At 12:48 30/01/01 +0000, Fytton Rowland wrote:
Academic editors, assisted by their paid editorial assistants, create in many cases a piece of work that provides a better impression of the authors than they had provided for themselves. I have argued before -- mainly in my chapter in the 1996 Peek and Newby book -- that there remains a need for professional publishing expertise in the electronic era. In Harnad's current vision of things -- the journals carry on, but authors mount their own papers for free-of-charge access on the WWW -- maybe this professional attention is part of the value added that the journals can lay claim to providing.
While I am bound to support Fytton's defence of the journal editor, his plea is one of hope rather than certainty. The fact is, the editor's role will be re-cast by the move to online publishing. The role of the editor is exposed, but there is nothing new in that. It's been going on for a decade or more in some publishing houses. The people to ask about the importance of gate keepers are the toll keepers, that is, the senior managers within these publishers. Quality is a marginal issue. When the margins that matter to the toll keepers are squeezed, quality at the margins is expendable. But is this acceptable? In a fully open system real priorities can be determined, and if quality is a high priority it will be less susceptible than it is now. What editors and others concerned for quality might ask is, who will be the paymasters in the future? And it looks like Albert Henderson's diligence is providing the answers. Steve Hitchcock Open Citation (OpCit) Project <http://opcit.eprints.org/> IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865