As big-pig journal publishers pull an Amazon-warehouse stunt, attempting infeasible speedups of editorial processes to publish ever-spiraling numbers of articles to make more money off author-side fees, Harvard is launching a journal-publishing program. Let no one say Harvard Library has no sense of timing!

The Loon doubts the overlay-journal option will see much uptake. For all the “why don’t they just” ballyhoo among the less rational of Old Man of Academe open-access advocates, overlay journals remain a blip on the landscape, if that. They simply don’t fit academe’s admittedly ossified mental model of what a journal is and what journal processes entail. Still, the Loon approves of Harvard offering the option, if only to provide sufficient real-world evidence of the futility of the overlay journal concept to make its deluded fanatics shut up at last.

Harvard Library is not shy about targeting its efforts partly at editorial boards disaffected with the big pigs; it is happy “to convert existing journals to open access.” The Harvard brand name should be attractive enough to have a reasonable shot at actually accomplishing this. As always with a new initiative, the first two or three journals should be the most difficult… but if Harvard Library is as canny as the Loon thinks it is, those crucial pioneers are already in the bag, or close to.

(Harvard Library has a good track record for canny OA moves, and has historically been refreshingly free of the magical thinking that infests the OA movement. It hired Peter Suber. It was the first and is still nearly the only institution to implement patchwork mandates with a well-resourced plan to gather up the bounty into its institutional repository. It was the first the Loon recalls to announce flatly that no amount of money would satiate the big pigs’ bottomless greed. All of this in the face of the usual lack of support from faculty.)

That Harvard Library understands that money is necessary to run a journal, and is willing to help editorial boards seek that money, bodes rather well. (Overlay-journal fanatics and similarly deluded Old Men of Academe rarely-to-never admit this.) The Loon’s main concern, former typesetter and XML minion that she is, is about what sort of production apparatus Harvard Library is ginning up. As many, many dusty neglected Open Journal Systems implementations can attest, faculty know nothing about editing and production processes save just enough to notice and disapprove when they are missing.

She can certainly forgive that the announcement does not explain this—it is not as though the faculty at whom the announcement is aimed would understand or care. The Loon cares, though, not because she hankers to return to production (though she would willingly dust off her old skills, were the remuneration adequate) but because not planning for and resourcing professional-grade production processes could mean the entire initiative falls at the first fence. “Why is Harvard putting its name on doublespaced Times New Roman with one-inch margins?!” would drop the final curtain at once.

She suspects Harvard Library knows this and is behaving accordingly, but she would certainly prefer to be sure.

In any case, she wishes Harvard Library well with this. If well-managed, it could signal an intriguing shift in the Great Game.

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