What Professor Harnad is proposing is very similar to the review process that brought on the subprime mortgage crisis. Anyone who lost retirement money or a job or is struggling with a mortgage payment should read on.
The rating agencies (Fitch, Moody's, and Standard & Poor) are approached by anyone who wishes to market a security. "Here are some mortgages; would you rate them for us? We will pay your fee for your appraisal." That is, the rating agencies are compensated by the very organizations that have securities to be evaluated. This tends to result in securities getting better ratings than they deserve--a systemic flaw. Many of the loans that have gone unpaid were rated AAA by the agencies. Now we have a proposal that authors pay to get their material evaluated. The potential for abuse is tremendous. And it is risky by design, not because of the poor character of the participants. This is not an argument against open access; like Professor Harnad I believe that "author-pays" publishing is going to play a large role (though I think it will be only one form of business model for research literature). The problem is what the author is paying for. It is systemically corrupt for authors to pay for peer review. I would prefer to see them pay for online hosting and various tools that make the literature more useful. And one of those tools would be a commenting and annotation feature that would serve as a form of review. List members may recognize in this description some of the elements of community-based online social media. Cognitive scientists make up a community (or several) just as do the fans of the Grateful Dead or Radiohead. The open access movement simply has not caught up with the Internet. Joe Esposito On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:35 PM, Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>wrote: > The "overlay journal" notion is and always has been an inchoate, > incoherent idea. Physicists thought that since they were happy > just using the Arxiv version of preprints and postprints, the > "journals" could be phased out, and the peer-review could be > "overlaid" on Arxiv. > <snip> > > Stevan Harnad > > PS Please don't even get me started on "disaggregated > journals"... http://bit.ly/S7 >