> Correct, but the publishers implement the refereeing, and that costs
> some money (about $300 per paper).
Interesting - where does that figure come from? As one who initiated
and edited two journals, I know that none of the refereeing that I
put in place cost the publisher (Butterworths at the time) a penny.
Clearly, different publishers have different practices.
> > 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.
True, but is not debate necessary to persuade the scholarly community
that testing would be worthwhile, and have they yet been persuaded,
apart from the BMJ running a test, by -
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html?
In any event, my suggestion is not that there should necessarily be
public feedback from those who use specific texts productively, but
that the citation record will reveal which texts have proved useful.
Of course, avenues for peer commentary could be opened but my guess
is that, for the reasons mentioned in
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
~harnad/nature2.html they are unlikely to be enthusiastically used.
> And it has already been much discussed in this forum.
But, without, it seems, any great degree of consensus arising.
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Professor Tom Wilson, Ph.D.
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN
Tel: (+44)(0)114-222-2631
Fax: (+44)(0)114-278-0300
Web address:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/lecturer/tom1.html
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Professors must have a theory as dogs must have fleas.
H.L. Mencken
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Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT