Apology accepted, Stevan, and I appreciate your willingness to re-read my message even though the yield was meagre. You ask:
SH> Now just what proposition of substance have I missed? The main point of substance is a claim on my part that your analysis of the publication process is faulty in not taking due account of the role of the editor in the process, owing to your mistaken understanding of the role of peer review. The result of this is that your self-archiving initiative is based on an inadequate understanding of the problems that must be addressed if self-archiving is to be successful. You might ask "Well, why not wait and see?" The answer is that I would do that if it weren't that you have set others in motion, such as those at NIH and at Caltech, whom I am concerned about because your advice to build archives is not going to be sufficient for them, and I am concerned that in the absence of a realistic understanding of the situation they will establish administrative structures which should not be established. But I will address only the basic analytic error here. The error in your analysis is apparent in the message to which I am responding, where you say "Editors are a part of classical peer review. . .", whereas in fact peer review is normally a part of the editorial process, possibly performed by the editor him/herself acting as peer, possibly by one or more other persons specially commissioned for the task. The same mistake is implicit in the following passage from your response to the immunologists: sh> Journals will continue to be the publishers -- but their sh> role may well shrink to that of providing and then sh> certifying the quality control. The rest of publishing sh> will vanish (for refereed journals). What has also vanished here is the editor, who is reduced to providing for and then certifying the quality control exercised by the peer reviewer. Well, not completely vanished perhaps: there is still the puff of smoke left by the mysterious operation of certification, here assigned to the editor rather than to the peer reviewer. However, this leaves it unclear whether you mean that the editor certifies the peer reviewer, who certifies the paper, or whether the editor certifies it directly, drawing upon the information about the paper provided by the peer reviewer. There is more than a quibble here since you are referring to a supposed office of certification that occurs somewhere in the publication process, and since the power of such an office and the conduct of its officer has serious consequences for authors -- their very jobs may be at stake -- one wants to be able to locate it precisely. Also, one wants to know how editors acquire such an office to begin with. Are there tests that editors must pass that qualifies them for wielding such power? Who composes the tests and certifies that the editors have passed them, and why are those persons given such power over the selection of editors? What are their qualifications? Surely power like this is not distributed on the basis of "old boy" preferences and the like. But then who prepares the tests for THESE people and thus validates them? You understand the logic of the argument here. The answer is not "Oh, well, the old problem of who guards the guardians has been around for millennia and we can't be expected to solve that here." The answer is that there is no solution to that problem and the idea of certification is nonsense in this context for precisely that reason. There is no function of certification that occurs as part of the peer review or editorial process. There are no guardians of the type you think must exist because there can't be. Modern science might fairly be said to have begun at the moment it was intuitively recognized -- recognized in practice -- that there are no guardians of the type you are trying to accommodate, and they aren't necessary after all. (The high energy theoretical physicists realized that anew, intuitively, and in practice, when the developments in communications technology laid bare the basic realities of scientific inquiry again, and the movement which you are presently leading was born.) Unfortunately, the end of medieval science occurred after the university traditions of authoritarian learning were already firmly in place, and those traditions haunt us yet in many forms because the institutional structure of the universities has never been reformed but only mechanized. Among those ghosts that still haunt us is the certifier above the inquiry process, the authority at the top looking down on the process from without with the power to intervene in it to separate sheep from goats by providing keys to the gates guarding publication to the sheep in the form of "certifications". Your image of the "invisible hand" is quite appropriate for characterizing this ghostly presence. Your conception of peer review is defective, involving an illicit introduction of anachronistic university administration functions into the inquiry process, where they have no business being. Research science is not a creation of the universities, and is still only partially integrated within them, where it sits uneasily because its inveterately egalitarian ethic -- which is built into its communicational practices -- is at odds with the rank hierarchical structure of the universities. To see how much at odds they are you might consider the fact that both the LANL archives and the world wide web were created by science where it was not under control of the universities and ask yourself whether either of them could have been created in the universities. It may be impossible for universities to be other than they are. The staying power of the authoritarian structures of rank and privilege are certainly impressive, and I have no recommendations for reform along those lines myself because, after 30 years or more of trying to imagine what such a reform would be like, studying the situation from the point of view of an insider, I have been unable to come up with any viable alternative. (No, I have no grievance against universities: I have always been treated justly and respectfully and think it remarkable that people would actually be willing to pay me to do what I do.) Thus it may be that the tension between the implicit imperatives of science and those of the university are irreconcilable, which means that accommodation must continue to be sought rather than full agreement, assuming science is to continue to be supported by the universities. But then this has been the situation all along, as science has been partially institutionalized within the universities in this country beginning in the last century. But accommodation is one thing and corruption is another, and the process of research science is corrupted when authoritarian practices derived from the institution accommodating it, whether it be the university or the government or industry, is unwittingly allowed into it as part of its normal process. That is what is happening when peer review is misconstrued as a certification practice that occurs within the publication process. Sometimes a shift in perspective can dispel a confusion. I ask myself when a philosopher -- meaning a person in my discipline -- would have occasion to say something like "This paper has been certified (validated, legitimated) by peer review because it has been published by a reputable peer review refereed journal"? I can't imagine such a thing. One would snicker uneasily, wondering what could be meant. Certified to be what? True? Validated as officially valid? Stamped as authoritatively good? Nobody has given any editor of any journal, much less any peer reviewer, the authority to make such pronouncements in word or deed, implicitly or explicitly. And my field is almost completely controlled organizationally by the organizing focus of the refereed journals, to which nobody, including myself, makes any objection because that is the sea in which we swim. We all have opinions, quite various because our interests are quite various, about the worth of this journal and that, some are mainsteam and some more marginal, and so forth. But no one translates that into talk about certification or validation. All of the talk here in the September Forum about validation and certification as the function of peer review, and of refereed journals as functioning chiefly to provide the peer review validation function, is completely unreal, as regards philosophy at least, and in view of the fact that philosophy itself includes people with interests and connections in every discipline in the universities, I do not think this can be regarded as an idiosyncrasy of the field. I stop at this point without having explained a number of things, one of which I think you should understand in order to put what I say into proper context, the lack of which causes you to look for explanations of what I am saying and even the meaning of what I am saying in the wrong place. I should have made clear to you before where I am coming from as regards what qualifications I have to be talking about these matters here. I am not speaking from a basis in a priori speculation but on the basis of experience comparable to your own in some respects, in connection with matters clearly relevant here, especially to self-archiving. But I don't want to overburden the present message. - 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