On Thu, 24 May 2001, Wentz, Reinhard wrote: > This week's New Scientist (26.05.01), apart from being substantially about > complementary medicine, contains a boxed article (p.53) by Stevan Harnad on > e-archiving copyrighted, peer-reviewed research findings on the Web to make > them more widely available for free to all fellow researchers. I think the > article suggests that this will improve researchers' chances to achieve > higher impact factors and better success in getting research grants and > (eventually) tenured academic posts. > > I believe the reasoning behind these conclusions contains at least one major > fallacy and several sub-fallacies. > > Can you spot them? I offer a book-token of £20.00 for the best suggestion. > > P.S. Stevan Harnad knows about this challenge and has already claimed the > prize money. So I may have to double it (£20.00 to him, £20.00 to AN Other) > if I am satisfied with his explanations. If there are many contributions I > may have to appoint un-biased assessors and anonymise the entries. Oh dear!
For the record, my guess is that the putative fallacy and sub-fallacies are all already itemized and fully resolved in the list of 23 prima-facie "worries" in: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8. In particular, my guess is that Reinhard is worried about (#10) copyright: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#10.Copyright or about (#7) peer review: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#7.Peer or about (#8) paying the piper: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8.Paying These are all standard questions, standard enough to have generated the above FAQs by way of reply. But I can also conjecture what some candidate nonstandard would-be "fallacies" could be, specific to what Reinhard has singled out concerning impact: If everyone self-archives, thereby freeing access to every refereed paper, then everyone's ABSOLUTE impact may increase (more readers, more citations all round), but their RELATIVE impact may not. (So there will be no added help with getting grants and tenure.) My reply is that the primary beneficiary of maximizing research access, and hence research impact, is research itself. If every researcher becomes more productive, and every researcher has a greater impact, then at the very least, science and scholarship and their beneficiaries (all of us) are better off. Even if every researcher's individual career does not enjoy proportionate benefits, the planet is still better off. But the fact is that the powerful and varied new measures of impact that this digital research corpus will spawn will also allow us to assess the magnitude of individual contributions more fully and deeply. So it will be possible to measure and reward relative impact in a much more informed and sensitive way then before. See: Harnad, S. (2001) "Why I think research access, impact and assessment are linked." Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16 (May 18, 2001). longer version: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html For a demo of the new impact measures and ranking, see: http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search And for a discussion, see: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm By the way, the New Scientist article was pathetically truncated to fit the magazine's box. I'll bet the original, longer version, already short-circuits some of Reinhard's fallacies: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/newscientist.htm I encourage all interested parties to follow the ongoing debate on this topic in Nature and Science too: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
