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In a posting to this list Miltiadis D. Lytras wrote: > We set the 1/2009 as the day of the grand launch, since then we will > present to the research community more than 10.000 people worldwide that > formulate our editorial boards. I suggest to members of this list that this is not a viable or reliable scheme. Miltiadis Lytras provided a link to a site which lists a very large number of scientific journals in a wide variety of fields, some are quite specialised, others are amazingly generic (eg Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Social Science, etc). All are "works in progress" waiting for the detail of editorial team and policy to be posted. They also claim to be hosting "3 World Summits" This appears to be a plan to hold the ATHENS WORLD SUMMIT ON THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY in September 2008, and at the same time/place there will be THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON OPEN RESEARCH and THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON PEACE MAKING However there are no details of these events despite the very short time available. The claim that this will be the "first international forum on open research" is extremely naive in view of the important international events that started with the Budapest Open Access Initiative sponsored by George Soros in 2001 <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/>, very clearly a serious and productive international forum on this topic 7 years ago. They claim to have 40 CHAPTERS around the world but there is no indication of where they are or who is running them, like the journals they appear to be intentions rather than reality. The website gives no indication of who is running ORS, it has no names of anybody involved, it has an address but no telephone number (but it has a page where you can pay them money to join). The visual presentation of the project is very aggressive with garish graphics and little animated images flashing away. As designers we may put this down to naive enthusiasm or we might feel that by our actions we reveal ourselves and somebody who uses such an approach is not taking themselves seriously as scholars. The rhetoric throughout is focused on the injustice and foolishness of current publishing systems and vague high-sounding aspirations rather than a reasoned argument for a new model. The new model proposed is a lot like the old model but with no indication of how it will be financed. It is not as progressive as Biomed Central which has both a radical concept of peer review and a novel business model, both of which seem to be working so far for their particular community. My main concern is that there are two ways to set up a project like this. One route is to create a pilot with one or two journals run by reliable people and allow it to grow as your experience and resources grow, the other is to construct a huge complicated scheme and hope that enough people will join it, and that you will be able to solve all the technical and organisational problems involved to make it work, that's the ORS method. In their attempt to make it work these people are making unfeasible promises about how fast your papers will be reviewed and published (by reviewers that do not appear to be recruited yet). So please approach this with caution. best wishes from Sheffield Chris Rust