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Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?
An anonymous reader writes "'We can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it' wrote Vannevar Bush in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Nearly 70 years later, academics are still wrapping research in inaccessible journal articles. Might they be doing it wrong?"
It's interesting that in math, the transition to open access journals is being led by some of the most prominent mathematicians, such as Tim Gowers and Terence Tao.
As a student in the sciences, the most annoying thing is when you are writing a paper and looking for sources you find this great journal article for a source and it only costs $45 to see more then the abstract. This article is essential for your paper so first you try through your library, then you look on the web, then you call your friend at a different college and see if they have access to it. I've never met a student that has paid up front for a journal article.
While I am all for having science knowledge be free, somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system. I had a friend who worked for a publisher and it was her job to edit journal articles and she was astounded and the poor writing that was submitted and confided that some articles didn't get published because they were so poorly written. What does need to happen though is Publishers need to realize that in this modern age they need a different distribution framework. If you take the approach of netflix and make every journal article available for a small price to individual subscribers everybody would sign up. In one state Instead of having say 10 individual libraries paying 5000 each, you have 60,000 students paying $30 each. There is still a way to make money from this they just need to realize that they need to modernize their distribution methods.
Bottom line, the idea of having only certain articles get published in special prestigious journals because of their significance is still a good idea. However maybe in this future age of article accessibility having articles are voted to be part of a collection based on how often they are cited would be a better indication of how "prestigious" an article is and how well it reflects on the author.