On Fri, 26 Nov 1999, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote: > it is not the publishers who provide [quality control] but the rest of > the scholarly community acting as unpaid referees
Correct, but the publishers implement the refereeing, and that costs some money (about $300 per paper). > it ought to be debated whether a more economically efficient quality > control process is to publish openly and freely without refereeing and > rely upon the reader and user of the information to make his or her own > quality judgements when using or deciding not to use a text. Such a question is not settled by debating but by testing. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html And it has already been much discussed in this forum. A complete archive of the discussion is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
