Dear all,
For the benefits of being readable to general readers across disciplines and regions, I suggest that we provide short descriptions on acronyms such as ISI, SSCI, SCI, etc.
As the discussion on open-access journals here, it may be helpful if we distinguish the "pragmatic purpose" of publishing as the following two categories
(1) indicators of "performance" and/or "excellence" for institutional use: this is where the issues of being included by major commercial citation index lie. Researchers, especially those need to respond to academic peer review, need to identify journals that are more established (and thus sometimes pro-status quo, more conservative). For example, the barriers to be included in the well-known Science Citation Index (SCI), and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) could be very high depending on the disciplines. It might be easier first to compile a list of established journals if the need is to publish in these journals in response to institutional performance requirement. Perhaps one can data-mine from the currently available Wiki-related bibliography?
(2) indicators of "relevance" and/or "searchability" for general public use: this is where the issue of making the research outcome accessible and useful for the general public, e.g. outside the pay-wall, searchable on the Web, etc. For that, I personally think old-style mailing lists (like this one) and personal blogs may work just fine. Do not forget the Wikimedia Research Newsletter as well.
It is a big issue of political economy of academic publishing and funding when it comes to the convergence/divergence of open access journals and the established journals/citation indexes. While everyone could be vocal about their efforts and rationals, I think it is equally important to describe the publishing landscape fairly so as to provide guidelines for new researchers to reach their diverse goals in their life/career.
One advice is to raise the issue also in the scholarly communication channels in the established disciplines, regarding which of their ISI-included established journals are open access (OA) or similar. For media/communication studies, one can try JCMC, which is both OA and included in the SSCI with pretty performance numbers.
Best,
han-teng liao
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 2:18 AM, Ward Cunningham
<ward@c2.com> wrote:
On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:
People should be able to publish their work as quickly as they like in a professional way, especially in fields that change rapidly and need to benefit from collaborating with one another.
Hmm. What is the quickest way that we would ever want to publish our work? If we push on this hard enough we might change the nature of work. (Yes, I know, much in academia conspires against quick. Same for business and probably dating. But as a thought experiment, how quick could quick be?)
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