At 02:03 PM 08/27/1998 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>No one is proposing to replace refereed journals by
>unrefereed archives, just to transform journals into paperless
>ones, their remaining costs (peer-review and editing) funded
>from page charges instead of S/SL/PPV, with archives merely the (free)
>mode of access to both the unrefereed preprints and the refereed,
>published reprints (triage being safely calibrated by setting =/+
>REFEREED to search either the whole archive or only the certified,
>refereed sector, respectively).
Isn't this, if you'll pardon me for saying so, a rather narrow view of what
the freely flowing access to data might mean for inter-scientist
communication? I really don't believe that the future of electronic
publishing is going to stop at simple replacement of paper forms of
journals.
If we see article publication as a commodity, and electronic versus paper
as competing for the same market, then it is clear that the electronic
publication will "win", assuming it eventually picks up the status of paper
publishing.
But if we see them as supplying alternative products; paper providing
archival, static data, and electronic providing dynamic communication, then
I can see both as continuing to prosper.
Perhaps the electronic medium will be more subversive than we can presently
imagine, reconfiguring the result of research from a publication or list of
publications into more research.
kris
Kris Hirst
Office of the State Archaeologist
The University of Iowa
Kris-Hirst_at_uiowa.edu or hirst_at_inav.net
<
http://archaeology.miningco.com>
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST