On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, Leslie Carr wrote:
> The trouble with a peer-reviewed flag is that it is not the guarantor of
> research quality that many might expect it to be.
It need not be. It need merely be a way of restricting search to
peer-reviewed papers. Then, once peer-reviewed papers only are
retrieved, there can be individual selectivity within the hits on the
usual basis (journal, author, institution, relevance).
We always knew there was quality hierarchy among journals, in terms of
peer review rigour, with the bottom rung being virtually an unrefereed
vanity press. "Peer-reviewed" conferences proceedings vary in rigour too.
Once all the OA target content is actually up there and OA, it will be
easy to set up search criteria that filter out what we don't want to
bother looking at in a finer-grained way than "refereed" vs.
"unrefereed." But now, with only about 15% of OA's target content up
there, surely the overwhelming priority is getting the rest of the 85%
up there, rather than fine-tuning our search powers over the pathetic
subset that we can as yet access!
(To put it another way: The trouble with searching OA space today is not
the presence of some low-grade refereed content, but the absence of most
refereed content.)
Ceterum censeo: Universal OA self-archiving mandates from university and
funders can and will remedy this quickly -- as quickly as we can get the
mandates universally adopted...
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
> It will be set as much for an extended abstract of a position paper in the
> East Anglian Regional Workshop on Flood Awareness as it will be for an
> article on Cosmology in Nature. It will be set whether one person gives
> the
> article a quick going over and says "alright", or whether five people
> review
> it thoroughly and provide detailed feedback about its weaknesses.
>
> In other words, the question is not so much "has it been peer-reviewed"
> but
> "has it been peer-reviewed to the standard that the reader thinks
> appropriate". And that information is usually derived from a knowledge of
> the
> publication outlet.
> On 29 Feb 2008, at 21:30, Frances Shipsey wrote:
>
> > Hello
> >
> > Yes I agree that it's essential and is seen as a key concern for
> > academic staff (as a group of them were telling me only yesterday).
> > Authors should generally know the status of their own material I agree.
> >
> > We use the refereed/unrefereed flag offered by the EPrints software.
> >
> > I can see a potential need for three (or four) categories relating to
> > peer review:
> >
> > 1. Pre-peer reviewed (= submitted version of an article to a
> > peer-reviewed journal)
> > 2. Peer reviewed (= accepted version of an article to a peer-reviewed
> > journal)
> > These would be earlier and later versions of the same type of academic
> > content with readers able to take their chances with the pre-peer review
> > version based on their knowledge of the author, but alerted to serious
> > academic articles - they would also look out for later versions if these
> > are flagged as *pre-* rather than *un-*refereed.
> >
> > 3. Non-peer reviewed (= article in an unrefereed journal)
> > This third category would thus include material of a more popular/less
> > academic nature and could incorporate the kinds of dissemination
> > articles that authors write alongside their academic papers.
> >
> > And perhaps in light of Ian's comment below, a fourth to enable deposit
> > even where status is not known
> > 4. Peer review status unknown
> >
> >
> > Best wishes
> >
> > Frances
> >
> > Frances Shipsey
> > eServices Librarian
> > Library
> > London School of Economics and Political Science
> > 10 Portugal Street
> > London WC2A 2HD
> >
> > t: +44(0)20 7955 6915
> > f: +44(0)20 7955 7454
> > e: f.m.shipsey_at_lse.ac.uk
> > w: www.lse.ac.uk/library
> >
> > LSE Research Online - http://eprints.lse.ac.uk - Enhance your research
> > impact
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Repositories discussion list
> > [mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Ian Stuart
> > Sent: 29 February 2008 21:20
> > To: JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: Re: Required and Desirable metadata in a repository
> >
> > Hubbard Bill wrote:
> > > Does this agree with other colleagues' experience? Is a p-r field
> > > required to facilitate future use of the material?
> > The flip-side of this argument goes thus:
> >
> > If the p-r field is required, should a Repository not accept any ingest
> > where that field is not present?
> >
> > For example, I am looking at ways of harvesting via Google Scholar, but
> > GS does not hold p-r details. Should I do something like only accept
> > deposits that are sourced from known journal repositories?
> >
> > (I'd also be interested in how many repositories *currently* support the
> > p-r field?)
> >
> > --
> > Ian Stuart
> >
> > Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic
> > communications disclaimer:
> > http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm
Received on Sat Mar 01 2008 - 16:26:58 GMT