ZENO'S PARADOX AND THE ROAD TO THE OPTIMAL/INEVITABLE Zeno's Paradox was the one about the philosopher who thought: "How can I possibly get across this room? For before I can do that, I have to get half-way across, and that takes time. And before I can get half-way across, I have to get half-way-half-way across, and that takes time too. And so on. So how can I possibly even begin?"
I don't know what the theoretical solution to Zeno's Paradox is, but the practical solution is to walk across the room. Otherwise we have Zeno's Paralysis. The equivalents of Zeno's Paradox have been repeatedly aired in this Forum: "How can we possibly free the refereed literature? For before we can do that..." The faithful participant in this Forum will by now be familiar with many of the prima facie candidates for "...." What they all have in common is that they leave us where we are, paralyzed, within a financially fire-walled refereed literature. By my count, all the prima facie rationales for Zeno's Paralysis so far aired have also been rebutted (energetically, repeatedly, and decisively) in this Forum, and the steps are clearly within sight and reach for freeing the refereed literature overnight through author self-archiving. Joseph Ransdell's rationale for Zeno's Paralysis has been that there is a bigger problem than freeing the refereed journal literature, and that this bigger problem is the real one to solve. The simple (and correct) answer is that solving the smaller problem is not contingent upon solving the bigger problem -- except if we insist on seeing it as such, in which case it is that erroneous conflation that IS the problem. I will not do a full point-by-point rebuttal of Joseph's rather lengthy posting, because much of it is simply irrelevant, and would amount to my joining in the endless and needless splitting of the half-distances, Zeno-style. I will merely correct the substantive errors and misinterpretations: > Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 17:57:13 -0700 From: "ransdell, joseph m." > <[email protected]> > > Your plan for achieving your goal ["to free the refereed literature online"] > ... is [1] to encourage self-archiving of > professional papers, including functional equivalents of papers already > published or being published in the refereed journals, thus [2] initiating > an economically determined process which you believe will inevitably > result in the elimination of such fees in due time. There is a profound misapprehension here which it would probably be useful to clear up in the minds of anyone who might have fallen prey to it: The refereed literature is already freed by [1]! The rest [2] is merely a prediction. There remains the possibility that even when the refereed literature is freed by [1], there will still be add-ons that individuals and institutions are willing to pay fees for. That is not pertinent to the goal of this Forum, which is to free the refereed literature, which will have been realized. The refereed literature will no longer be held hostage to those add-ons. > 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. You are conflating [1, freeing the refereed literature] and [2, the probable economic restructuring that may follow from 1]. The University is an ally in establishing Open Archives in which its researchers can self-archive their preprints and postprints (http://www.eprints.org). That is all that is needed for attaining [1]. (Universities do not currently think of levying fees on JOURNALS for access to their researchers' give-away research; it is equally absurd to imagine that they would levy access fees on the very researchers on whom the universities seek to make a research IMPACT in publishing that same give-away research in the first place! It is IMPACT that generates research and revenue for researchers and universities. To instead seek direct income by blocking access to research reports is tantamount to blocking their impact, and would be equivalent to advertisers seeking direct income by levying fees for access to their ads. In other words, Joseph's Zeno-like worries on this score are not only unfounded but incoherent.) As regards [2] (on which [1] is not contingent, and which it need not and should not, indeed cannot await in advance, Zeno-style), it is an arithmetic fact that IF the economic consequence of [1] is that universities' readers prefer the free version of the literature (rather than just that portion of it that their university can afford via S/L/P fees), and hence that their annual S/L/P fees need no longer be paid, THEN there will be many times more than enough to pay for the tiny remaining peer-review costs out of the annual savings. The universities need to have their research peer-certified for the same reasons their researchers' do -- for the "credibility" of their "ads" -- so it is in both their interests to use a bit of the annual wind-fall savings to pay for the quality-control. But ignore prediction [2] if you like, because [1] is not contingent on it! Self-archiving, eo ipso, frees the literature for everyone, everywhere, forever, even if the universities continue to pay for the fire-walled version the old way! > 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. Vide supra. (I am, by the way, Hungarian born; a Canadian citizen, and lived and worked in the US until 1994...) > The weakness... 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. This question might have been raised in the era before Gutenberg and before peer review. The answer is, one does not say ones words, one publishes them. And one does not publish them in a Vanity Press, but in the highest-standard peer-reviewed journal that will accept and certify them as having met its standards. And a "peer" is merely a qualified fellow-expert in the domain of expertise in question. One can only repeat: The objective is to free the REFEREED LITERATURE (such as it is), not to save the world first. Whatever constrained the "realities of communication" in the Gutenberg Era (i.e., peer-reviewed publication) will continue to do so in the Online Era. All that's needed is to free that already constrained literature from access-blocking tolls. > 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. Correct. And that is precisely why one self-archives both the pre-refereeing preprint and the post-refereeing postprint. The journal's peer-review tag is then the certification of having met the quality standards of the peers at that level. > 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. Correct. And this second phase, after peer-review certification, is called IMPACT. And it is precisely to maximize the potential impact of research that we are trying to free the peer-reviewed papers from obsolete access-barriers (= impact-barriers) online. > 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 I'm afraid I couldn't follow this: The peer-reviewers selected by the editor are indeed intended to be a valid and representative sample of the relevant peer expertise in general. Apart from that, Joseph seems to be confusing the first, filtering stage of IMPRIMATUR (Quality-Control & Certification [QC/C] through peer review), which sign-posts the published literature, with the second stage, IMPACT, something that only comes after publication, as the peers navigate this sign-posted literature and try to build on it. > 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. Strong words. But note that they could just as well have been spoken in the paper era. Joseph is dissatisfied with peer review: Fine. Let him find and test something better, something that gives us a literature that is of at least the same level of quality as the one we have, and then we can talk about implementing his system. Till then his animus against refereeing is completely irrelevant to the objective of freeing the current refereed literature from needless impact barriers. It is merely a red herring. > ... certification is a convenient fiction... > authoritarian conception of editors > nothing more than... a very questionable means -- of effective > access to research peers. Until Joseph provides an at least equally effective means of access, I suggest that these fulminations serve no constructive purpose. > 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 "invisible hand argument" follows from a very simple fact (not a hypothesis) about the Ginsparg Archive: From the very beginning (and still earlier), all those papers were and still are destined for peer reviewed journals. They are written with the expectation of being answerable to peer review. There has been no change in that respect. The Archive is not, and never was, a publisher, or an alternative to publishing. And publishing in Physics (and in all other academic disciplines) does not refer to vanity-press self-publication, but refereed publication. Self-archiving, in other words, is not self-publication and never has been. The journal hierarchy continues to exist, as it did before the Archive existed; the only difference is that now the peer community has access to both the pre-refereeing preprints and the post-refereeing postprints for free (and earlier). Those are the facts. The speculative part is about what would happen if the invisible hand of peer review were actually removed -- if the journals all vanished, for some reason. Joseph thinks everything would stay pretty much the same, whereas I think they would dip toward Usenet -- until we re-invented peer review. Nothing much hinges on that speculation for me, for I am merely advocating freeing the peer-reviewed literature from impact-barriers through self-archiving -- which is precisely what the Ginsparg Archive is doing for Physics; hence this is a proven principle. Joseph, in contrast, seems to be advocating freeing the literature from peer review, through self-publication. That is rather a different matter, and raises a wealth of empirical questions that the facts and history of the Ginsparg Archive certainly do not address, let alone demonstrate. Harnad, S. (1998g/2000) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) and in Exploit Interactive 5 (2000) http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/ Longer version: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html > 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 Yes, peer review does not stop with formal journal refereeing; that is part of the continuous, collective, self-corrective nature of science and of learned inquiry in general. But post-publication "open peer commentary" is not to be confused with pre-publication peer review. For the peer commentary is transpiring in a filtered, quality-controlled, sign-posted, and hence navigable published literature; the peer review, in contrast, is operating on the raw, unfiltered substrate which, even with the help of the Invisible Hand, is something the community-at-large needs to be spared having to navigate unaided, given the unspeakable (let alone readable) volume that is being written. Harnad, S. (1998/1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 4(11): 283-292 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad98.toronto.learnedpub. html http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/talks/Harnad_Snider.html Only Editors, paid to do the job, and referees, stealing from their precious research time at the behest of those Editors [and the Golden Rule], should ever have to contend with those raw first drafts: Joseph's imagination is failing him if he thinks that science would be well-served if those drafts all went straight on-line, without mediation, and the filtration began only afterwards, with "open peer commentary." What peer would have the time or the courage to tackle generic papers willy-nilly so as to let the rest of the peerage know whether it had all been worthwhile? How is the labour to be divided? Indeed, is it not likely that classical peer-review would simply have to be re-invented so as to divide the labour rationally? In any case; this is all speculation. If Joseph wants to test an alternative, he has to do so empirically, with a representative sample of raw manuscripts, NOT written for submission to refereed journals, but written only for this sort of free-for-all; and he needs a representative sample of peers, who must navigate and sign-post this literature with comments. And the experiment must be conducted with a large enough sample size and for long enough so that we can have confidence that its results generalize beyond a Hawthorn Effect. When he comes back to report his findings, then they will warrant our attention; but not now, on the basis of the Ginsparg Archive, which is certainly NOT an implementation of the experiment in question. > 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. And with so much to read, how does Joseph imagine that anyone has the time to test and monitor reputations? > (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.) It would be interesting to see that evidence; on the face of it, until and unless those authors stop submitting all those papers to refereed journals, they constitute no kind of publication, but merely what they look like on their face: public self-archiving, before and after publication. > 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. Correct. It is the Quality-Control & Certification (QC/C) provided by peer reviewed journals that does that. As to "connecting effectively": The old way was with impact-barriers, the new (optimal/inevitable) way will be without impact-barriers. Which is more effective? And what (if anything) would be still more effective? (Note that self-archiving both preprints and postprints on-line SUBSUMES Joseph's own preferred option -- which I suppose is one without peer review: Each author has the option of performing the empirical experiment I urged on Joseph, namely, to self-archive only preprints, and not bother with journal peer review. It is surely of some empirical relevance that virtually no author in the Physics Archive has chosen this option, in its decade of existence. Discipline differences? I'll wait to see; apart from a few crackpot papers, exactly the same pattern occurs with the multidisciplinary CogPrints Archive http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk.) Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science (special issue honour of Eugene Garfield) (in press) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.htm > 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. I don't understand this "porting" terminology. Speaking literally and factually, the Archive gave Physicists a means of publicly self-archiving their preprints and postprints online. That's all. No other practises changed (apart from the user preference for the free online archive). > 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. I am afraid that there is no evidence whatsoever for this -- except if you are doing a play on words with the term "primary": certainly both the unrefereed preprint and the refereed postprint precede the appearance of the print version, but that is not a new form of "primary research publication" but a welcome primacy in real time. (By the same token, paper preprints, which were always disseminated earlier than final drafts and journal offprints, were never a new form of "primary research publication" but merely a faster way of disseminating papers.) > Let me quote a couple of passages from an address of [Ginsparg's] 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 I am afraid I do not see that at all! We have here some anecdotes about how colleagues say they go about doing evaluations, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the "invisible hand" factor (which I am beginning to fear you have not understood: to repeat, that factor would only vanish [to mix metaphors] if physicists stopped preparing their papers for, and submitting their papers to, peer review; nothing of the sort has happened). > 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. Ahem. Even taken out of context, it is hard to imagine that anyone would interpret this as implying that mere format constraints such as providing an abstract are what distinguish the Usenet literature from the Los Alamos literature. Might I point out that Usenet postings are not, and never will be, answerable to peer review, whereas Los Alamos papers all are? > 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. What has been provided is a self-archiving system. Try to remove the layers of interpretation and see it factually for what it is. It will not be a place of primary publication until the REAL place of primary publication (the journal, and its all-refereeing QC/C) are out of the loop. Or is this just a play-of-words on "place": for I certainly agree that the "locus classicus" of the papers has become the virtual locus, rather than the real locus: yet the citations are invariably to the journal-published version, as soon as it is available...) > 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. Yes, it is false to characterize it as a MUD; but it is equally false to characterize it as a "place of primary publication": It is a place to publicly self-archive primary publications (and prepublications) online. > 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. Nothing of the sort, as I hope I've pointed out in enough ways by now. If there is reputed to be something different about physics (and it is just a rumour, I don't really know the hard evidence), it is that (1) physics papers undergo less revision under refereeing than papers in other disciplines, (2) physics journal rejection rates are lower, at all levels of the hierarchy, and (3) physics papers tend to be aimed more directly at their proper level of the hierarchy (rather than trickling down via multiple submissions, until they find their level, as they do in some other disciplines). It would follow from (1) that unrefereed Physics preprints would be safer for immediate peer consumption than in fields where QC/C typically requires more substantive modifications. If these things are true, they suggest that physicists are perhaps more disciplined, more conscientious, or smarter. But be that as it may, it does not give a hint of what they would be like if the Invisible Hand were removed, i.e., if they stopped being answerable to journal peer review. My guess is that they would prove to be like all human beings when they are not answerable to quality-control standards; and the quality-control would quickly have to be brought back again. > 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. I can't follow all this. It seems to me any "research community" that currently has a fleet of refereed journals, currently behind S/L/P impact-barriers, is "mature" enough to free it through self-archiving -- if it can free itself from Zeno's Paralysis. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
