On Thu, 24 May 2001, Wentz, Reinhard wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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!
For the record, my guess is that the putative fallacy and sub-fallacies
are all already itemized and fully resolved in the list of 23
prima-facie "worries" in:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8.
In particular, my guess is that Reinhard is worried about (#10) copyright:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#10.Copyright
or about (#7) peer review:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#7.Peer
or about (#8) paying the piper:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8.Paying
These are all standard questions, standard enough to have generated the
above FAQs by way of reply.
But I can also conjecture what some candidate nonstandard would-be
"fallacies" could be, specific to what Reinhard has singled out
concerning impact:
If everyone self-archives, thereby freeing access to every refereed
paper, then everyone's ABSOLUTE impact may increase (more readers, more
citations all round), but their RELATIVE impact may not. (So there
will be no added help with getting grants and tenure.)
My reply is that the primary beneficiary of maximizing research access,
and hence research impact, is research itself. If every researcher
becomes more productive, and every researcher has a greater impact,
then at the very least, science and scholarship and their beneficiaries
(all of us) are better off. Even if every researcher's individual
career does not enjoy proportionate benefits, the planet is still better
off.
But the fact is that the powerful and varied new measures of impact
that this digital research corpus will spawn will also allow us to
assess the magnitude of individual contributions more fully and deeply.
So it will be possible to measure and reward relative impact in a much
more informed and sensitive way then before. See:
Harnad, S. (2001) "Why I think research access, impact and
assessment are linked." Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p.
16 (May 18, 2001).
longer version:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html
For a demo of the new impact measures and ranking, see:
http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search
And for a discussion, see:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm
By the way, the New Scientist article was pathetically truncated to fit
the magazine's box. I'll bet the original, longer version, already
short-circuits some of Reinhard's fallacies:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/newscientist.htm
I encourage all interested parties to follow the ongoing debate on this
topic in Nature and Science too:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
You may join the list at the site above.
Discussion can be posted to:
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Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT