For this post I want to explore scholarly communication.  A recent NY Times article discusses Harvard’s push for open access.  I am fascinated by this new push for getting rid of the publishers, and having the material published by the library.  While Harvard is considered a frontrunner in this matter, in truth, the first actual push came from our government. 

The NIH (National Institutes of Health) requires all federally funded research findings be submitted to the NLM (National Library of Medicine).  Harvard, on the other hand, is debating whether or not to publish their scholarly work via an open access repository.  The library would spearhead this process!  “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

With this all going on, there has also been a lot of blogging on putting scholarly work in blog format and circumvent the publishing process.  (See Why Professional Librarian Journals Should Evolve into Blogs) This push suggests that peer review should be a process that occurs post publication.  I tend to agree with T. Scott who suggests:

I’m not at all sure that it would be a service to the library community if all of those articles that I read through in their first iterations had simply been posted to a blog and opened up for comment.  The few experiments that have been done in the last couple of years with post-publication review have not been overwhelmingly successful, the ArXiv experience notwithstanding (extrapolating from the experience of a small, tightly knit, fairly homogeneous scientific community that writes largely in formulas to a much more diverse, narrative literature is a stretch, I think). 

So I think that it’s great that we take back scholarly communication from the business of publishers.  But I do not think it prudent or wise to circumvent the scientific methods of peer-review prepublication.  The interesting question will be what role libraries and librarians will have in the new era of scholarly communication.