Brand names and Open Access

I was reading Peter Suber’s July 08 Open Access Newsletter, and its enough to make my head spin…there are so many developments posted on Open Access News I just can’t keep up anymore, its fantastic that “hot” stories are now tagged and the feed to these stories can be subscribed to here.

I was struck by a particular point Peter raised:  that the availability of funds to pay for access [to research] does not scale to keep pace with the growth of published knowledge.

It made me think about the format problem.  I’ve been hearing it mentioned over and over again, this question: why are we so attached to packaging our research into a journal format?

Is it the brand name that we’re so attached to?  If we’re looking for quality, do we simply just seek out the Prada of journals?  Does not the research stand up for itself, just like a consumer good has to? If your Vuitton luggage falls apart after one trip down the baggage conveyor belt, does the fancy brand matter anymore?

Maybe its about lack of time.  Who has the time to compare quality of consumer goods…we’ve all purchased a generic brand at one point or another that greatly underperformed. To protect against that disappointment, its just easier to pay a little more for the name brand version.  Perhaps we adopt a similar mentality with research?

This worries me a bit.  The fact that research output volumes are multiplying so quickly…is it not in a way working against the cause?…is it not further fueling the demand for these high impact journals to exist? Is it not so much easier to simply save time by trusting the name brand research?

In my mind, the solution lies in the metrics…where citations and downloads can be measured and compared to the opinions of the elite groups of peer reviewers that decide which articles are Vuittons and which are simply generic.   I can’t help but predict that once a more unified and unprejudiced method of tracking impact appears, brand names just won’t matter.  The quality of an item of research will simply stand up for itself, visible for all to see, no longer in need of being sold under a designer label.