Andrew Odlyzko wrote: > The main incentive for scholars to insist on free access > to their papers, though, is this is the way to get them read. > Easy availability is essential on the Internet. Some criticize > this trend, claiming it produces superficial impressions, an > overload of material, etc., but instant gratification (even > if it "saps the moral fiber of society," in the words of > critics of some earlier technological innovations) is the > way we are going.
I think the case is much stronger than that, Andrew. Internet availability means that critical response is timely and the quality of critical response is bound to be much higher when response is timely because of the simultaneous availability of relevant context, much of which tends to get lost very rapidly as the leading edge moves on. > In spite of the slow pace of evolution of basic scholarly articles, > I wholeheartedly endorse Stevan's (and Paul Ginsparg's) efforts > to stimulate usage of eprint archives. I think Joseph is wrong > about the need for some special kind of maturity on the part of > a scholarly area to adopt such archives. I have seen many fields > successfully switch to the use of such archives, and I am not > aware of a single instance of any area that has then abandoned > it, nor even of any area where a substantial number of people > regret the move. Much more common are comments of the form > "I don't know how we ever lived without this." If a research community can ever establish itself to begin with as users of the medium there is no reason why they should be expected to abandon it later, unless it would be for "catastrophic" reasons. Let me explain, though, what I have in mind by a catastrophic reason since this may help to clarify what I mean when I talk about the necessity for a certain level of maturity of the field in order to use something like the Ginsparg Archive effectively. As sciences develop they become dependent on increasingly sophisticated and expensive instruments of observation and experimentation. NASA -- I mean the entire operation there and everything it supports -- is an instrument of perception for astronomy, the Fermilab is an instrument of perception for particle physics, and so forth. Imagine a world economic crisis that made it out of the question for this or any other country to continue to fund such instruments, with such operations shut down for several decades. This would be a "catastrophic" reason. What would happen to those specialized fields of research which can go nowhere beyond where they are at the time of the shutdown because they can't access the data they have to have? Let us suppose that there were some scientists who managed to hang on in spite of this for a couple of decades, trying to keep the field going in hopes of later funding, perhaps. They would doubtless keep working with what they already had to work with prior to the shutdown and could no doubt continue for some time to fill out a lot more detail on the basis of that. But as time went on the lack of hard data would start showing itself more and more in the theoretical disagreements among them, which would be increasingly impossible to settle through observation and experimentation. And after a decade or two the theories would be what the post-modernists think all scientific theories are now, namely, just good stories, with more and more good stories about the same thing proliferating ever more rapidly. Now, how would that show up in their professional communication? Their publications would get more and more spongy in their implications since they cannot be implemented experimentally or observationally, there would be increasing tendencies for the formal requirements to dissolve so that readers would be unable to tell what would actually count as a replication if one were possible since in fact none would be possible in practice. Literary rhetorical devices would become increasingly prominent so that the logic of their argument could not be effectively pinned down. What were once research models would become more and more like literary metaphors, and in due time what had once been a genre of professional physics, let us say, would become a genre of science fiction. As this occurred they would write less and less for one another and more for the general public. And as this happened, the Ginsparg system, if it continued in use at all, would start changing in detail, and would either be abandoned or become something else. For example, instead of the present arrangement of making an abstract available by sending them to people who have listed themselves as interested in this and that topic, so that people can make then make a special request for a copy of the paper, there would be a tendency to make the abstract itself more and more substantive so that it came in time to be a looser version of the paper, and so people would increasingly see no need for both and work with what used to be the abstract only, and at the same time the distribution list for the abstract would tend to broaden its criteria of distribution so that the abstracts would be distributed to more and more people and finally all would be distributed to all. Thus it would transmute into a listserver medium, which is a broadcast medium, very different from the medium of communication which Ginsparg constructed, unless it was simply abandoned for a separate listserver arrangement at a certain point. I could explain the reasons for this but don't want to make this message unduly long. Now, as a manager of a listserver-based forum myself for more than seven years, which has been, in my opinion, a genuine professional success in which I take some pride, I do not speak disparagingly in describing the passage from a Ginsparg-type Archive to a listserver based forum. One could regard it as a degeneration in function, but only on the assumption that formal research publication is somehow a higher order of communication than the sort which can occur in a good forum. I don't think that is true. In intellectual life you cannot always be hyper-rigorous and formalistic without becoming intellectually petrified. There is a place for formality and a place for informality. The give and take and spontaneity of an extended question-driven dialogue -- not a debate but a Socratically structured dialogue -- is in some ways more valuable intellectually than the literature in which research claims are made, and I do not think it is even correct to regard it as involving an inferior logical form. BUT they do serve importantly different functions, and Lederberg is right in insisting upon the unique importance of primary publication as an especially serious and highly controlled form of communication. Thus it is important to recognize it as such and not allow it to be confused with other forms. Now, my imaginary case of the research field which, while attempting to be such, kept degenerating towards being a purely literary activity, would do so by leaving behind the Ginsparg Archive, either by modifying it into something else or by an outright abandonment in favor of something else, in order to keep their communication going. The inability of this imaginary field to ground its activity in well-conceived and critiqued research claims would quickly make the Ginsparg system unusable because of its rigidity of function. It is not a flexible medium because it is purposefully designed not to be a flexible medium. The application of this to the question at issue, about whether many research communities can effectively use the archives, is that there are many research communities which are, for one reason or another, limited in a way similar to that described for the imaginary community above. For example, there may never have been enough funding to develop the right sort of instruments for a given field, or there may never have been people in the field who were good enough as scientists to understand what kind of instrumentation is needed, and consequently they never have been able to make it beyond a certain point and have never adequately established themselves around a generally reliable empirical connection with their subject matter. This being so, editorial control of the field by a few truly special figures may be necessary to keep it hanging together in the way that is NOT required by the people in Ginsparg's specialties. That is why it would not do them any good to try to work from the Archive in its pure form, at least initially. There are other reasons, too, why a research community would not be able to handle it at first. It could be that the journal system in their field has been abused by influential people who have used it to keep themselves in control, and consequently the whole field suffers from a kind of methodic demoralization because it has been made reliant on critical standards being maintained a priori by an elite of editors and their entourage rather than having become accustomed to exercising critical control as a routine procedure of the whole research community, the latter being what you have in the case of the fields that have actually used the Ginsparg system effectively. Or again, it may be that a given research field has never found its way yet towards sufficient agreement on subject matter or on method to be much more than a "wannabe" as a research field, though the aspiration is there. These are some of the various sorts of cases I have in mind in expressing some doubts about just how far the Ginsparg Archive in its pure form can be expected to provide a basis for self-archiving on the scale wanted. I am suggesting that some accommodations should be made in encouraging self-archiving for that reason. That is, it should be conceived in such a way that on-line communication less rigorous than that associated with primary publication is encouraged as well. This need not be thought of as in opposition to Stevan's project -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
