On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Peter Singer wrote: > I understand Stevan's desire to focus on solutions that do not require > fundamental change of the journal system, such as his innovative > proposals for freeing the literature. However, I think it is important > even for appraising Stevan's proposals to consider alternative, > complementary, and perhaps more fundamental approaches. > http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/singer.html
I have posted Peter's pointer to his peer-review-reform site, but can I point out a logical problem here? Peter writes above as if we were speaking about different "solutions" to one and the same "problem," but we are not! This Forum is concerned with freeing the peer-reviewed literature, SUCH AS IT IS, from access/impact barriers online, not with freeing it from peer-review, such as it is (i.e., not with reforming peer review, not with "fundamental change of the journal system"). Nor is it concerned with reforming other forms of review: for grants, promotion, tenure, prizes. Nor are are these literature-liberation proposals "innovative"! They are by now, in 2001, decidedly old hat, alas! http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ What WOULD be innovative would be finding a way to get everyone (other than a subset of physicists, growing only linearly) to IMPLEMENT them, at last! There is now the hope (not just mine, but many others' too) that (1) OAI-interoperability (http://www.openarchives.org), (2) free software so universities can immediately create OAI-compliant archives (http://www.eprints.org), and (3) a concerted push by universities everywhere to install and fill those archives, just might get us to the optimal and inevitable (and long overdue) at last: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#7. And what is the optimal and inevitable? It is (until further notice): the CURRENT annual peer-reviewed research literature (at least 20,000 refereed journals, according to Ulrichs [http://www.ulrichsweb.com]) totalling at least 2,000,000 papers a year (on the most conservative estimate of an average of 100 papers per journal) all 2,000,000 accessible online, for free, for all, forever. As a bonus, in addition to the 2,000,000 annual peer-reviewed final drafts, there would also be their earlier embryological stages, in the form of pre-refereeing preprints too. Getting-THAT is the solution. Not-having-THAT is the problem. The problem is self-evident. (What researcher, whether author or reader, would not want his own research papers and everyone else's to be freely accessible to all?) The solution too is already tried, tested and successful. (The physics/mathematics/astro subset of the 20K refereed journals consists, conservatively, of at least 1000 active journals, averaging at least 300 papers per journal per annum, for an annual total of 300K papers. These are currently being freed at a rate of 30K papers per annum (http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions), so this subset of the literature would reach the optimal and inevitable in about a decade, at its current growth rate.) So we have a clear problem, and a clear, tested, demonstrated solution. (It is to the collective wisdom of that 30K vanguard of the research community that we are all indebted for our empirical evidence that self-archiving will indeed free the research literature. Proposals are otherwise just proposals, archives are merely empty skies, and archiving software merely skyhooks: The rest of the research community must now take note, come to its senses, take things in hand, and collectively liberate the literature by self-archiving their own contributions to it.) But the "fundamental changes to the journal system" that Peter is contemplating go beyond merely freeing it online, as above, beyond what is self-evident and already demonstrated. For some (perhaps not Peter), they involve untested changes in peer review itself, the quality control system that has vouchsafed us the current literature, such as it is. And for some (including Peter this time) they extend to how one evaluates research and researchers AFTER peer review (review for grants, promotion, tenure, prizes): "We need changes in policy, culture, and measures of quality. Change in policy is perhaps the easiest to accomplish, because it requires only the stroke of a pen (and some lobbying). The policy of a university, granting agency, or prize committee could simply state that the work itself, rather than where it gets published, should be the focus of attention. Granting agencies could require researchers to retain copyright of articles describing funded research,[3] and to publish that research in an open-access forum. "Cultural change is also necessary, but more difficult. Even if the policy says, "judge the work," the people around the table will still spend a great deal of time counting articles and looking up impact factors of the journals in which they are published. One way to change the culture is for the leaders of these decision-making bodies -- the chairs of the university promotions committees, granting-agency review committees, or prize committees -- to demonstrate a different set of values by publishing their own work in open-access journals. If senior academics embrace open access, they will embolden their junior colleagues to follow." This goes beyond peer review reform to further (worthy) issues, but ones on which the (refereed) literature liberation movement surely should not even take an a priori stand! Not only are peer-review reform and grant/tenure-review reform not the already tested and successful route to the optimal and inevitable that we are proposing, but it is not at all clear what their destination would be. No one knows what the literature would look like if its quality control system were to change in some "innovative" way. (I support the BioMedCentral project, but that is merely a new, free, online set of peer-reviewed journals, with the usual uphill battle of establishing its quality credentials and credibility: http://www.biomedcentral.com/ -- "open access forums" [like this one!] are another matter...) Nor does anyone have any bright ideas about better ways to review grant proposals or candidates for promotion and tenure! But I do know one thing: That among the worries voiced by many researchers as a rationale for NOT self-archiving, and among the deterrents invoked by some publishers to encourage them to continue not to do so, has been precisely the spectre of compromising the quality of the research literature we are trying to free, and whatever guidance it might provide for evaluating quality. So while I and others are at pains to make everyone realize that there is NO CAUSAL CONNECTION AT ALL between (1) freeing the refereed literature through self-archiving and (2) any change whatsoever in its quality control system (either peer review or grant review or career review), we find ourselves with awkward allies who are giving exactly the opposite impression, which is that freeing the refereed literature is somehow coupled with "reforming the system" (in various speculative and untested ways). Is it uncharitable to want to bless the efforts of these well-meaning reformers, but at the same time to want to distance them as much as possible from our own? Our efforts are not "complementary"! At best, they are orthogonal; at worst, the peer-review reform-movement, if portrayed as yoked to it in any way, could be an obstacle to the progress of the (peer-reviewed) literature-liberation movement. Different problems, different solutions. (It is not out of the question that a freed online research literature will spawn more diverse and more equitable performance indicators -- hence more potential beans for grant/tenure/prize to count. But can we please keep that under our hats for now, till the literature is safely launched skyward? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.htm ) -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): 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]
