Murray Turoff writes
> we will find small groups of young scientists doing it on their own and
> gradually evolving a whole new set alternative societies.
I have some initial evidence of that. I work on a collection of
toll-free archives providing structured metadata about new publications
(mostly pre-prints) in my field. This dataset is called RePEc. RePEc has
a number of user services, one of them is a current awareness service for
recent additions to RePEc. The service is called NEP: New Economics Papers
and its homepage is at
http://netec.wustl.edu/NEP. Each week a team of
editors filters the list of all new additions into a series of reports
that are subject specific. This is a primitive form of peer review. But
it is easy to imagine extensions for example web sites with lists of
recommended papers. These things will evolve slowly over time. I hope
to see a scolarly communication system where the publication is separated
from the quality control. I like to see a world where every author can
publish her work on the internet, and where separate groups review
the work.
Thomas Krichel mailto:T.Krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST