
Elsevier defends its value after Open Access disputes - grownseed
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/elsevier-defends-its-value-after-open-access-disputes-328037
======
mindcrime
Seems that this is what I just read:

"Blah, blah, blah, peer review, blah, blah, economics, blah, blah, blah,
innovation, blah, blah, blah."

Seriously, I don't see anything in there that sells me that Elsevier is adding
significant value to the academic publishing world. So they reject a lot of
stuff? An arXiv overlay journal can easily have its editors click a button to
reject a submission, but the paper is still there on arXiv if people still
want to read it for whatever reason. As far as that goes, an overlay journal
could easily support crowd-sourced ranking based on votes, tags, etc., and let
users set filters to define the bar a paper has to reach before they see it.
And if you support discussions around each paper, you encourage post-
publication review.

"But, wait" you're saying... "somebody would have to write that software".
Yes, technically correct, although there are open source platforms already
that could provide a very significant foundation to build on. And if a major
initiative were launched to build a standard, open source platform for
building overlay journals, I feel highly confident that a number of
contributors would jump in. At the very least, I'd volunteer for that myself.

"But what about the marketing that Elsevier does", you say.

I say, a scientific journal should receive respect and credibility based on
its contents, not the marketing spend of the publisher. If anything, reading
the bits about marketing in this article leave me with an even less favorable
view of Elsevier (if that is possible).

~~~
mindcrime
To expand on that, it looks like there is already some software out there to
facilitate building overlay journals:

[http://arxivjournal.org/rioja/](http://arxivjournal.org/rioja/)

