Well, not quite so fast, Glen!
Look. How many papers do you read a day? How do you decide which papers to
read?
You can form an organization of like-minded folks that puts before you only
the papers that that organization thinks are good. (i.e., an archival
Journal)
You can set up some "wisdom-of-the-crowd" scheme that votes on which papers
are good.
Not clear to me whether I fear the authoritarian way any more than I fear
mob psychology.
For most authors, the disagreeable fact is that a lot of people are reading
a few papers, and most papers are not read by anybody
Perhaps it's the J-distribution of hits on papers we should be worrying
about.
Perhaps we need a paper evaluation system that's more like Pandora: You get
what you ask for, except that every once in a while the system throws you a
song by an obscure composer, just to keep you honest. I have often
wondered if FRIAM (or the sfcomplex) could set itself up as a "Journal".
An author has a new paper, and sends it to the list. It goes up on an
internal website and people start assigning stars and making comments. When
it reaches a threshold of "stardom" it goes up on a public website. The
author can set the star-threshhold. (In otherwords, if the author wants to
"publish" a paper that his fellow FRIAM members think is shitty, he sets
the threshold real low.) Readers of the public website can set a star
threshold, below which the data base will not display a paper for them.
However, by common agreement, the data base is rigged so that it slips
readers a non conforming paper randomly about ten percent of the time.
For a sampling of some lovely papers that have not been read by
anybody (}:-[), please visit:
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of glen e. p. ropella
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 10:32 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic
Chemical
Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 12/07/2010 08:53 AM:
> You know, it wasn't SO long ago (i.e., I remember it) that SOME
> journals thought of themselves as "archival," and their reviewers* saw
> their role as defending the pages of those journals against error. In
> that context, getting published was supposed to be the end of a
conversation, not a
> beginning. I don't know if, and where, that view survives.
I hope it's completely dead. It should be obvious that authoritarianism is
bad.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
