On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, Stevan Harnad wrote: > I cannot follow this, about "responsibility" and "context," at all. We > are talking about authors self-archiving their final, refereed draft, > the one that has been peer-reviewed, revised, finalized and accepted.
Sez who? Take for example: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0108005 (our friend Podkletnov of the anti-gravity device) What is to prevent this fellow from adding a journal-ref to some obscure supposedly peer-reviewed journal subscribed to by only a handful of institutions (such as Physica C: Superconductivity...)? Podkletnov could even insert a journal-ref to Physical Review, or Reviews of Modern Physics, or Applied Physics Letters, or some such; I am not aware of any substantial verification mechanism that is currently in place for that data; perhaps something will come along for the major journals, but that still leaves the obscure ones... And even if he actually DOES have a published paper on this subject (as he does in Physica C) it is up to the author to ensure that there is no substantive difference between the two versions. Hence "responsibility" and "context" are issues - whose responsibility is the integrity of the content and metadata (the author's or the journal's), and what context is the article presented in (a big database with little tags to indicate publication status, or a journal ToC)? Now that's not to say we wouldn't publish papers like this - we do on occasion. But very rarely do they make it through the highest-level filters in our journals (Phys Rev Letters, or the Rapid Communications sections of the others) and then only through a deliberate editorial decision to allow a controversial group of author to present their case. Lundberg is clearly worried about even worse cases in the medical fields - recent news about the scurrilous things drug companies will do with reports of scientific research are enough to tread very carefully in this area. Of course it really just means that engineers can't rely on the ArXiv for finding what's going on in physics; they will more likely go first to secondary services that filter on a group of relevant and highly-regarded journals (such as INSPEC in physics, or Medline in bio-medicine). And so that group of readers bypasses the author self-archive altogether. Which is probably fine. Arthur
