Dear all, Wayne Tyson wrote: > ... > What I would like to see is a shift from publication in the ripoff > journals to self-publishing on open-source websites (saving mountains > of Georgia clay and forests of "pulpwood"), casting all research and > scholarly work to the winds for ALL peers to review and reference, > thus eventually permitting MERIT to survive and the BS to compost. > > While I could write authors and get papers that way, the amount of > time involved, both for me and the authors, is, in my view, an > unnecessary burden in the 21st century. Multiply this by everyone > searching the Internet, and the burden is monumental. It is not
I believe this is rather unfortunate argument. If such a "publishing anarchism" would have its way, we would spend much more time sorting out credibility of each published piece of results than we do with approaching authors or searching through the current databases on Internet. Also, the proportion of rubbish in the "published" (publicly exposed) papers would increase dramatically, if the authors would not face the prospect of their approach, results, and conclusions being checked by the experts in the same field. The large amount of "gray publications" is not only the result of the existence of high publishing barrier, but also the result of really bad science done at many places. In my opinion, the peer review is, despite all the faults of its actual state, really necessary to stay and abandoning it would be a disaster for scientific progress. On the other hand, the paper of Bergstrom & Bergstrom quoted here before tells interesting story and gives the recipe. Non-profit publishers are currently in a strong position and it can be further improved by qualified decisions of submitting authors. But the price of publishing cannot be driven down to "free", only at a huge expense of deteriorating the quality of communication among scientists. Petr Smilauer Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic
