On 17-Feb-10, at 6:19 AM, Richard Poynder wrote: However, I think Jean-Claude is more focussed on âoughtâ than âisâ. True, he proposes an existing service (Brazil's SciELO) as a model for the future, but given the way that researchers are motivated by their institutions and their funders today, I suspect the model we are more likely to see emerge -- in the near term at least -- is the one that is apparently becoming common in China (http://tiny.cc/5a58S).
Comment: China is unique, in many respects. It is unlikely that this model would be replicated outside of China. It is also quite possible that China will rapidly assess and address the issues; the pace of change in general in China in recent years is astonishing. One aspect of the Chinese experience that is unique is the speed and scale of its modernization project, resulting in huge numbers of new scholars needing to publish, without an existing scholarly system for them to fit into. This is a situation that would be impossible to replicate elsewhere on anything like this scale. The other uncommon element for Chinese scholars is a government committed to tight control of information dissemination. Rapid adoption of, and support for, scholar-led open access publishing using tools such as OJS could very quickly eliminate the bottleneck described in the above article. Heather Morrison, MLIS PhD Student Simon Fraser University School of Communication The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
