On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
> > > http://preprint.chemweb.com
>
> One of the very first articles on the Chemweb forum was one
> which had previously been rejected by two referees
> after having been submitted to a "conventional" forum.
>
> Presumably the H/O Strategy could lead to a more or less
> permanent presence somewhere for such articles.
>
> Without implying anything about the specific article noted above,
> I wonder whether there is a risk that with precedents established,
> such chemistry preprint servers might simply become a refuge
> for "unpublishable science".
I worried about this too, until it became clear that:
(1) As a matter of empirical fact, the proportion of crackpot papers in,
for example, the Ginsparg Archive, is extremely low; the vast majority
are merely the preprints of papers submitted to a "conventional forum"
(= a refereed journal), and eventually they are superseded by the
refereed draft, or at least a citation to the refereed draft.
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
(2) With the new interoperable self-archiving software
<http://www.eprints.org>
there is are explicit metadata fields for "refereed/unrefereed"
and for "journal-name". So the users can safely restrict their
reading and searching to the conventional journal literature if they
wish.
(3) It is not at all a bad idea that there should be a vanity-press
level in the Open Archives, one that can serve as a repository for
papers rejected at higher levels yet (given the imperfections of peer
review) possibly not without value, to be discovered eventually. (There
is plenty of room in cyberspace; and navigability by suitable
signposting via metadata tagging.)
But please note that the H/O Strategy pertains only to refereed,
accepted papers. It is irrelevant to papers that never get past the
embryological stage of preprints (nonprints).
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad [email protected]
Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected]
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