Journals to Blogs, Cont.

Thanks to David Rothman for rounding up the reactions to my call for librarian journals to evolve into blogs.  Thanks also to commenters here; and for those who follow the action over on T. Scott, he and I had a pretty good discussion about this last week.

A fair criticism of my idea is that it is too binary and absolutist. Why can't we have journals and blogs? Or journals for some purposes and blogs for others?

So, a refinement: I'm not so much concerned with the vehicle (journal or blog) for sharing research or hypotheses in library and information science.  What I care the most about is putting our ideas into circulation more quickly than we do currently. I believe that in the high majority of cases quality peer review could happen after an early version of an article appears.

In this context there must be an incentive to make constructive peer reviews, rather than leaving brief and/or inflammatory comments in reaction to article postings.  Authors would need to be comfortable  with posting less than fully vetted ideas.  And there would have to be solid management so that postings like "This is a cool article!!" don't appear on any reputable web site.

I don't have a very good handle on how to operationalize these ideas.  Anything close to what I am describing will be a distant development. Conceptually, though, the idea is sitting pretty well (for me at least!). I look forward to the continued discussion.