As moderator Stevan has specified that the topic of the September Forum is whether or not there is "a way to make learned serial literature available online, free for all." And he has indicated further that the continuing agenda -- assuming there is some continuation -- is to be on "the road to the optimal and the inevitable for refereed journal publication." (See the appended quote below from Stevan's earlier message.)
There is a somewhat different topic that especially concerns me, though, and I wonder if there is any other forum where it might be appropriately discussed? The question I have in mind concerns the extent to which the xxx archive, considered as a publication system, is extensible across academia in general. I take it for granted that the system must accommodate the function of refereed journal publication, presumably as a part of the value-added "overlay" on the basic database of freely submitted and freely accessible research papers, but do not see that as especially problematic as long as the principle of the overlay is maintained, i.e. all "value-added" factors are accommodated in the overlay and the policies of the base are not modified. The purpose of the forum I am looking for would be rather to discuss the kinds of difficulties this extension is meeting and is likely to meet as the attempt to extend it progresses from field to field, with special concern for whether or to what extent it is found acceptable as a form of professional practice. The accommodation of refereed literature is only a part of the problem to be solved, as is the problem of the cost of journals, and -- without intending to question the importance of either of these matters -- I am concerned myself with the larger range of problems involved in the extension of xxx and wonder if there are others who are similarly interested in this. It seems likely prima facie that the success of the xxx system has been due in part to the pre-existing and well established practice of pre-print distribution that had developed in certain fields (such as high energy physics), as Paul Ginsparg has himself suggested, and that its most likely success in extension will be in other fields that also have more or less well developed traditions of pre-print distribution. There may, however, be other factors as yet unnoticed that will make an important difference in this respect as well, even as regards the "hard" sciences, and as regards the rest of academe, the safest thing to say is that there may well be problems not usually even thought about by those in the hard sciences. Indeed, their very "hardness" or solidity as consistently productive research traditions may be due in large part to the same factors that have led to their already existing commitment to use of preprint distribution of research reports in leading edge research. I am not suggesting possible difficulties in a skeptical spirit nor with the intent of discouragement. On the contrary, I think it is of the first importance to press for its extension everywhere in academia, and this for the following reasons: (1) The difficulties encountered in attempting to establishing the xxx system will tend to reveal as nothing else could what purposes the present publication practices in various fields actually serve. (a) The university is a composite of a number of different intellectual traditions which do not originate from a common source historically and have not developed with a common understanding of the function of professional publication. Though officially ignored, this difference in understanding cannot have gone unnoticed by anyone who has had much experience with the typical review processes involved in tenure and promotion, for example, as it goes from the department level through the various administratively more comprehensive levels, or who has had much occasion to attend to the differing perceptions of what is professionally appropriate and what is not as expressed by people in the various disciplines that go to make up the university. In normal academic life we usually and rightly downplay the differences in the interest of workable consensus. But the differences are there, the present situation is not a normal one, and the mere attempt to extend the xxx archive principle could be extraordinarily enlightening about what the university is actually like as a composite of distinct disciplines. (b) Moreover, the benefit to the various disciplines of being compelled to reflect upon their practices in order to explain why such a system is or is not feasible could hardly be exaggerated, and it is quite possible that there will turn out to be a surprising number of special areas even in the humanities where such a system would work and be welcomed. (2) The significance of the xxx archives as an institutional innovation and reform will doubtless be perceived somewhat differently by various people interested in it. My own view is that, regarded by historians of the future, it will be seen as having had three major effects, regardless of how successful the further extension of it turns out to be. (a) The first is that it has made good on the claim of science to be essentially public and universally accessible as an activity of discovery of how things really are, at least as regards people who are sincerely interested in doing what is necessary to find out what is and has been happening in science. I am not talking about scientific popularization but about the accessibility of scientific activity in a timely manner by those who are able to contribute to it and benefit from it as participants in it in virtue of direct access. There are, of course, limitations in what people can do who lack the instruments required to participate in research on par with those on the leading edge; but access both to retrieval and to distribution of findings in some fields is now universally available to anyone who can access the internet, and scientists themselves have done what is within their power in those areas to make universal access available. (b) It has provided an extraordinarily lucid model (yet to be analytically explicated from a logical point of view, as far as I know) for understanding what the essential role of publication actually is in primary research activity, speaking generally, and thus made it possible to isolate its immediate research function from other functions which publication practices can and do serve, such as those served by critical review processes (including "peer" review), which are various and by no means reducible to some simple "certification" or "validation" or "qualitative ranking" function. (c) The success of the xxx archive, as a system of publication playing the role alluded to above, provides a kind of existence proof for the proposition that, in its pure form as cooperative inquiry aiming at finding out how things are, science is essentially egalitarian in its social structure. This truth is one that has largely been forgotten during the course of this century, though it was understood by American philosophers in particular prior to the First World War, who thought of the primary benefit of science not in terms of its technological applications (which are morally ambivalent) but in terms rather of its role as a suggestive model in the development of democratic life and institutions. These implications of the success of the xxx archive will, I believe, show themselves historically as of the first importance as regards the aim of increasing the intelligence and effectiveness of reform movements both in academia and in the world in general. Or perhaps I should express these as hopes rather than beliefs of mine, but my estimation of its value is the same in either case. Thus -- to repeat -- I am concerned to promote and to understand the problems that are involved in promoting the extension of the xxx archive principle throughout academia generally, and am wondering if there is any forum available for discussing freely the problems that are or may turn out to be involved in this -- and, of course, I am wondering as well to what extent there actually is a desire to engage in such ongoing and exploratory discussion, the chief aim of which would be to keep the xxx archive movement alive by providing it with the sort of ongoing critical intelligence that only an open forum with the diverse constituency of the present forum, devoted specifically to that task, can provide. I do not conceive such a forum as having any ax to grind other than as just described. It's aim should be informational and investigatory rather than persuasional. I would like to suggest also that, if there is such a forum, it would be desirable to try to include input not only from the constituency of the present forum but also from a broader range of representation of faculty across the academic spectrum. I should stress, though, that I do NOT mean by this that one should seek official delegates of the presently influential faculty, chosen for their present prestige and status, but rather people from various fields who understand what networking is, who are honestly interested in the potentialities of it, and who have an experientially informed and realistic view of what academia is actually like, as seen from their special perspective, regardless of their present status and prestige -- bearing in mind that status and prestige is as likely to be a disability as it is to be an asset when it comes to the intelligent discussion of things of possible radical import. The point is that judgment should be used: those who know of interested people in various fields should simply invite them ad hoc rather than trying to get some sort of "official" representation, which latter could be deadly. APPENDIX Stevan Harnad said, on 17 Oct 1998 (9:55), in response to an earlier message of mine: -----QUOTE HARNAD-------- The issue here is quite simple: There currently exists a learned serial literature; it is largely in paper now, and costly. Is there a way to make that literature available online, free for all? I believe that the answer is yes, and that this outcome can be attained without first having to solve the problems of academic inequity or to correct the imperfections of peer review as it is currently practiced, worthy as is the goal of doing so. Indeed, I think it is both short-sighted and defeatist to suppose that the one is contingent on the other two. So I am determined not to let worthy but irrelevant causes obstruct or obscure the road to the optimal and the inevitable for refereed journal publication. --------END HARNAD QUOTE-------- Stevan evidently misunderstood me as urging a solution to the problems he mentions. My concern is only with problems in extending the xxx archive model. But I think it is clear that even with this misunderstanding cleared up, we still have different agendas, and the present forum is not suitable for what I have in mind. P.S.: For what it is worth, I have a paper on-line which is a modification of an occasional paper given several years ago at a local meeting of the APS, entitled "Sciences as Communicational Communities", which will indicate the basis of my professional interest in these matters. The special relevance of the xxx publication system will perhaps be obvious in it though there is no explicit reference to it since I was not yet aware of its existence when I first wrote the paper. http://www.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/physics.htm Joseph Ransdell ------------------ JOSEPH RANSDELL <[email protected]> or <[email protected]> Department of Philosophy, Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX 79409 Area Code 806: 742-3158 office 797-2592 home 742-0730 fax ARISBE: Peirce Telecommunity website: http://www.door.net/arisbe Home Page: http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm
