Ever since George Soros announced that he would be donating $3 million to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, debate over the e-journal versus traditional journals has been heating up. An article today from the BBC points out some a few critics attacking the net journal initiative.
In many ways, these criticisms are the same ones being made in the debate surrounding peer-to-peer journalism versus Journalism-with-a-capital-J, arguments that probably shouldn’t be made so hastily because the two media aren’t necessarily competing. As the Physical Review Letters has proven, online journals can provide an entirely different type of information (namely late breaking results) that augments, rather than undermines traditional journals.
overstated 