Let me clarify the samizdat business. When I speak of "scope for review and
evaluation of self-published papers" I do not mean that bad papers would not
be published, but that we could have a mechanism for commenting on them and
identifying good ones. This is happening with blogs and other material on
the net, there is lots of stuff out there, but somehow the good (or at least
interesting) material seems to get the attention.
Gary Grossman pointed out that the number of papers in many fields is
exploding anyway, although I don't think that our capacity to read and
filter them has grown correspondingly. This is not just because scientists
are getting more productive (or numerous), but also because more and more
papers are pushing their way through the system that shouldn't. Conference
proceedings for example - these used to be work in progress, not finished
work to be cited, but the pressure to publish is so great that people won't
go to a conference unless they can get some primary brownie points. There
are more and more obscure journals whose main function seems to be to
collect subscription fees.
Gary also comments that if you keep trying, most decent papers can get
published somewhere. Sure, but it is pretty discouraging to have a project
with your colleagues that you can't publish together, and closely related
papers get scattered over several journals. For example, some journals
refuse papers that do not contain original data ("we have standards" the
edotor of one of these once told me), so if a theorist writes a paper
analysing the work of his experimental colleagues he may not be able to
publish jointly with them.
I think that Patrick Foley has the right idea - let's just put our ideas out
there for everone to criticise.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Petr Smilauer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: SCIENCE Access to information Obstacles Open Source Re: Bill to
address science journal publishing
> Dear William Silvert and others,
>
>>A couple of posters have interpreted "publish elsewhere" as leading to
>> publishing anarchy. This misstates the situation. There is still scope
>> for
>> review and evaluation of self-published papers (samizdat),
> Your own terms are contradictory here. When reviewing and evaluating,
> you need an unbiased opinion (as much as it goes, given people have their
> faults), so you can evaluate your papers yourself. And there would be no
> point
> in evaluation, if there would not be the right to reject...
