Despite its flaws, peer review is generally seen as a reasonable and
practical way of filtering (and often improving) scientific articles. The
fact that it was introduced (if that's indeed the case) by a commercial
publisher (even Maxwell) doesn't make it "a marketing device". Maxwell
also introduced international, global journals. Previously the society
journals were mostly national or regional (still visible in their names).
Does that make the international approach a 'marketing device'? By that
reckoning every improvement introduced by a commercial publisher would be
a 'marketing device', which is not doing justice to the contribution made
by those publishers. Besides, even if these things are 'marketing
devices', they surely are not only "marketing devices for commercial
publishers" as Jean-Claude formulates it, given that these
'devices', particularly peer review, are also widely being used by
non-commercial publishers. There must be some merit in them, one might
conclude.
The topic 'commercial or not commercial' might be a legitimate topic for
discussion, but it has nothing to do with open access, which is
independent of the commercial status of the publisher.
Jan Velterop
Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon_at_UMONTREAL.CA> wrote:
Thank you, Bo-Christer, for this useful reminder about the
peer-review
process. Most journals worked on this basis far into the 20th
century
-some still do, particularly in SSH.
It was Robert Maxwell who apparently brought the practise of
peer review
into science journals as a way to compete more efficiently
against
well-established journals placed under the auspices of
scientific
societies. In effect, Maxwell appears to have upped the ante
in the
selection process of articles in a bid to demonstrate that
all his new
"International journals of whatever" at Pergamon Science were
even more
rigorous, more objective and more transparent than the
traditional
journals based on the de-facto cooptation system which had
dominated
science publishing before the '50's.
In terms of policy, Bo-Christer's remark is important because
it shows
that peer review really covers three very different facets:
1. A quality-control process;
2. A ritual for the passage into scientific land (used for
promotion and tenure for example, or for grantsmanship);
3. A marketing device for commercial publishers.
It also means that peer review (as distinguished from purely
editorial
control) is not the result of the eighth day of creation;
rather, it is
a recent social device introduced at various rates into
various
scientific disciplines. However, what is important in science
is quality
control, and not peer review.
Peer review is a way to achieve a degree of quality control
and it does
provide some measure of assurance in this regard; but so does
the old
editorial vetting techniques, however opaque and subjective
they may
look. Peer review is neither perfect, nor is it the unique
method to
achieve some measure of quality control. Furthermore, the
importance of
peer review can only be relative because it depends on its
(relative)
ability to ensure quality control.
This brings me back to an important point I have been making
for some
time now: while it is crucial to have authors mandated to
self-archive
wherever possible, one can also incite the same authors to do
the same
thing in a more positive manner. By offering forms of quality
control
directly related to OA depositories and which can complement
and even
correct the results of peer review, OA depositories will be
viewed as
valuable places where to locate papers that have already been
published
in peer-reviewed journals. In other words, there is no reason
to feel
that existing journals are the sole source of quality control
through
peer review. Depositories can add their own quality-control
voice to
that of existing journals. I am talking here of quality
control not
based on usage, such as impact measurement, but based on some
evaluation
process carried out by peers.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le lundi 26 septembre 2005 à 10:18 +0300, Bo-Christer Björk a
écrit :
> On the 26th of October 1905 the paper "Zur Electrodynamik
bewegter
> Körper" by an unknown researcher called Albert Einstein was
published by
> Annalen der Physik in Band 17, pp. 891-921
>
(
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/109924449/PDFSTART).
> This paper is of course a landmark in the history of
science, but it
> also illustrates the big changes that the scientific
publication process
> has gone through in a century. The paper did not go through
an anonymous
> peer review but was read by the editor (Max Planck) who
made a decision
> to publish it. The process was extremely fast since the
manuscript was
> sent in the 30th of June and published three months later.
It would
> probably have had problems in passing a current day peer
review process
> since it contains no references, breaks with the prevailing
paradigms in
> the field and at the time lacked empirical evidence to back
it up. What
> would Einstein do if he wanted to publish his results
today?. He would
> probably have posted a copy of the manuscript to the open
access
> repository for High Energy Physics (http://xxx.lanl.gov)
and hoped that
> others would pick up the ideas and spread the word via
viral marketing.
>
>
> Bo-Christer Björk
--
Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon
Dept. of Comparative Literature
University of Montreal
PO Box 6128, Downtown Branch
Montreal, QC H3C 3J7
Canada
Received on Wed Sep 28 2005 - 20:28:37 BST