Dear Dr Harnad, I've read the original articles mentioned in your message and also your article on peer review (Harnad,S.,1998. The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (c. 5 Nov. 1998) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html). If you will, I would like to add another possibility. Why not let the authors themselves do the job of editors and publishers? For example, the author would write her/his paper and choose 3 referees randomly from a pool of expert referees (see 1). The referees would give their reports and the author would make the changes which are agreed upon and the ones which are not agreed would appear as appendix on the paper in a section called "Referees comments" together with the author's answer. Obviously, in this section would appear general comments related to ideas (hypothesis, methods, applicability), not structure (grammar, etc) of the paper. There could be also comments from the referees about the importance of the paper, and referee questions and authors answers (along the lines of some proceedings of symposia). The referees are therefore non-anonymous to both authors and public (their addresses SHOULD appear in the paper for contacts).
The author would then make the final layout of her/his paper (using any of the almost infinite variety of available softwares) and would "publish" the final version in her/his web site. In this way we achieve several highly desirable qualities : 1- authors would have the copyright of their work, (as suggested by Bachrach S. et al. (1998). Intellectual Property: Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Science 281 (5382):1459-1460. in http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459), 2- publication would be free of costs for both authors and readers, rapidly "published" and easily accessible and distributed, and 3- the hand of the referees would be "visible", eliminating "invisible friends" and "enemies". Rejected papers could be re-submitted with new randomly choosen referees, but the reports of all referees SHOULD appear. Even in the extreme case that the paper is rejected several times, the author her/himself would have the final decision on "publishing" or not, as long as she/he would always include the veridict of the referees. The wide public would then judge whether to trust or not in the results of the paper. Notes: (1) This pool of referees could be organized by the appropriate scientific society and could be available in the web in a especial software. Referees would have numbers and each time an author would enquire for referees, his name and the title of the article would be registered and 3 (or more) referee names would be returned to the author after automatic referee number randomisation and combination choice. Referees could establish in this software their availability (for example, no more than 4 articles per month) and this would be considered by the software during referee choice. Each of these "pool of referees" would somehow act as a feedback control center for how many times an article was "submitted" and the information would be freely accessed by any interested person. Yours sincerely.............Alex Soares ****************************************************************** Alexandre Goulart Soares Laboratory of Aquatic Ecology Section Systematics and Ecology of Animals Zoological Institute Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Naamsestraat 59 B-3000 - Leuven - Belgium voice: + 32 16 32 39 66 fax: + 32 16 32 45 75 e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://ioc.unesco.org:591/glodir/ Latest publication: http://www.oup.co.uk/mollus/hdb/Volume_65/Issue_01/650133.sgm.abs.html *****************************************************************
