RE-THINKING >Tony Barry wrote: > >There is a more fundamental question which relates to the concept of a >"final version". We are so used to the static nature of print that we have >ingrained into us the concept that a publication _should_ be finalised.
In my own small journal we have a policy of allowing non-substantive changes to text after publication. So we are happy to fix spelling or grammatical errors, but nothing that will substantively change the meaning of the text (of course in some disciplines grammatical changes may well be regarded as substantive). This is not a matter of hanging on to some old-fashioned convention. Its important if people are going to discuss an article its not a moving target. I can think of two Nature articles published in my own area of interest in recent years that I've had problems replicating in someway or other. When I present my own data related to these experiments I want to be able to refer to the one version of the article everybody knows; I don't want half-a-dozen copies in different members of the audience. Stevan's example brings up the absurdity of having two substantively different versions of an article floating around. I don't think it really matters whether the print or electronic version is the more correct one. What's more important is that everyone is discussing the same mss. It should not be used as an argument that articles published electronically should become infinitely fluid. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patrick Wilken http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~patrickw/ Editor: PSYCHE: An International Journal of Research on Consciousness Secretary: The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ http://www.phil.vt.edu/ASSC/