Well, not quite so fast, Glen! Look. How many papers do you read a day? How do you decide which papers to read?
You can form an organization of like-minded folks that puts before you only the papers that that organization thinks are good. (i.e., an archival Journal) You can set up some "wisdom-of-the-crowd" scheme that votes on which papers are good. Not clear to me whether I fear the authoritarian way any more than I fear mob psychology. For most authors, the disagreeable fact is that a lot of people are reading a few papers, and most papers are not read by anybody Perhaps it's the J-distribution of hits on papers we should be worrying about. Perhaps we need a paper evaluation system that's more like Pandora: You get what you ask for, except that every once in a while the system throws you a song by an obscure composer, just to keep you honest. I have often wondered if FRIAM (or the sfcomplex) could set itself up as a "Journal". An author has a new paper, and sends it to the list. It goes up on an internal website and people start assigning stars and making comments. When it reaches a threshold of "stardom" it goes up on a public website. The author can set the star-threshhold. (In otherwords, if the author wants to "publish" a paper that his fellow FRIAM members think is shitty, he sets the threshold real low.) Readers of the public website can set a star threshold, below which the data base will not display a paper for them. However, by common agreement, the data base is rigged so that it slips readers a non conforming paper randomly about ten percent of the time. For a sampling of some lovely papers that have not been read by anybody (}:-[), please visit: http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org -----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 10:32 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 12/07/2010 08:53 AM: > You know, it wasn't SO long ago (i.e., I remember it) that SOME > journals thought of themselves as "archival," and their reviewers* saw > their role as defending the pages of those journals against error. In > that context, getting published was supposed to be the end of a conversation, not a > beginning. I don't know if, and where, that view survives. I hope it's completely dead. It should be obvious that authoritarianism is bad. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org