[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Tue Mar 25 12:03:57 UTC 2014

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 9:46:31 AM, you wrote:

> railed against the "completely unstable and
> unpredictable new world of ephemera" , and they may have a point.

Like Mike said, we are the masters and the rules are the slaves. We can easily create "versions of record" where they are useful and get rid of them where they are not.

It's not like everything digital is now all of a sudden ephemeral and everything paper is not. If we control it, it will be as ephemeral and as stable as we make it to be.

Versioning is one way of doing it, perhaps superimposed by 'staging', e.g. 

- preprint
- reviewed by <X experts
- reviewed by >X experts
- no dissent/with dissent
- retracted
- recommended by >X experts
- patented
- re-used
- cited >X times

Any rule we build upon this could, e.g. prevent certain stages from becoming a version of record or revoke a version of record status.

This is just a modern version of what we already have: manuscripts, pre-prints, proofs and 'paper', we'd just be upgrading it to the digital age, 20-30 years after the digital age arrived :-)

Simply by having our digital objects under our control allows us to invent a few organizational components, the potential combinations of which should allow for sufficient flexibility to serve all communities within science. We design an open standard that grows with the needs of the scientific community and with its increasing diversity and specialization. If we want our infrastructure to serve our needs and not vice versa as it is now, we need to be in charge of the rules that govern the infrastructure, not 30k different journals.

Obviously, this infrastructure needs to include our other digital objects as well, code and data, in a similar/analogous fashion.

The only possible way I can see to realistically finance this infrastructure is by using the funds we currently waste on publishing - or who is going to tell politicians they need to pay us an additional 10b annually, because we can't get our act together? I mean it took us the better part of 10 years to get politicians to support mandates and gold OA funds. How will we sell a "sorry, the whole OA thing for the last ten years was actually completely misguided, can you pretty please give us a hundred times of what you've reluctantly have us so far to get things right and keep a useless, dysfunctional publishing landscape artificially alive in the process?" to any politician without bribing them? When we have already given all the money to bribe them with to the publishers? :-)

Cheers,

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurogenetics
Universität Regensburg
Germany