Continuous publication


A colleague informed me of the following interesting news from BMJ: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7659/1450.

Basically BMJ will be presenting articles continuously as they become available. At first this sounds ho hum, not a big deal. But then I got to thinking about it and I think this turn of events is significant. One of the things I talked a bit about in my chapter on the future of e-resource management (written two years ago) was this very thing, referring to the disaggregation of journal content and likening it to how iTunes changed the way we think of music albums. I’m not patting myself on the back here; it’s not an original idea or concept because others have talked about this for a long time. But I’m intrigued by the possibilities and implications.

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July 17th, 2008
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  • On one hand, this isn't a new model for (some) gold OA journals (as BMJ notes). Some journals use "overlay publishing," where a defined issue is a set of pointers to articles that were posted as soon as they were ready. Others have abandoned the issue concept entirely and define the journal as a branded stream of articles. (That model, sometimes difficult to deal with, has been around for years--at least since 1995 and probably before then.)

    Other than BMJ's high profile, what makes BMJ's change interesting is that there's a print journal--and it's becoming a selection of BMJ's published articles rather than the totality. Assuming nobody tries to make a branding distinction between "accepted but not part of the print record" and "part of the print record" this strikes me as a useful innovation.

    [I'm in the process of building a cluster on open access at the PALINET Leadership Network, so I've been thinking about this more than usual.]
  • Walt, good points. Thanks. I can see cataloging implications for this BMJ
    approach. And more.
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