals, the editorial line is often as important as quality concerns. Quite often, HSS Journals are flag-bearers of interpretive perspectives or schools. One way, perhaps, to overcome this difficulty is to create a PLOS-HSS journal that would federate many editorial boards of as many journals. Each editorial board would thus retain its journal-like identity. When an article would be submitted to the PLOS-HSS megajournal, every editorial board could decide whether to evaluate it or not. The result is that the article could be peer reviewed from a variety of perspectives including several editorial boards. If accepted, the article would be published with an acknowledgement of the boards involved. Any article published with the peer-review of one person chosen by one particular editorial board would automatically be part of the content of that journal. As a result, an article could be associated with several journals, but would appear only once in the mega-journal. Of course, each journal could repackage the articles it owns to publish a separate journal (without quotation marks). This possibility might limit the pains of losing one's editorial identity in a big mega-journal, but, ultimately, the mega journal would simply federate boards that would reflect a wide variety of trends, tendencies, and theoretical choices. Given the continuing importance of national languages in the HSS, one possible principle of aggregation or federation could be based on language. In this fashion, HSS studies would begin to reorganize themselves in large linguistic groups. Then further refinements can appear such as translations of the best papers in the main trade languages of the world (e.g. English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc.). In this fashion, the globalization of HSS studies could begin in earnest. Of course, there are many devils lurking in many detail crannies, but some good thinking should allow overcome most if not all of them. Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 18 janvier 2013 à 12:29 -0500, Omega Alpha|Open Access a écrit : 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 -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal
[GOAL] Re: If the sciences can do it… PLOHSS: A PLOS-style model for the humanities and social sciences
It seems that we are equating PLoS with PLoS ONE, the megajournal. Is PLoS planning to abandon its original strategy of producing top-quality journals to compete with the likes of Nature and Science? If not, some thought about how to talk about this might be a good idea. Along this vein, I am wondering if it is wise to brand a new humanities and social sciences megajournal after PLoS - at first glance it gives the appearance that HSS is considered to be slow and lacking in innovation. This is not the case. It is true that there are many very traditional publishers in HSS, but it is also true that a large portion of the world's STM journals are still being published by Elsevier. best, Heather Morrison On 2013-01-18, at 11:03 AM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: The idea of a PLOHSS is one I have discussed with at least one person who works for PLOS. Personally, I believe the PLOS solution is extremely important in that it contributes to separating scholarship quality from journal editorial lines. In other words, in a PLOS-like journal, if the work is well done, it does not matter whether it is a popular, or a hot, or frivolous, or a locally relevant, topic, and so on. The main issue with a PLOS-HSS journal is that HSS journals are strongly tied to editorial lines. In HSS journals, the editorial line is often as important as quality concerns. Quite often, HSS Journals are flag-bearers of interpretive perspectives or schools. One way, perhaps, to overcome this difficulty is to create a PLOS-HSS journal that would federate many editorial boards of as many journals. Each editorial board would thus retain its journal-like identity. When an article would be submitted to the PLOS-HSS megajournal, every editorial board could decide whether to evaluate it or not. The result is that the article could be peer reviewed from a variety of perspectives including several editorial boards. If accepted, the article would be published with an acknowledgement of the boards involved. Any article published with the peer-review of one person chosen by one particular editorial board would automatically be part of the content of that journal. As a result, an article could be associated with several journals, but would appear only once in the mega-journal. Of course, each journal could repackage the articles it owns to publish a separate journal (without quotation marks). This possibility might limit the pains of losing one's editorial identity in a big mega-journal, but, ultimately, the mega journal would simply federate boards that would reflect a wide variety of trends, tendencies, and theoretical choices. Given the continuing importance of national languages in the HSS, one possible principle of aggregation or federation could be based on language. In this fashion, HSS studies would begin to reorganize themselves in large linguistic groups. Then further refinements can appear such as translations of the best papers in the main trade languages of the world (e.g. English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc.). In this fashion, the globalization of HSS studies could begin in earnest. Of course, there are many devils lurking in many detail crannies, but some good thinking should allow overcome most if not all of them. Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 18 janvier 2013 à 12:29 -0500, Omega Alpha|Open Access a écrit : 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
[GOAL] Re: If the sciences can do it? PLOHSS: A PLOS-style model for the humanities and social sciences
Heather, PLOS ONE is only one of seven journals published by PLOS. I'm not aware that PLOS has any plans to abandon its original strategy. Martin should probably be invited to offer his own description and intention (I don't know if he is on this list). It does seem, however, that it is specifically the PLOS ONE mega journal format that he is looking at as a model for his HSS effort. If there is any conflation it's only in the sense of: PLOS publishes PLOS ONE. Therefore, PLOS is providing the model for PLOHSS (not through any affiliation, just by example). In any event, as I understand it, PLOHSS is not the official name for the effort, it's only a placeholder designation for the initial ideas hub website http://www.plohss.org he has setup. See on his blog here https://www.martineve.com/2013/01/13/an-update-on-the-plohss-project/, where he is soliciting ideas for a name. Also, I believe it was in the Library Journal interview http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/01/oa/qa-martin-eve-on-why-we-need-a-public-library-of-the-humanities-and-social-sciences/#_ where he indicated that discussions might conclude that they separate the humanities and social sciences into subset journals. At the very least, my take was that by invoking PLOS he is saying HSS should be able to have its own online public library of open access article literature. Gary F. Daught Omega Alpha | Open Access http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology oa.openaccess at gmail dot com @OAopenaccess On Jan 18, 2013, at 7:24 PM, goal-requ...@eprints.org wrote: Message: 3 Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:18:31 -0800 From: Heather Morrison hgmor...@sfu.ca Subject: [GOAL] Re: If the sciences can do it? PLOHSS: A PLOS-style model for the humanities and social sciences To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) goal@eprints.org Cc: boai-forum boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Message-ID: fc0abee7-ad47-4ff9-a7de-12b95cf12...@sfu.ca Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 It seems that we are equating PLoS with PLoS ONE, the megajournal. Is PLoS planning to abandon its original strategy of producing top-quality journals to compete with the likes of Nature and Science? If not, some thought about how to talk about this might be a good idea. Along this vein, I am wondering if it is wise to brand a new humanities and social sciences megajournal after PLoS - at first glance it gives the appearance that HSS is considered to be slow and lacking in innovation. This is not the case. It is true that there are many very traditional publishers in HSS, but it is also true that a large portion of the world's STM journals are still being published by Elsevier. best, Heather Morrison On 2013-01-18, at 11:03 AM, Jean-Claude Gu?don wrote: The idea of a PLOHSS is one I have discussed with at least one person who works for PLOS. Personally, I believe the PLOS solution is extremely important in that it contributes to separating scholarship quality from journal editorial lines. In other words, in a PLOS-like journal, if the work is well done, it does not matter whether it is a popular, or a hot, or frivolous, or a locally relevant, topic, and so on. The main issue with a PLOS-HSS journal is that HSS journals are strongly tied to editorial lines. In HSS journals, the editorial line is often as important as quality concerns. Quite often, HSS Journals are flag-bearers of interpretive perspectives or schools. One way, perhaps, to overcome this difficulty is to create a PLOS-HSS journal that would federate many editorial boards of as many journals. Each editorial board would thus retain its journal-like identity. When an article would be submitted to the PLOS-HSS megajournal, every editorial board could decide whether to evaluate it or not. The result is that the article could be peer reviewed from a variety of perspectives including several editorial boards. If accepted, the article would be published with an acknowledgement of the boards involved. Any article published with the peer-review of one person chosen by one particular editorial board would automatically be part of the content of that journal. As a result, an article could be associated with several journals, but would appear only once in the mega-journal. Of course, each journal could repackage the articles it owns to publish a separate journal (without quotation marks). This possibility might limit the pai! ns of losing one's editorial identity in a big mega-journal, but, ultimately, the mega journal would simply federate boards that would reflect a wide variety of trends, tendencies, and theoretical choices. Given the continuing importance of national languages in the HSS, one possible principle of aggregation or federation could be based on language. In this fashion, HSS studies would begin to reorganize themselves in large
