Larry: Thanks for the extensive reply to my criticisms. Sorry for the delay in responding but it will take me a few days more before I am ready to do so properly. I've been reading the various material by you that provides background understanding in some depth for what you say in your messages here, and I am increasingly intrigued by the issues implicit in this project, though not yet convinced that -- as presently conceived -- it is either viable in principle or achievable to a significant degree in practice without turning into something else that you will eventually want to dissociate yourself from. But your attempt to develop a philosophically sound conception of it, and to do so both by extensive dialogue and by practical involvement and experimentation in actual implementation of it is the last thing I would wish to discourage in any way, as long as the idealism is still there and you stay open to criticism.
The reason I am so slow in response is that I don't want to present only a negative view of your project but to suggest a somewhat different perspective to entertain, if I can describe it properly, which might be of some help in developing a more profitable understanding of its prospects and problematics than achieved thus far. I don't mean to be speaking as if from some superior vantage point but only from a somewhat different one, in virtue of different experience acquired in pursuit of what seem to be relevantly similar goals. Let me explain one reason why I say this, though I should apologize in advance for the length of it. I don't expect a response in detail. It is mainly just FYI. Hopefully, I will be able to come up with something of more value to you later. The interest I have in the sort of thing you are concerned with stems from two distinct but related aims. The first is one which has gradually formed itself over the years in connection with the standing problem in Peirce scholarship posed by the fact that Peirce's philosophical work still remains largely entombed in a vast quantity of unpublished manuscript material which is available, as a practical reality, only to a privileged few, and even for them in a largely unordered form that often defeats the possibility of shared access to it convenient enough to build effectively on the basis of it. The recent developments of computer-based information and communication technology make it possible to solve the problem of universal access to it and to develop instruments of organization and analysis and scholarly communication that could do justice to it, but attempts to do this have yet to be successful, and my own efforts in this direction thus far have caused me to think of the practice of scholarship and of philosophy rather differently than I otherwise would and in ways that seem to me to bear on what you are trying to do, too. More to the point, though, is the second aim, which is one which I acquired more or less by accident in virtue of my philosophical interest in the role of communication and publication in the process of inquiry motivated by the purpose of getting at the truth about something. From the Peircean perspective, which regards the inquiry process as fundamental in understanding epistemological matters, inquiry is to be understood as a essentially of the character of a dialogical process, which means that one has to be concerned with the question of what the role of publication is in that process, which is usually just ignored by philosophers of science because they think of publishing as something one does only to communicate results after they have been arrived at and already recognized as being acquired knowledge. In working out the implications of this I was led to the question of what is or can be meant by "peer review", which is supposedly a validation process that occurs in the process of attempted publication, justifying the publication by somehow certifying or validating the document submitted as worthy of publication. But how can It do that if the judgment of a peer is logically on par with the judgment of the author, as is implicit in the concept of a peer? A second opinion is just another opinion nor can any piling up of further peer opinions change the logical status of the opinion reviewed, regardless of whether they agree or disagree. Omitting the reasons here, let me just say that I came to the conclusion that the common understanding of this practice is seriously flawed, and what is usually referred to as peer review is actually only a degenerate form of it at best since authentic peer review is something that can occur only in consequence of publication rather than being something that occurs prior to it that can justify it, as it is usually but mistakenly conceived. But at about this time I discovered that something had been happening in certain of the hard sciences which also lent support to this conclusion, namely, the movement, originating with some people in high energy physics and closely related fields in math and astronomy, to generalize the practice of research publication which they had developed of using a server-based deposit and retrieval system which automated publication in its primary research function in the research process without making use of peer review at all as commonly (but mistakenly) understood. This development dates from 1991 when Paul Ginsparg, a physicist with computer skills, set up such a server system at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). It is, I believe, beyond all reasonable doubt at this point that it actually does work in some highly regarded fields in the hard sciences, and there was good reason to think that this is so after only a few years of its use (for reasons I would have to explain separately). Assuming that this is so, though, what this shows, in my opinion, is not that peer review has been eliminated as unnecessary -- which is how people in those fields think of it -- but rather that the usual conception of peer review is mistaken and that it is this system of communication itself -- the one devised by Ginsparg -- which illustrates what peer review proper is, which is unrestricted access and responsiveness to the results claimed by a given researcher of those to whom the researcher is addressing his or her research claim. By the mid-90's some people in these fields, led by Ginsparg, perceiving the import of this primarily in terms of the difference it could make in enabling universal, egalitarian and open access to the cutting edge of research -- though other idealistic motives were probably motivating them as well -- had begun promoting this publication procedure vigorously as something that could be generalized and exported to other hard sciences, and perhaps even to disciplinary research in general. In other words, they perceived in this a kind of academic revolution, given the importance of research publication and its practices. But by 1977 a strong reaction and resistance to this was forming among a variety of interested parties -- researchers in other fields, university administrators and some governmental institutional administrators, and commercial journal publishers most conspicuously, and doing so for more than one reason, though the reason usually given, was based on the dangers supposedly involved in abandoning peer review as a critical control practice. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there was some real fear generated at very high levels of power at the prospect that control over research might be slipping out of the hands of the many vested interests in the presently prevailing system in virtue of what had developed at Los Alamos. I have to skip over much of some interest that was happening in this connection, though. In any case, at this point a remarkable individual began to figure more and more prominently in public discussion of this topic here and there, namely, Steven Harnad, a computer scientist working in cognitive science who professed to be a devotee of Ginsparg's "revolution" in publication practice and who was urging it as the universal method to be adopted across the board in academic research while at the same time arguing that its adoption did not undercut the reliance on peer review even in the fields in which it seemed most obviously to do so. Harnad's reason, though, was not that he believed, as I do, that peer review should be reconceived in terms of unrestricted access and responsiveness to the research claims of a research peer, but rather that peer review was still operative and efficacious in the Ginsparg system in virtue of what he calls the "Invisible Hand" of future peer review, which would be occurring subsequent to the pre-print distribution. The argument -- the point to his metaphor -- was that since the researchers in the affected fields admittedly did publish their research claims in editorially controlled peer-reviewed journals subsequently, this being a normal part of establishing a cumulative record of the researcher's professional accomplishments as a matter of record (as Ginsparg and his associates would admit), the prior awareness that they would be doing so in the future was operating earlier as the critical control constraint in the awareness of the researcher at the time of preparation of the pre-print. Now this patently fallacious argument -- which supposes that it would not occur to the researcher that the initial statement of the research claim in the unrefereed pre-print need not be identical with the subsequent statement of it submitted later for purposes of "official validation" by traditional peer-review -- might seem too obviously invalid to be persuasive. But this does not take into account Harnad's shrewd rhetorical skills taken in combination with the circumstance that the public debate on the topic came to be carried out in an on-line forum moderated and rigidly controlled by Harnad himself. This forum was populated by the major players of influence in the world of the research libraries, the major research universities, the major commercial journal publishers, and interested administrators of various government agencies concerned with research publication. It was and still is sponsored by the influential journal _American Scientist_, which established the forum in September of 1998. (It was originally called "The September Forum" but was subsequently renamed a couple of times and is still in existence with the name "American Scientist Open Access Forum".) It was established for the express purpose of discussing the desirability or undesirability of publication practices such as those championed originally by Ginsparg and his associates, described in generic terms as "open access" archives, and Harnad the moderator presented himself as a devout follower of Ginsparg who, however, had perceived (as Ginsparg did not) that peer review was not really at issue in this for the reason noted above, namely, the Invisible Hand argument. In order to avoid wasting space on objections to the self-evident truth of that argument Harnad announced that peer review was to be an undiscussable topic there on the grounds that there was no problem there and discussion of the topic would only cause unnecessary fears in the establishment, and he rigidly enforced that policy throughout, patiently restating his Invisible Hand argument whenever objection was raised to his banning of that topic and ignoring all criticism of the Invisible Hand argument itself as if it had not occurred. Consequently, with no way of introducing discussion of actual publication practices that might have shown that some reform other than universal adoption of the Ginsparg system might be needful, the argument for the universal adoption of an open access system of that sort was conducted primarily in terms of its economic advantages: the idea being that since the adoption of a single system of pre-print publication of that sort would have no significant effect on peer review practices, the realization that this is so, taken together with the understanding that such a system is economically advantageous to all concerned other than the commercial publishers, would eventually assure its adoption, and the only real question was as to how to hasten its acceptance. On the face of it the discussion there might appear at first to concern much more than this, and in a sense it does, but in fact the ruling out of any discussion of peer review practices insured that none of it threw any light on the actual problematics of publication and the opportunities opened up by the new technologies since none of this was ever discussed, and what took its place was largely pointless quibbling over details concerning economic factors involved in publication interspersed with demonstrations by Harnad that open access was steadily on the march. In fact, though, after an initial period in which data concerning use of the Ginsparg archive seemed to show that it was being increasingly used, it began to become clear that this was true only for those fields in which the Ginsparg system was originally adopted -- in high energy physics, math, and astronomy -- and a few other fields closely related to it, and there was actually no tendency towards generalized application of it. Within about two years, then, the idealistic movement of those around Ginsparg, who had hoped to export their system universally, no longer existed -- Ginsparg himself, rightfully suspicious of Harnad's supposed discipleship, had never paid much attention to the forum to begin with and ceased to contribute altogether -- and the powers-that-be who had at first been seriously disturbed by what they regarded as a real threat to the various vested interests they represent realized that there was no longer anything to fear and lost interest in the topic. The forum itself still exists even today -- one wonders why -- but it is now devoted almost entirely to distributing messages from Harnad addressed to an audience that is no longer there. What I have concluded from all of this is that although the Ginsparg system has proven itself viable in certain important research fields, what this provides evidence for is not that such a system can be universally exported but rather that those disciplines in which it originates are ones whose research practices are sufficiently perfected to enable them to practice peer review proper in an exemplary way, and this could provide an important clue to how to understand what is happening in fields which are unable to make use of such a system but must rely instead on traditional control by journal editors. And I have concluded further that when traditional journal control is examined more closely it becomes clear that what is usually thought of as control by peer review is actually not that at all but rather control by an editor. For "official" peer reviewers so called function only as advisors to editors, who need not take their advice and are the persons actually providing the decisive critical control by deciding what does and what does not get published. This being so, one question that arises is why it is that only in a relatively few fields are the researchers generally competent enough to dispense with basic reliance on editorial control, as those in the fields using the Ginsparg system are accustomed to do. And another is the problem posed by the fact that journal editors are single individuals who have been given or have taken upon themselves powers of decisive judgment that appear to place them at a level above the level of the researchers whose work they judge, thereby functioning not as peers of them not themselves subject to peer correction. There is something amiss in this, since it seems that review by peers has in fact been abandoned altogether in editorially controlled publication. But why are editors seemingly allowed to be out of the loop of control by peer criticism when it is commonly agreed that peers ought to be subject to critical control only by their peers? I think the answer to this is not that editorial control of this sort ought to be dispensed with but rather that there ought to be some recognized arrangement whereby editors are made subject to peer review as such by the people whose work they adjudge. Contrary to what one might think, there is no contradiction in this, nor is there any insuperable difficulty in practice in establishing recognized formal procedures whereby editors would indeed be themselves made subject to review by those whose work they adjudge, thus bringing them within the loop of critical control by one's peers. But in fact the formal arrangements of academic life, with its typically authoritarian tenure control system, militates strongly against critical control of editors, which leaves these fields seriously crippled as research communities by their reliance on authoritarian critical control systems. But whether I am right on this or not, the establishing of The September Forum provided an extraordinary opportunity -- not taken advantage of -- for dialogue which could have made it apparent where the need for reform in publication practices could take effective hold by making use of the possibilities which the new technologies open up, simply by showing the radical conflict in present academic life between the traditional authoritarian structures of control built into the tenure system as conceived or misconceived at present and the structures of egalitarian or peer control which the sciences at their best have perfected in contrast with this. But the fearful refusal to allow any discussion of peer review practices made it impossible for the real problem to be discussed, and Harnad's misguided attempt to insure the growth of open access by repressing that discussion retarded its growth instead, if it accomplished anything. To be more exact, what was lost by the way Harnad mishandled the situation was an opportunity -- probably unique -- to raise the level of sophistication about the real problematics of research publication to those in institutional control of it and to enable the representatives of the major funding agencies for research, who were also much concerned with what was going on there, to fund projects designed to encourage the innovative exploration of the potentialities for the reform of research disciplines which are seriously crippled by domination by well-protected elites who are unwilling to address the challenges posed by the advent of these technologies. (And there are darker realities that need to be recognized and addressed as well, as is obvious upon reflection about the role of secrecy in research, both as posed by commercial interests who literally buy or lease entire research departments in universities now and by clandestine government interests as well.) The relevance of all this to your project, Larry, is obvious enough in a general way, I suppose, but I guess that what I have had particularly in mind in explaining all this is that I want to impress upon you that you may be basing your strategy in developing the Digital Universe on an assumption that you can take for granted the reigning academic powers and structures as providing a more reliable source for separating out the sheep from the goats than is justified in view of the radical cognitive derangement in academia which I see as being based in part on a misunderstanding of what the real critical control factors in research are, owing to the astonishingly foggy thinking that commonly goes on in connection with the idea of peer review as the provider of that control. -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 268.1.2/274 - Release Date: 3/3/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
