[RePEc-announce] looking for a volunteer on quality assurance

[Thomas Krichel]

x  
  The RePEc community is looking for a volunteer to head a committee on
  quality control for journals admitted to be indexed in RePEc. Here is
  some background.
  
  There is a growing number of journal-like outlets that pretend to be
  normal open access journals. But in reality, all they do is take
  authors' money, and put the content up on a web site. They do no
  quality control. They have no editorial board that does any work. In
  fact, many times people on the board do not even know that they are on
  it.
  
  Traditionally, RePEc has not done any quality control prior to listing
  additional journals. We believe that quality can best be assessed by
  users of the RePEc dataset. However, we have been criticized for
  helping these deceitful outlets gain a mantle of respectability
  through their RePEc listing. Therefore we take this step forward. We
  expect quality control also to be an issue with toll-gated journals.
  
  The volunteer we are looking for will determine the exact name of the
  committee and its remit. (S)he would recruit a few committee
  members. (S)he would run the mailing list and maintain some web pages
  for the committee. RePEc can provide both. Anybody who is interested
  in this work should contact repec at repec.org.
  
  We expect that this will not be a lot of work. We are sure that this
  as a duty that any academic can itemize as a professional service on
  their CV.

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  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                              skype:thomaskrichel