How journals could “add value” by Mark Watson.
From the post:
I wrote a piece for Genome Biology, you may have read it, about open science. I said a lot of things in there, but one thing I want to focus on is how journals could “add value”. As brief background: I think if you’re going to make money from academic publishing (and I have no problem if that’s what you want to do), then I think you should “add value”. Open science and open access is coming: open access journals are increasingly popular (and cheap!), preprint servers are more popular, green and gold open access policies are being implemented etc etc. Essentially, people are going to stop paying to access research articles pretty soon – think 5-10 year time frame.
So what can journals do to “add value”? What can they do that will make us want to pay to access them? Here are a few ideas, most of which focus on going beyond the PDF:
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Humanities journals and their authors should take heed of these suggestions.
Not applicable in every case but certainly better than “journal editorial board as resume padding.”