I came across this publication on Peer Review produced by the Research Information Network. I post this as you asked for an algorithm, which is set out in this short brief.  The guide is available at www.rin.ac.uk/peer-review-guide  Regards,  Jakes
On 17 May 2010 09:28, Jean Kempf <[email protected]> wrote: The debate about wikipedia and the definition of Open Access seems to me both scholastic and revealing of the view we have that the "electronic" world would be in any fundamental way different from the paper world. Certain actions (distribution/access) may be easier there but the same fundamental intellectual issues apply. - Semantic debate first. The French langage makes a nice distinction between "publication" and "édition". "Publier" is to make something public, whatever the means (including self-publication as poets, aspiring politicians and other sects do). Doing "Edition" is, as in English, publishing + EDITING (meaning choosing, cutting, etc.). The only problem is that the French langage, which does have two verbs, only has one noun for "publisher" which is "éditeur". This is because in the paper world authors needed an "intermediary" (sometimes just a printer) to make their work (manu-script) public (ie printed). They don't anymore, and so goes the confusion. - As to the bottom line: research (and education by the way as well, much too often forgotten on this list!!!) need access (not impact which is a purely technocratic concept) and reliability (or certification in technocratic parlance). The debate in mail after mail on this list comes from the fact that "access" has a cost (either direct or indirect, shared by different groups or budgets) and that not everybody (here & elsewhere) agrees on who could/should pay and for whom. (For instance when a peer reviewed article from an expensive journal is made available, it's the rich universities paying for the poor ones. Marginally it might also be a way of breaking the back of big business.) The issue of reliablity/certification is much fuzzier as I believe there is a world of difference between disciplines, and especially between STM on the one hand and Humanities and most Social sciences on the other. A reliable physics, biochemistry article is very different from a reliable history or philosophy article as the construction of facts in each discipline is different, and the capacity of the reader himself to discriminate is different. Hence the fight we are having on what OA applies to and which, to my mind, makes us waste a lot of energy on matter which are not fundamental. Stevan's advocacy for Green is perfectly compatible with that of others for Gold, and not sequential. Lastly, a point which I find important to a better understanding of what we are talking about, even though it might be outside the focus of the list. I recently had a long conversation with an engineering professor (he is in semi-conductors, in one of the very good labs in Europe) and what he told me about the way peer review is conducted in his very serious field (there's after all a huge industry behind it) left me (as a historian) totally aghast as to the perfunctoriness/speed of the process, the people who did it (graduate students...), and by the general reliance on "reputation" even in the very best (A) journals. My question is simple then: can someone describe the peer review process in one of the "hard" sciences, task by task (as an algorithm) in a detailled way and by WHOM it is "normally" done. Thanks, Jean Kempf http://www.oapen.org Please donât print this e-mail unless you really need to...................
