Joseph Randsell thinks self-archiving in LANL, and its sequelae, may constitute a new form of peer review. I disagree, but first a straightforward error has to be corrected:
LANL (The Los Alamos Eprint Archive) does NOT just consist of unrefereed preprints. It started that way, but by now, in Year 8, authors are annually archiving both unrefereed preprints AND refereed final drafts, and, quite naturally, swapping the latter for the former once it is available. This makes the question of whether what is going on in LANL is some new form of peer review incoherent: Classical peer review is exerting its FULL, usual quality control functions on the final drafts in LANL. (There are no figures yet on proportions, but I hope the stats engine will soon distinguish unrefereed preprints from refereed reprints: Paul?). http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions Second, Joseph has partly misunderstood my "invisible hand" argument: The point is that the unrefereed preprints deposited in LANL are mostly exactly the same ones that are being concurrently submitted for refereeing. Papers knowingly prepared to be answerable to classical peer review are ALREADY more constrained than those that are simply destined for the vanity press (as all papers would be, if peer review were abandoned -- or if mere vanity-posting were simply rebaptized as a "nouveau peer review") Last point: What Joseph thinks may be a new form of peer review rather than peer commentary IS just peer commentary: What else could it be? Peer review is not just a red/green light; it is corrective peer feedback to which the author is systematically answerable (as enforced by the peer-editor) BEFORE the work can appear tagged as "Refereed" (in Journal X. It is that "Refereed" tag that guides the reading of ALL the readers of the refereed journal literature. They do not have to dredge through the raw submissions, 90% of them destined for rejection by the best journals, and 10% destined for varying degrees of revision before appearing. How could this ADVANCE sign-posting be done AFTER posting? LANL contains the raw drafts as well as the refereed ones. (Moreover, Physics may be the field in which the difference between the raw and final drafts is the smallest; the causal role of this in the fact that it all happened in Physics first will have to be analyzed by historians of science.) When the Physics community uses the unrefereed preprints in LANL, it is doing what it used to do in the paper medium too: Certain people's work you know can be trusted, and you want to know about and build on it as soon as it is available. That is not a new form of peer review. It is just the Physics preprint culture. The refereed papers in LANL are used the same way all refereed papers are used. Nor do they become refereed papers in virtue of a new form of LANL peer review that has transpired between the archiving of the preprint and the archiving of the reprint. The refereeing has been done the classical way, and LANL archives the result. Nor do I believe that LANL has given rise to a new, still more preliminary form of pre-preprint (at least not to any significant degree), a precipitous-preprint that is not the same as the classical preprint, the one that is usually the same one that is concurrently submitted to a journal for peer review. So there is no "nouveau peer review" shaping any pre-preprint to preprint transformation either. Let me close with a review of what I actually meant by the "invisible hand" metaphor: (1) It constrains preprints to be drafted on the presumption of answerability to classical peer review, through conventional journal submission, usually concurrent with archiving. (2) It underlies the transition from unrefereed preprint to refereed reprint IN LANL. (3) LANL has not REPLACED classical peer review, it is completely parasitic on it, but it has produced an invaluable SUPPLEMENT to classical peer review, making the unrefereed literature immediately available on an unprecedented scale, and making open peer commentary possible too, both for preprints (to help shape the final draft) and for the refereed final drafts (making revised post-publication corrections and updates possible). -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/