e-Archiving Challenge

From: Wentz, Reinhard <r.wentz_at_IC.AC.UK>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:18:09 +0100

Dear Colleagues,

This week's New Scientist (26.05.01), apart from being substantially about
complementary medicine, contains a boxed article (p.53) by Stevan Harnad on
e-archiving copyrighted, peer-reviewed research findings on the Web to make
them more widely available for free to all fellow researchers. I think the
article suggests that this will improve researchers' chances to achieve
higher impact factors and better success in getting research grants and
(eventually) tenured academic posts.

I believe the reasoning behind these conclusions contains at least one major
fallacy and several sub-fallacies.

Can you spot them? I offer a book-token of £20.00 for the best suggestion.

As the article is, I believe, written with the tongue slightly in the cheek,
I don't want to appear too serious with this offer, but would like to have
the fallacies brought into the open nevertheless ...

Best wishes,

Reinhard

Reinhard Wentz, Dipl. Bibl.
Imperial College Library Service
Medical Library
Chelsea & Westminster Hospital
369, Fulham Road
London SW10 9NH
tel.: 0044 (0)20 8746 8109 fax.: 0044 (0)20 8746 8215
e-mail: r.wentz_at_ic.ac.uk


P.S. Stevan Harnad knows about this challenge and has already claimed the
prize money. So I may have to double it (£20.00 to him, £20.00 to AN Other)
if I am satisfied with his explanations. If there are many contributions I
may have to appoint un-biased assessors and anonymise the entries. Oh dear!
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT