At 11:39 PM 1998/08/31, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>To put it really starkly: Ultimately the prestige of refereed journals
>depends on the referees, and they are in the pay of neither the
>publisher nor the author in EITHER model.
Its not the prestige of the _journal_ that is important, it is the seal of
approval which is given by the referees to the _authors_ work. The journal
is the tail not the dog.
In the long term does the academic community want to judge the work of its
individual members via a mechanism based upon print technology or does it
want to look to alternatives?
Someone will have to pay and there could well be room for multiple methods
which are disciple specific. But at the moment research institution pay a
great deal via their libraries, mostly for material which they never use,
just to get the few papers that they will use. They do his via a mechanism
which pays publishers to take machine readable text and centrally produce
printed copies of this redundant material and then ship (or fly) all over
the world. From an engineering point of view its ridiculous when there is a
global network in place which can provide individual localised printing to
those who need it when they need it.
Tony
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Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST