On Sun, 18 Feb 2001, Greg Kuperberg wrote: > First, since you like to talk about "access barriers", refereeing > itself is the single biggest access barrier to journal papers in math, > simply because it takes so long.
You're quite right. But the fact that we are all overloaded -- and that there is too much research that needs our refereeing to allow most of us to immediately put it on the top of our stacks -- is unfortunately a fact of current-scale life! So I don't see any way around that human ergonomic "access-barrier" to the final, refereed, revised draft. But certainly it is now possible to make the pre-refereeing draft available on a scale as broad as publication, and we should all do it (or at least those of us who are not worrying about patents)! I am hopeful, though, that as online implementation of refereeing gets more streamlined, it will make it possible to re-distribute the refereeing load in a way that will minimize turnaround times on people's stacks.... > Second, to the surprise of many new users, arXiv articles in the > aggregate are about as good as published papers. Yes, there is the > "invisible hand theory". You might be firmly convinced by this theory, > but most of us are firmly undecided. What we should all be firmly undecided about is its alternative. Since absolutely nothing has changed insofar as universal answerability to peer review is concerned, surely the null hypothesis is that the causal factors remain as they have always been. It is an empirical question, however -- and one that I hope our survey and then some direct "DIFFing" on successive drafts, pre- and post-refereeing, will help answer -- how much difference there really is between pre- and post-refereeing drafts. Note, though, that full empirical answer to this question will not even give an epsilon of a clue as to what the size of that difference WOULD BE if there were no longer the universal answerability, and the peer-review and certification system simply vanished. That would require some rather radical experimentation. You, alas, are prejudging what the outcome would be... > > Please ask your colleagues [to] participate in the survey: > > > > http://www.eprints.org/survey/ > > I filled it out. It has some interesting questions but it is twice > too long. Many thanks. We worried about that in constructing it. It's a trade-off between getting an incomplete picture, by asking too few questions, and not getting enough respondents, by asking too many questions. We have not yet announced the survey far and wide. I hope that when we do, the numbers will still prove substantial. If not, we may devise an alternative "short form." > > Alas, it is hard to draw empirical conclusions from an N of 1... > > There are very few people who are hip enough to use the arXiv but who > don't have to worry about employment or promotion. It'll be interesting at least to hear what "Simon says," across disciplines. > Other people in a similar position have told me that > they think that journals are superficial, and that the only reason that > they still publish is to please other people, either journal editors > or administrators. Could this be (and I am not asking this ironically), an elite minoritarian opinion? the opinion of the top tail of the gaussian distribution, of the ones who are almost peerless anyway, and can police themselves as rigorously today as they did in Newton's day? How many of the annual quota of at least 300K papers in math/phys/astro is of that calibre? -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
