On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 02:34:29PM +0000, Jasper McCrea wrote: > matt jones wrote: > > I think that the whole model is completely broken in a modern context. As > > I understand it, the original point was to disseminate academic research > > to the community. In a post-Gutenberg world, the idea of charging > > academics to see the work of their peers when they could be self-archiving > > online just doesn't make any sense. > > It is important to collate and distill. Otherwise there'd be a heap of > academics wasting time rooting through shoddy work (that wasn't > refereed) for a few nuggets. ^^^^^^^^
important bit. good journals have good referees and contain quality science, not quantity. However, things like the current research review system which are based (partially) on number of published works do encourage quantity not quality. If there was no problem with this, I would never have heard the the "minimum publishable unit" banded about while at university, by people figuring out how many papers a chunk of research could be broken into. Rather than publishing 1 paper 50% the size of the sum of all 3 containing all the work. :-( Nicholas Clark
