[Journal] Re: FOSS4G 2011 Special Edition

[Dimitris Kotzinos]

Dear all,

my thoughts on the discussion about the journal:
(1) not all academics have a budget for publishing :)
(2) why do we assume that people want to pay for publishing and what are 
the conditions? For example do we know what kind of effort will be 
required and how much time it will take to turn the Journal to a high 
impact refereed journal? Dan has already sent some interesting points on 
that! For example at the moment we even lack (despite Landon's and 
Tyler's tremendous efforts and all the rest of us who help as much as 
they can) a coherent publication schedule!
(3) I think that the most important topic to be addressed is "what kind 
of journal we want". It is a different thing (requiring different issues 
to be faced) if we go for an academic / peer reviewed journal than a 
magazine type, different if we want to charge authors, different if we 
want to have ads and so on. Unfortunately I think that we are in a point 
where we cannot have it both or all the ways.

Final note: funding seems to become a hot topic all over OSGeo 
(suddenly). I fully agree that this is a sensitive and important issue 
but I wouldn't like to see it overwhelming everything else (and I would 
like to caution the Board on that - and my apologies for overstepping). 
I think that it is not a very good idea to have every activity within 
OSGeo look for its own funding, since we will most probably address the 
same funding resources this can turn to a race for funds within the 
foundation.

Best,

Dimitris