I support your initiative as regards its basic intent, Stevan, but I want to explain why I think it will not work as it stands, focusing on the incentive problem. I indicated in my message of a few days ago that one reason for my doubts is because you are trying to motivate individuals apart from research communities. But I will not be pursuing that further here but rather focusing on another problem in connection with motivation, namely, the misuse of the Ginsparg Archive as a model. But let me first describe your plan as exactly as I can, so that you can correct any misunderstanding I may have of it and we can then pin down the problem as exactly as possible.
Your goal or aim is, as you describe it, to "free the refereed journal literature on-line". You take it for granted that this literature is all going on-line soon, one way or another, and your aim is not to get it on-line, since that will happen of its own accord, but rather to eliminate all access restrictions to it once it is there. As you perceive it, the major difficulty is posed by the policies of the commercially owned refereed journals, which are accustomed to charging access fees to the literature and will continue to do so in one form or another whether publication is on-line or not. Your plan for achieving your goal in spite of this is to encourage self-archiving of professional papers, including functional equivalents of papers already published or being published in the refereed journals, thus initiating an economically determined process which you believe will inevitably result in the elimination of such fees in due time. Since the idea is to eliminate costs to the reader this plan shifts the costs back either to the author or to somebody -- a third party -- who benefits sufficiently from this kind of publication to be willing to bear the expense involved in mediating the author's work to the prospective readership -- the costs of publication, in other words -- or at least is willing to share the burden of expense with the author. You think the best candidate for this third party is the university, who will subsidize the mediation, perhaps supervise it, perhaps even be fully in charge of it. This is on the assumption, though, that this third party would not impose access restrictions of its own. Difficulties in achieving your goal can be divided into (1) those that might hinder self-archiving, especially of the sort that will discourage the publishers' policies of recovering costs and making a profit at the expense of the reader, and (2) those that might interfere with the economic process tending toward the "inevitable and optimal" end-state where the literature is free in the sense both of being available gratis and of being available to all with the technical capacity to connect with the on-line archives. Most discussion here has related to the second part of the plan, but mainly in respect to the economic factors, the effects of the laws of the market, and so forth. These do not interest me. There are other problems pertaining to the second part of the plan that I think important but which you regard as not discussable here, though it is not clear why, since they pertain to the realization of your goal and could certainly affect its success or failure. Most notably, these are the problems implicit in the assumption that whoever acts in behalf of the author in mediating (or financing the mediation) of the research paper from the author to the reader will not impose access restrictions of their own. The common sense dictum that whoever pays the piper is likely to want to dictate the tune suggests that anyone who assumes the former role of the commercial publisher might find reasons of their own for restricting access in some way, and your idea that there is no problem in this worth discussing if the agency is the university or a multi-national consortium of universities seems to me extraordinarily naive, but perhaps explicable in terms of your own background as a British academician which may mislead you in trying to understand the rather more volatile and sometimes rapacious character of American universities. But however that may be, I am not concerned to push into that topic here. My concern here is only with the first part of the plan, the part that depends upon a correct understanding of those motivations of authors that will lead them to take the decisive step of self-archiving and, moreover, of doing so with enough enthusiasm to set in motion the changes supposedly destined to lead to the "inevitable and optimal" result you are hoping for. Your plan for encouraging self-archiving is to build or provide the software for building archives modeled on the "layered" version of the Ginsparg Archive, with extensive and sophisticated encoding and interlinking of its contents that integrates them all into a world database which can be both accessed and analyzed with the latest instruments available for these purposes. In other words, make self-archiving as easy and as attractive as possible for the authors and count on tapping their universal motive of making their work available to others at no cost to them. The weakness in this is in the description of the motive, which everybody agrees with but which says much less than it seems to say because it does not take into account the realities of communication, one of which is that in order to say something to somebody it is not enough to utter the words and make them public: the person addressed must be in position to hear them and be willing to listen to them attentively, especially when the words are in the form of lengthy and difficult scientific reports. Now, in the scientific and scholarly world the channels (methods, media, customary practices) of communication that make it possible for one person to actually communicate something to another about a subject-matter of common interest are quite various, ranging, at one extreme, from the subtle patterns and mores of informal communication between close professional friends which make it possible for a couple of colleagues to have a brief and highly allusive but sometimes highly effective informal conversation about a technical or theoretical matter to the highly controlled and formally rigorous discourse of primary research publication, at the other extreme, with its formal claims and equally formal objections and ensuing argumentation, which at its best can be as choreographically and elegantly structured as professional dance. Between these extremes of formality are a number of other modes of communication which differ significantly from one another and have distinctive roles to play in scientific and scholarly discourse: the structure of debate, say, which is very different from the structure of argumentation in research reports and responses, but has its own role to play under certain conditions; the various forms of regulated and unregulated group discussion; the structure of state-of-the-art review, and so forth. Has anyone ever tried to catalog these and figure out in a systematic way what they respectively contribute to the overall scientific understanding and how they do it? I don't know. I doubt it, though, because of the way even the most obtrusive and important of these forms of scientific discourse -- the primary research publication -- has been neglected as a topic of study, though I believe things will be changing rapidly in that respect in the near future. (I've remarked before on the importance of Joshua Lederberg's explicit identification of primary research publication as a distinct communicational form, his recognition of its unusual importance, and his isolation of some of the key components in it, and I will take that for granted here.) This sort of communication is distinguishable first of all by its function of making formal research claims, and what makes it so important is not that what is said in formal publication is more important than what is said informally -- many informal conversations are more important in moving the field along than some primary research publications -- but rather that the saying of it, the actual act of making a research claim, triggers the most rigorous mechanism of critical control available to the scientist or scholar. What is that? It is nothing more or less than unconstrained and sometimes obligatory peer criticism in response to a research claim which a peer of the researcher deems questionable. Now we come to the point: what the research author wants is not merely to write his or her results in the sky but to press them upon a targeted readership -- his or her research peers -- in the special form of research claims, the communicational vehicle of which is the primary research publication. Why? Because the researcher aims at making a contribution to his or her field, and the way you make a contribution is to make a research claim and have it accepted by your research peers. Now acceptance of a research claim is something that occurs when and only when what the researcher has concluded and presents in the form of a claim is in fact taken up and actually used by others as something taken for granted by them in their own work. This is not acceptance of a paper for publication, which may or may not lead to acceptance of claimed findings or discoveries. This is acceptance of the claim itself, wherein one person's research conclusion, presented to others as such, re-occurs as a premise or presupposition in the work of their research peers and enters thereby into the ongoing course of cumulative growth of the science, shaping it in some way, small or large, as the accepted claim moves into the knowledge base and enables further questions to be raised. >From the point of view of the individual researcher, this is research success in the most fundamental sense, and is what all researchers aim at, provided they have not lost their way, as sometimes does indeed happen when they conclude, cynically, that what counts is not understanding your subjectmatter but understanding the prejudices of editors, who may also have lost their way by coming to regard themselves primarily as gatekeepers whose chief task is to keep barbarians out instead of mediators whose primary task is to bring authors and readers together. It seems to me, Stevan, that in your zeal for the protection of peer review practices you have lost sight of why people want to publish. According to you, in one of many statements to the same effect: SH > Authors work hard for recognition and certification SH > by their PEERS, and it is the service of peer-review SH > (refereeing) that a refereed journal implements (the SH > peers review for free too!). The first half of the sentence is clearly intended to convey that it is the approval of peer reviewers -- as distinct from acceptance by one's research peers generally -- that motivates normal publication since the fictitious office of certification could only be imputed to peer reviewers or editors; and the second part of the sentence characterizes the research function of refereed journals as being that of "implementing" this bogus act of certification. Now, publication is not certification of anything. There is no office of certification of research claims, and nobody appointed editors -- much less peer reviewers, who are merely called in to assist editors -- to any such task. If certification is a convenient fiction for some purposes, it is still a fiction and is not helpful for our purposes. But what I especially want to focus on in the present context is not the authoritarian conception of editors implicit in that fiction but rather the way it diverts our attention from the actual dynamics of inquiry by focusing us upon what is, from the point of view of the author, nothing more than a means -- often a very questionable means -- of effective access to research peers. Worse, we are asked to take as a norm what is in fact a professional dysfunction; for something has gone wrong when a researcher is writing for recognition by peer reviewers and editors rather than for his or her research peers. I don't doubt that it happens. Everybody knows of people, nominally successful and even professionally influential, whose vita is as barren as it is long because they devoted themselves to studying the prejudices of editors and other influential persons rather than their research subject matter. This is one way to get ahead in the world, but it is not a way to do science. There is something amiss here and it bears importantly on your understanding of author motivation in science. My guess is that had you not come up with the "invisible hand" argument to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between your devotion to the refereed journal, construed as a policing system based on peer review, and your devotion to the Ginsparg Archive, which dispenses with editorial and peer review policing altogether, you would long since have recognized that there is no need to resort to such a questionable hypothesis since the explanation of how critical control is maintained in the research fields served by the Ginsparg Archive is readily apparent when you look closely at how Ginsparg constructed the Archive and ask yourself what would keep YOU in line if you were publishing there. Fear of a possible future peer review by a person unknown whose opinion will count only so far as some editor decides to take account of it? I don't think so. The fact that quality control is maintained in the fields served by the LANL system can be accounted for easily enough if we bear in mind what the critical control of research is based on: uninhibited peer criticism by the generality of one's peers, which is at its most rigorous, intense and influential when occasioned by the making of research claims. In view of this, what motive does the individual researcher using the LANL system have to maintain quality in his or her work? The strongest motive available: fear of the development of a reputation for poor or slipshod work -- irresponsible or incompetent research claims -- among those peers whose opinion is of the most importance to the author using that method of publication. The development of a bad reputation there is a far more certain cause of one's research career being blighted than is the negative view of a merely imagined and anonymous peer reviewer whose opinion is never more than advisory, anyway. A rejected paper on the basis of negative peer review can perhaps be published elsewhere, but a damaged reputation arising from such direct communication is all but impossible to rehabilitate because people often will not even bother reading later work that might redeem an author's reputation because they already have too much to read, anyway. As regards The Hand, it cannot add anything to this owing to the fact that the version of the paper submitted to the refereed journal later need not be the same as the paper originally submitted in the form of a preprint. Since the author certainly knows this, then -- if there were no other factor compelling attention to quality -- the author would be well advised to postpone the hard work of writing up a high quality paper until later, initially submitting instead a preprint version little better than a first draft, provided it presents the claim interestingly enough to be likely to generate a critical response which can then be used in strengthening the paper to be written later. Since a critical response is all the more likely the more questionable the claim made, provided it is provocatively stated, then -- if there were no other source of control -- there should be a general tendency for research papers in their first incarnation as preprints to be highly rhetorical, exaggerated in their claims, sloppily stated and reasoned, poorly documented, and composed with little attention to the niceties of the polished professional paper. But although this sort of tendency was predicted, this seems not to be the case as regards the preprint literature in the Ginsparg Archive. The Invisible Hand hypothesis cannot account for this -- the data you have compiled about how preprints are slated to be replaced by refereed versions is just impertinent -- and only serves to obscure the research realities that should be recognized, which is what I believe to be the centrally important thing about the Ginsparg Archive, namely, its success constitutes an existence proof that editorial filtering is not required for maintaining quality control in primary publication for at least some research communities. (I omit here a discussion of the evidence for believing that the Ginsparg Archive actually does work as a system of direct primary publication for those fields for which it was created.) The question then arises as to what the characteristics of those research fields are which do not require special policing techniques in order to maintain quality control and to what extent research fields not so mature as those can make effective use of such a system. The doctrine of the Hand has obscured the need to take that question seriously since the answer is supposedly already given by reference to the supposed virtues of the peer review system. Your assumption has been that getting people to self-archive is just a matter of providing software that enables people to upload, download, and so forth, given their interest in making their work public. But individual researchers have no interest in using a communicational medium that doesn't connect them effectively with people in their research field, and merely self-archiving their papers doesn't do that. Paul Ginsparg ported a research community, or at least its nucleus, from one medium of communication (the email distributed preprint) to another (the preprint archive and server system), and any authentic emulation of his accomplishment has to do something analogous to that. This can perhaps be done, though nothing has been said here to indicate what that might be other than what I suggested myself a few days ago. But the research field he ported is exceptional in terms of its critical control practices, and how many many such research fields are capable of making effective use of a system like that devised by Ginsparg? My impression is that because of your conviction that the refereed journal system of communication is the be-all and end-all of scientific communication you have thought of what Ginsparg did as being primarily a feat of computer applications, whereas the real feat was in creating an on-line system of primary research publication, which was a very different sort of accomplishment. Let me quote a couple of passages from an address of his of 1996: PG > It is ordinarily claimed that journals play two PG > intellectual roles: a) to communicate research PG > information, and b) to validate this information PG > for the purpose of job and grant allocation. PG > As I've explained, the role of journals as PG > communicators of information has long since been PG > supplanted in certain fields of physics, so let's PG > consider their other role. Having queried a number PG > of colleagues concerning the criteria they use in PG > evaluating job applicants and grant proposals, it PG > turns out that the otherwise unqualified number of PG > published papers is too coarse a criterion and plays PG > essentially no role. Researchers are typically familiar PG > with the research in their own field, and must in any PG > event independently evaluate it together with letters PG > of recommendation from trusted sources. Recent PG > activity levels of candidates were mentioned as a PG > criterion, but that too is independent of publication PG > per se: "hot preprints" on a CV can be as important as PG > any publication. http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/pg96unesco.html That seems straightforward enough as a statement of research autonomy, in contrast with your view of the dependence of the LANL Archive on the "invisible hand" of the refereed journal system, and he indicates clearly in a later passage in the same paper that his intention was specifically to create at Los Alamos a system for primary research publication: PG > It is important to distinguish the form of communication PG > facilitated by these systems from that of usenet newsgroups PG > or garden variety "bulletin board" systems. In "e-print PG > archives," researchers communicate exclusively via research PG > abstracts that describe material otherwise suitable for PG > conventional publication. This is a very formal mode of PG > communication in which each entry is archived and indexed PG > for retrieval at arbitrarily later times; Usenet newsgroups and PG > bulletin boards, on the other hand, represent an informal mode PG > of communication, more akin to ordinary conversation, with PG > unindexed entries that typically disappear after a short time. How did he go about establishing the Archive as a place of primary publication? First, he did this by so constructing it that the basic necessary conditions of primary publication were met and its users were made aware of this so that they would understand what they were doing in depositing their papers in the archive. This included such things as providing the software to be used in putting the contributions into a form suitable for primary publication, requiring an abstract, setting up a system of notification of availability to interested parties, dating the submission, insuring against tampering, keeping successive versions, and so forth. (Paul could perhaps be prevailed upon to fill in more detail on this, but much can be derived merely from studying his informal papers on the topic, which make it clear that he takes account of all of the factors which Lederberg identified as necessary for literature of this very special function.) His diligence and good judgment in attending to these seemingly trivial details was the basis of his accomplishment. His achievement in constructing that system was not the achievement of a computer programmer but of a professional physicist. Second, he also accomplished it by defending it against misrepresentations of its functions, as he is doing in the passage just quoted. Attempts to trivialize its significance -- which are attempts to show that it is not a place of primary publication -- typically take the form of mischaracterizing it by describing it in such a way that one ignorant of how it actually works gets the impression that it is like a chatroom or a usenet news bulletin board or a listserver based forum or general discussion group or a MUD, etc., which are on-line communicational forms rarely capable of functioning as places of primary publication, whatever their value may be otherwise, because some one or more of the necessary conditions for that are normally absent. The bad news, from the point of view of your use of it as a model for self-archiving, is that it is such a formally austere environment as to be suitable only for a highly developed research community, accustomed to independence from editors and peer reviewers because their regular practices as scientists embodies a higher level of critical control than the refereed journal system can offer. For all your admiration for Ginsparg's accomplishment you have not been able to perceive the basis for it in the exceptional character of the research communities themselves, whose members have not required the kind of policing you take for granted as the paradigm of critical control because their normal practices already exemplify the paradigm of scientific self-control in a more pure and developed form. Thus it apparently hasn't occurred to you that it cannot function as the universal model for stimulating self-archiving for that very reason. I have no idea how many research communities like the ones that make good use of the Ginsparg Archives there may be, but in reflecting on the many reasons why a given research community might not be matured enough to handle a system as austere and demanding as the Ginsparg Archive is -- sometimes because of factors beyond anyone's control, sometimes from situations in which privilege and power has corrupted leadership and demoralized the research community, sometimes from continuing inability to find agreement on basic research aims -- it quickly became clear to me that it is not likely that we will find nearly enough fields mature enough to set in motion the economic process you envision as leading to the "inevitable and the optimal", even supposing the problem which I touched upon in my previous message of recruiting research communities rather than individuals has been solved. You may want to think in terms of making common cause with the Digital Journal people and others who take a more realistic view of what can be done. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Joseph Ransdell [email protected] [email protected] Dept of Philosophy 806 742-3275 Home: 806 797-2592 Texas Tech University - Lubbock, Texas 79409 USA http://www.door.net/arisbe (Peirce Gateway website) http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
