Locally controlled scholarly publishing via the internet: The guild model

Abstract

Many librarians and scholars believe that the Internet can be used to dramatically improve scholarly communication. During the last decade there has been substantial discussion of five major publishing models where readers could access articles without a fee: electronic journals, hybrid paper‐electronic journals, authors' self‐posting on web sites, free online access to all peer reviewed literature, and disciplinary repositories where authors post their own unrefereed articles. There have been numerous projects within each of these models, as well as extensive discussions about their strengths and limitations. While some of these projects have become important scholarly resources in specific disciplines; none of them has become commonplace across numerous disciplines. There is a sixth model that has been quietly adopted and developed in a number of disciplines – the research publication series called working papers or technical reports that are sponsored by academic departments or research institutes. Many of these manuscript series are available to readers, online, and free of charge. This model – which we call Guild Publishing – has a distinct set of advantages and limitations when compared with the other five publishing models. This article explains the Guild Publishing Model, provides some examples, and discusses its strengths and limitations.

The Scientific Article in the Age of Digitization

“…32 Garvey and Griffith 1972;Garvey 1979. 33 Kling, Spector, and McKim (2002) point to differences across disciplines, especially in nomenclature:…”

“…For instance, we have omitted for reasons of efficiency the role and functions of subscription agents that operate as clearinghouses between publishers and libraries 60. Mackenzie Owen 2002, p. 278-9.61 Hibbitts 1999;Jobson 2003;Kling et al 2002.…”

The Cultural Shaping of ICTs within Academic Fields: Corpus-based Linguistics as a Case Study

“…For example, Orlikowski and Gash (in Kling and Lamb, 1996, p.48) found that 'people's fine-grained work incentives influence whether they see technologies as relevant, and the ways in which they appropriate the technologies'. Kling, Spector and McKim (2002) illustrate how the cultural context of disciplines can lead to the rejection of digital resources. They observed that attempts made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in North America to implement a digital pre-print server model of publishing (arXiv.org) in bio-medical science, which is popular within the disciplines of physics, mathematics and chaos theory, were resisted by lead scientists in the field.…”

“…For example, differences in patterns of communication for collaboration have been accounted for from a variety of perspectives. Kling, Spector and McKim (2002) used publishing models as a frame of reference, Olson and Olson (2000) were interested in the affects of geographic distance, and Kraut, Galegher and Egido (1988) examined the influence of interpersonal factors.…”

E-Journal Proliferation in Emerging Economies: The Case of Latin America

“…1 Diverse models, which are already in place or are under consideration, offer alternatives to the traditional process of academics submitting papers to print journals to which their institutions must then subscribe. These models include publishers producing a subscription-based electronic version of their print journal; e-print repositories; authors posting their articles on their own Web sites; and peer-reviewed electronic-only journals (Kling, Spector and McKim, 2002). Evidently, this debate's momentum is unlikely to diminish: issues of storage and archiving, copyright, authorship, and editorial procedures, for example, need to be considered at length.…”