Just one remark ...
the current system does waste a lot of reviewing work ... if only
because:
- the same paper gets submitted in several places, when not accepted
- papers are read by many people who never get to voice their
opinion, whether valuable or not.
There are many ways that reviewing information can be produced,
stored and used in the more flexible world of the Internet.
and there are ways of rating reviewers and reviews (I think this is
already a formally studied topic), or groups of reviewers.
I have not given much thought as to how anonymity of reviewers
could be maintained in such schemes, but I would guess it is
atractable problem.
apologies for saying "published" instead of "publicly archived" ...
and I understand your aim is to have access to the peer-reviewed
corpus ... sorry for being off topic
Bernard
On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 11:56:01PM +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Bernard Lang wrote:
>
> > We can publish first, and review or copy edit later, in whatever
> > order is convenient, or never if no one wishes to do it.
>
> We can publicly archive first (let's reserve the term "publish" for
> something more than this mere vanity-press, lest it lose its meaning)
> and then we can submit that unrefereed preprint to an established
> journal for peer review. (Why established? Because otherwise you have
> no way to know what quality-standards have been met by their having
> accepted it for publication!)
>
> Or, we can leave the paper forever as merely a publicly archived,
> unrefereed preprint.
>
> The primary objective of this Forum, however, is to attain free online
> access to the entire full-text contents of the peer-reviewed corpus of
> 20,000 refereed journals. Vanity self-archiving of unrefereed preprints
> does not meet that objective. Online access to unrefereed preprints is
> merely a bonus, an extra, not an alternative way of meeting the objective
> of attaining free online access to the peer-reviewed corpus.
>
> "Self-Archiving Refereed Research vs. Self-Publishing Unrefereed Research"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1468.html
>
> > I do not care if, when, and how reviewing has been done... all I need
> > to know is whether it has been done, and by whom or what group, and
> > maybe even have the comments.
>
> (This is a bit confusing, as "if" is synonymous with "whether," mais
> passons...)
>
> Whether the "it" has been done, and "by whom," for our purposes, is the
> question of which known, established quality-controller and certifier
> (i.e., which journal) has peer-reviewed and accepted the paper. That
> tags its level in the quality hierarchy, and those tags are critical
> for navigating the enormous literature for busy researchers who would
> rather not spend their time reading or trying to build upon material of
> uncertain quality. This kind of reliable filtering cannot be done on
> an ad hoc basis (any more than eggs can be certified on an ad hoc
> basis: the egg-graders have to establish their reputations).
>
> And comments are always welcome, but they are a luxury. See:
>
> http://www.bbsonline.org/
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/
>
> > With that I am a big enough boy to make my own decisions. Choosing
> > a journal is just choosing a set of reviewers. Why should I do it
> > before I know what papers I'll be looking for. Why not consider a
> > bunch of papers and then decide which types of reviews I'll consider
> > adequate (for example depending on how selective I need be).
>
> Because there are only so many hours in the day, and an awful lot of
> stuff is written. I would rather have trusted quality filters in
> advance, not after I have committed my time! and I'd rather have a
> literature already written with the foreknowledge (on the part of its
> authors) that it will have to answer to peer review. And for the peer
> reviewers to be able to certify that I can trust a paper, I first have
> to know I can trust the peer review. So its quality level must have
> been reliably demonstrated in advance.
>
> In other words, I need journals.
>
> > And why should papers have only one type of reviewing, when they
> > are so many different publics with different needs, even within the
> > not for profit litterature.
>
> Because peer-review is a scarce, over-farmed resource; because peers
> review for free; because one review is more than enough for most
> papers; and because pre-certification peer review is not the same a
> post-certification peer commentary...
>
> "A Note of Caution About 'Reforming the System'"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1169.html
>
> Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer
> Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4)
> 283-292. Short version appeared in 1997 in Antiquity 71: 1042-1048.
> Excerpts also appeared in the University of Toronto Bulletin: 51(6)
> P. 12. http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/talks/Harnad_Snider.html
>
> Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
> [online] (c. 5 Nov. 1998)
> http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
> Longer version:
> Harnad, S. (2000) The Invisible Hand of Peer Review, Exploit
> Interactive, issue 5, April 2000
> http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/>:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
> http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/nature2.html
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Received on Sun Dec 16 2001 - 19:08:47 GMT