As a participant in the Caltech Conference (with Stevan Harnad, Ann Okerson, and others), and as someone who has advocated a scholarly consortium to promote and give academic respectability to internet refereed journal publication (from the First International Conference on Refereed Electronic Journals in Winnipeg in 1993), I have to say that I am not aware of any sinister motives at work in the Caltech attempt to "flesh out" the idea. Stevan Harnad has raised some interesting criticisms and the Caltech proposal is not inacapable of being improved upon. But no sinister "gatekeeping" by senior university administrators is at work here, to my knowledge. In fact, senior admin people in universities have been among the slowest to realize the importance of electronic publication! So, perhaps we could deal with the practical matters of how best to proceed, how to improve upon the Caltech proposal, etc., and lay to rest X-file type paranoias about the feared ulterior motives behind the proposal. As a step in that direction, I applaud Harnad's proposal that authors seek to retain the right to make their own free distribution of their papers, and that the academic establishment (e.g., acad societies) could/should line up in support of this practice. In a sense, for some time journals have been doing something like this, in the provision to authors of multiple off-prints of their published papers. Harnad's proposal amounts to negotiating the right to distribute *pre-publication* form(s) of the paper as well as the off- print/post-publication form. But I'm not so sure as he is that his "subversive proposal" will succeed in forcing journal publishers to the net. It may, in some fields, such as particle physics (though I can't myself say), if (1) the pace of discovery research is very fast, (2) the people all basically know one another and one another's work, and (3) it is readily and quickly possible to evaluate the worth of a research claim. But in other fields, such as my own (origins of Christianity; Religion) and other fields perhaps esp. in the Humanities, things are different. I'm frankly not interested in reading unpublished papers, except as a favor for friends, or very exceptionally, in some question where it *is* possible to determine the immediate value of the paper from merely reading it without re-tracing the research involved. In most cases, I want the refereeing process first: to filter out the papers not worth the time, to set the agenda of what must be responded to, etc. And I know that a good many others in my field feel the same way. I know because I've had people decline interest in reading my own papers until they're published! Moreover, unpublished material doesn't count for any career purpose: tenure, promotion, obtaining research grants, general credibility of a scholar, etc. So, given these factors, and esp. in the sort of fields I've mentioned, how would the inherent value of pre- publication archives of one's work really have much clout in bringing about change? In a number of Humanities fields, the problems are to get refereed material out within a reasonable period of time (e.g., I've just had published in April a paper I wrote in July 97, and had accepted in Jan 98; and that's not as bad as it could be in time-lag). But it must be *refereed* material, not the author's own pre-publication version, that gets out a.s.a.p. Internet publication would facilitate more rapid dissemination of refereed work. But we need to legitimize and make fully respectable internet refereed vehicles. How to do that? How do we get academia to get on board? How to we get heads of depts and tenure/promotion committees, univ. V-Ps, research grant bodies, etc., to see publications in refereed internet vehicles as in principle and eventually in fact as significant publication as the known paper vehicles? Larry Hurtado
L. W. Hurtado University of Edinburgh, New College Mound Place Edinburgh, Scotland EH1 2LX Phone: 0131-650-8920 Fax: 0131-650-6579 E-mail: l.hurt...@ed.ac.uk