Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication"

Having been a "peer reviewer" for two legal publications, and having undergone the peer review process for my own master's thesis in biology, I can say with some confidence that it's unlikely that an open peer commentary would provide anything like the level of review necessary to validate a work.

As a law review editor, I spent weeks researching the sources and assumptions of a paper written by someone else. Every cite was checked for accuracy, every argument made was questioned as to whether the materials cited really did support the argument. It was grueling work. The process for scientific peer review, while not so focused on cite-checking, is equally rigorous in its own way.

Peer commentary already exists, in the form of response to and duplication of work that has already been vetted by journal reviewers. There is enough peer commentary work available now without sifting through the masses of kludge that regularly flood into most journal offices; I doubt that most unvetted work would be peer reviewed at all unless the author was well-known or the topic was "sexy" is some way.

Kevin Grierson

Kevin W. Grierson
Willcox & Savage, P.C.
1800 Bank of America Center
One Commercial Place
Norfolk, Virginia 23510

mailto:kgrierson[_at_]wilsav.com
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>>> harnad[_at_]ecs.soton.ac.uk 09/09/02 02:24PM >>>
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Having been through this so many times before, it is fairly predictable that the next response will be:

    "Well then replace peer review and journalname certification by open     peer commentary plus citation/hit impact polls."

That option is as yet untested, and there are many a priori reasons why it would be unlikely to succeed in generating a research literature at the level of quality, navigability and usability that we have currently. This too is discussed in the above article and also on these threads:

  "Peer Review Reform Hypothesis-Testing"   http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0479.html

  The relevant google search here is:
  (harnad peer review commentary supplement substitute)

So, yes, maximizing visibility and accessibility is a necessary condition for maximizing research usage and uptake, but it is not a sufficient condition. Peer-review and the certification of its outcome (by what we currently call the journal-name) is a necessary condition too.

The way to maximize accessibility is of course through open access. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

But the give-away authors of (the peer-reviewed research subset) of the give-away open-access literature still need more than that. They still need protection (currently called "copyright" protection, but call it what you like!) for the authorship and integrity of their texts. Public dissemination itself alone provides some protection, but not enough.

Stevan Harnad Received on Tue Sep 10 2002 - 12:25:36 GMT