On Sun, 2 May 1999 23:17:16 +0100, Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Sun, 2 May 1999, J.W.T.Smith <[email protected]> Hi John - no relation, though we did meet recently at a very interesting seminar sponsored by the UK's Association of Professional and Learned Society Publishers - see <http://www.alpsp.org.uk/rep0499.htm> for a brief report on the meeting, and http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/ALPSP/notes.html<< for my notes. I was actually called to speak at the last minute in place of Bob Kelly (who Mark Doyle and I work for here) on our journals as overlays of e-prints. It turned out that almost all the speakers, who ranged from a consultant predicting the demise of journals to us regular publishers, seemed to be converging on a few central themes that are exemplified by John's proposal - at least some journals will survive, perhaps many of them, but they will have to do so by recognizing their strengths and responsibilities and taking on the role of something like John's Independent Evaluators. Journals will relinquish some of their current-content and distribution roles to things like the preprint archives, but will be taking on new responsibilities also in areas traditionally dominated by abstracting and indexing services (through interlinking, subject-focused searching and browsing, and the like). Maybe we were all being misled, but I thought the degree of agreement on the future quite remarkable. Just a couple of comments on your discussion: >> The LANL model is centralised... Any centralised model is vulnerable to >> control - who shall say you can deposit your work here? Just like the >> journal. The net is distributed and any publishing model based on it >> should take advantage of this. > >The LANL model is based on public SELF-ARCHIVING. No physicists are >complaining that their work is being blocked from LANL. Well - a few have been sent my way :-) but I agree this is not the problem. > [...] >So central vs. distributed archives is a pseudo-issue: Nothing of >substance hangs on it. Well, you could also say the whole web acts like a central archive (or several) - that's the "web portal" model, and in part that's John's SFP model. I think the actual details of implementation (in particular the degree to which ease of access to subject-related material is available) is important. Critical features are the archiving itself, and searching/indexing - these are a lot easier to implement for a centralized site. >> there is nothing in the DJ model to prevent an author having his or her >> work evaluated by more than one evaluator... > >You are very generous with referees' services. Multiple submission >(whether parallel or serial) is already the bane of the current >overloaded referee system. You propose to overload it still further. > >Articles rejected by one journal are certainly submitted to another >(and just about everything is eventually published somewhere), but >surely once a paper is accepted ONCE by a journal, no further >refereeing is called for. Stevan - a very good point, and one that I believe has been neglected by a lot of the proposals for new kinds of peer review (like some of the stuff in the Caltech Scholarly Forum proposal). However, if it is funded by the author, then I think John's idea is quite workable - most authors will probably not feel the need to pay for multiple evaluations, and those with very limited resources could perhaps pay for only the barest evaluation. If we are to go to a system where the author pays for peer review (as you have been advocating) I think multiple evaluations are going to be inevitable one way or another. Arthur Smith ([email protected])
