On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, D. R. Forsdyke wrote: >sh> Archives are archives, a reliable, permanent place where all authors >sh> can self-archive their journal articles on-line for free for all. > > The key here is "permanent". Files can be deleted and interfered with. > Could you spell out what you mean by permanent?
Los Alamos is good enough for now. When the world's authors' eggs are all in the same virtual basket, collective interests will ensure that they are reliably upgraded in perpetuo. There is NOTHING here to detain us. http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions >sh> the only function left for the journals to perform will be >sh> quality control and certification. > > You might point out two kinds of certification...one for potential > readers who are unable for themselves to sort out the "good" stuff...one > to help those who judge the authors as meriting appointment, tenure, > promotion and research funding. In the former case, I think better > search-engines (see latest Scientific American) and a new class of > professional sifters/reviewers) reporting directly to the internet, will > replace journals. In the latter case, merit assessors ("peers") will > really have to do their homework...read the author's application, not > just skim through his/her publications and tick off how many are in > Nature or Cell. (see http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/peerrev.htm). Nothing at all to point out along those lines: Both peer review and tenure review could certainly do with some reform. But that has nothing WHATSOEVER to do with my one specific goal, which is to FREE the peer-reviewed journal literature, such as it is, not to "FIX" it. The main point of my recommendations about self-archiving has been that these two agendas should not be conflated. Free the peer-reviewed literature (through author self-archiving via E-biomed) OR fix peer review, but do not hold the fate of one hostage to the other, especially given that the benefits of freeing the literature are already dramatically demonstrated whereas the reform schemes are all still untested pigs-in-pokes. http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/