Thanks for the vigorous response, Stevan. I think perhaps my point got missed, though. I am not trying to discredit the value of refereed publication by palming off something else in its place and saying there is no difference when there is. That is not my purpose at all. I meant to make it clear that there might be good reasons for not calling the peer response subsequent to publication "peer review" just as there might be good reasons for doing so, and that I wasn't yet arguing for the latter, though I am inclined to think that it might be best, on balance. I wanted to explain first, though, why I think it important to raise that as a question, notwithstanding the fact that I agree with you about it being unwise to combine the reform of peer review practices with the aims you are promoting.
The reason is that I don't see any way otherwise to take into account and to repair a major gap in the rationale for using the LANL system as a model -- a gap which is not effectively plugged by the invisible hand argument. If that is all that is available then the basis of the scepticism and suspicion about LANL as a model is left untouched and it is probably best to recognize that it is an albatross and abandon it as quickly as possible because, otherwise, you will waste a lot of time and energy in responding to hostilities rooted in reaction to it. It is its use as a model that is thought to be objectionable; for the sceptic might be willing to grant that the high energy physics theorists (and some of their friends perhaps) are an admirably disciplined bunch, and LANL itself is okay because of that, but nevertheless be deeply opposed to using it as a MODEL for practices that are supposed to extend across the full range of the disciplines in the universities. There is surely no question but that the significance of LANL is commonly thought to lie in its success as a preprint server, not in the many other facilities added or being added, and it is reasonable for people to think that in adopting it as a model you are doing so because of that for which it is famed, not for other features of it of no special interest as innovations. So unless you are going to just forget about using it as a model -- and I don't think you are -- you are going to be plagued from now on with objections arising from its function as a preprint publication system even if that is not what really interests you in connection with it. Those objections will be to the effect that it is a terrible model to use regardless of how it is dressed up because it teaches by its example disrespect of the most holy of all academic sacred cows: peer review. You can't get around the fact that it presents an example of a flourishing science in which the figures at the leading edge are not working from peer reviewed literature but from material that has not been filtered, and the more you insist on the extraordinary discipline of the people in doing without filtering -- e.g. the way they deposit something in the LANL archive only when they are simultaneously submitting it to a journal, the alacrity with which they replace the unrefereed version with the peer approved refereed one, and whatever else might be cited in this connection -- the more you convince people that such a system may be okay for super-researchers in recondite areas of physics but for more ordinary sorts of mortals the temptation to be an intellectual slob is just too great, which makes it just about the worst model you could possibly have chosen. The appeal to the invisible hand does not lessen the import of the fact that the LANL system uses unfiltered material, and it is bound to occur to many people that there is not, after all, any rule that requires people to simultaneously submit the paper to a referee: that is just a custom at LANL at best. Lesser mortals might find it more reasonable to relax that austere stance, and indeed it seems a bit odd on the face of it that one would want to present a version to be assessed by referees without taking advantage of the opportunities that might be available for correcting it first, following upon preprint distribution and criticism. The reason I am pushing this to the fore is that I notice that you don't any longer seem to regard the preprint server as an important part of it. When the immunologists responded in tones of outrage to precisely that feature of the E-biomed model you quickly advised the NIH people not to worry about implementing the preprint server: that could be figured out later; what is important is the refereed literature, anyway. But if that response is appropriate for the pacification of the immunologists now, there will surely be no later time at which it will be prudent to implement the preprint server. In general, I note that it is as if the less said about preprint servers the better these days. But doesn't that strain credibility? The LANL archives minus the feature that made the archives famous? People are bound to sense something amiss in this. I notice that your final interpretation of the "invisible hand" seems to be somewhat congenial with the Lingua Franca blurb, where it turns out that the research activity based on the preprints is actually all for the purpose of producing truly fine peer reviewed articles later. This won't do. As I said earlier, the basic fact is that the LANL preprint server provides the basis for primary publication in certain fields, meaning publication that directly affects the course of inquiry in the science, and this unfiltered and actually effective publication occurs prior to publication based on peer review. You say > ... it [the invisible hand] constrains preprints to be > drafted on the presumption of answerability to classical > peer review, through conventional journal submission, > usually concurrent with archiving. What constraint? What presumption? The constraint on the author is that what he or she writes is to be in agreement with the facts, as these are ascertained in the course of inquiry, not as they are established through agreement with peer reviewers. The invisible hand is just an awareness of a future contingency that can be handled in more than one way or even ignored, if the researcher decides, perhaps unwisely, and I am confident that the researchers using the LANL system are not normally thinking about that contingency but rather about the far more pressing reality that consists of the people who will be downloading and reading the preprint; for they are the peers whose acceptance counts first of all, and it would surely be a poor researcher who lost sight of that priority. > 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. I realize that the LANL system is actually just an automated form of a prior practice, but doesn't that just raise the same question again? What IS the role of peer review if people at the leading edge do not require its services as a filter? The invisible hand argument just doesn't touch that. I think it can be answered and I already did answer it, but not by appealing to the hand and not by invoking an Ersatz form of peer review either. The advantage of my answer is that it is not necessary to abandon the model you began with. It does raise the question of whether it might be best to recognize that there is in fact something happening in the inquiry process mediated by the machine at LANL that involves a kind of internalization of the peer review function, but that is, as I said, something that need not be settled in order to see that the fears of the immunologists and others are based on a misunderstanding of what is happening there and what it signifies as something extensible. > > 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. I was aware of that. My point is that what is of special interest at LANL has been and still is its function as a preprint server. > 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. This skips over the fact that the scientific work is being done by the preprints, not the final drafts. > 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") This has been answered but I must say that the resort to the concept of the "vanity press" seems to me just gratuitously contemptuous of people and their motives and is very misleading as regards what is actually happening when people try to communicate. How can we implement a communications revolution with the use of simplistic denigrations like this? > 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.) Which still doesn't come to grips with the fact that the "raw drafts" are the omnes that are actually introduced first into the inquiry process and the finished versions the ones that appear after the work has been done. That is what has to be accounted for, you see. -- Joseph Ransdell <ransd...@door.net> or <bn...@ttu.edu> Dept of Philosophy Texas Tech Univ. Lubbock TX 79409 (806) 742-3158 office 797-2592 home 742-0730 fax ARISBE:Peirce Telecommunity http://www.door.net/arisbe http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm