Re: Petitions, Boycotts, and Liberating the Refereed Literature Online

Stevan Harnad <harnad[_at_]coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

>Journals need to continue to exist and perform their essential,
>irreplaceable function, which is implementing peer review and
>certifying the refereed, revised, final drafts as having been
>accepted for publication by that journal:
>http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/nature2.html

Call me a rebel, but my vision for the future of scientific research publishing is a post-publish filtering system, where everything gets published in open, free, online journals, completely searchable. With very powerful search and filtering engines, a researcher can quickly filter out articles not conforming to certain standards **of their choosing**.

Various scientific societies can still perform their valuable function of peer-review, to put together a list of "approved" published papers from that pool of papers conforming to their requirements. (Do note that most researchers who are knowledgeable in a certain topic and wish to keep abreast of what their peers are doing have the ability to judge a good paper from a not-so-good one, so the role of peer review is really no longer necessary. In the old system, peer-reviewers supposedly act in proxy for the research community.)

This is a totally new paradigm, which at first may be difficult to understand why it is necessary or beneficial to scientific progress.

The problem with the traditional view of using peer-review for gate keeping is that it is egregiously abused. I am a Ph.D. mechanical and chemical engineer, and worked for 15 years in DOE National Laboratories, and did my share of peer review, and being peer reviewed. I also talked to brilliant scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (mostly physicists) who had outstanding papers rejected because they dared to rock the orthodox biases of the senior editors at certain journals. I myself was put under pressure once to reject an article because the senior editor did not like it. I approved it because it was a good paper and met the requirements of peer review -- the paper was never published, interestingly enough, and never again peer reviewed for that journal.

Max Planck certainly pegged it right when he said (paraphrased) that science only advances when the old scientists die.

The future of electronic publishing now means we can bypass the gate keepers, as well as supply the tools to help researchers to cull through the chaff *by their choosing and not by those who hold the power in scientific societies*.

Now, I don't know the relevance of this to CNI-Copyright, except that this alternative vision of our scientific publishing future certainly presents new intellectual property issues, and challenges. We must be careful not to hold onto current paradigms as somehow sacred and eternal. This not only applies to scientific publishing, but to copyright and other intellectual property law.

Jon Noring Received on Tue Oct 31 2000 - 00:14:03 GMT