On Fri, 26 Nov 1999, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote:
> it is not the publishers who provide [quality control] but the rest of
> the scholarly community acting as unpaid referees
Correct, but the publishers implement the refereeing, and that costs
some money (about $300 per paper).
> it ought to be debated whether a more economically efficient quality
> control process is to publish openly and freely without refereeing and
> rely upon the reader and user of the information to make his or her own
> quality judgements when using or deciding not to use a text.
Such a question is not settled by debating but by testing.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
And it has already been much discussed in this forum.
A complete archive of the discussion is available at the American
Scientist September Forum (98 & 99):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
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Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
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Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT