Newsgroups: bit.listserv.erl-l
Date:         Tue, 14 Apr 1992 10:22:35 MST
From:         Gene Glass <ATGVG@ASUACAD.BITNET>
Subject:      AERA Committee Meeting

     As Jean Pierce announced last week on the ERL-L list, the
AERA Electronic Network Committee will hold a meeting at the AERA
Annual Meeting next week in San Francisco. The "El. Network
Committee" is really just anyone who chooses to attend the
meeting. The meeting appears in the program as Session 20.47,
which meets Tuesday at 4:05 p.m. in the Parc 55 Hotel, Medici
Room, 4th Floor. The program lists me and Jean Pierce as chairing
the session, but in fact Bob Barger of Eastern Illinois
University ( CFRNB@EIU.EDU ) will be chairing. (AERA is too late
and our semester at ASU is ending too early this year; I remember
when AERA used to meet in Atlantic City every year in the first
week of February, so I should not complain too loudly about the
current schedule.)

     The format of the meeting will be an open discussion of
issues and opportunities for networking with computers that ought
to involve AERA. Perhaps I forfeit the right to raise an issue by
not being able to make the meeting, but if anyone cares to act as
proxy, he or she might nudge discussion toward my favorite topic:
Why aren't we creating an electronic journal? Not a newsletter,
not a digest, but a full-blown archive of papers written by
researchers and deposited on a LISTSERV for retrieval by one and
all. As one who has edited three scholarly journals over the
years, I am amazed that they still exist. The seem an illogical
anachronism, held together by the fact that they serve  only the
personnel system of the universities. Their cost and their pace,
the unreliability of the editorial decisions, their politics--all
of these are shortcomings that today's technology can correct. I
am envisioning a system in which anyone who wishes to archive
their work for general accessibility can do so by sending it
electronically to a central address; ERL-L could serve as well as
any. An "editor" would quickly review format and then archive the
work. As each new "paper" is archived, an announcement is sent to
all subscribers; further, a cumulative abstract of all papers is
maintained, which can be retrieved and scanned by anyone who is
interested. (If you are wondering how this "retrieval" would
work, then try this: send an email letter to
LISTSERV@TCSVM.BITNET. Include only a single line in your letter:
it should read GET ERL-L LOG9203. You will quickly receive a long
document that could just as easily have been a monograph on a
subject of interest to you.)

      No submissions would be rejected. (Your university tenure
committee would actually have to read your papers to see if they
were any good instead of merely count pages in refereed journals
with high rejection rates.) When I outline this endeavor to some
people, they say "But the archives would fill up with garbage; no
one would want to be seen there. It would be like ERIC." My
response: "I like ERIC; I think ERIC is a fantastic resource and
I never intend to read everything in it. Just as I don't read
everything in the journals; in fact I hardly read anything in
them any more; they are full of garbage too. And remember, one
person's garbage is another person's treasure."
     How could the "quality" problem be solved? Simple, perhaps.
Every time a document is retrieved, a counter is activated. The
number of retrievals would be shown in the abstracts. Important
documents will have many retrievals. In effect, the system could
do what the Social Sciences Citation Index does; index the
visibility and importance of a work. If your tenure committee
still won't take the time to read your papers, you can at least
show them how many persons around the world were interested
enough in your work to retrieve it.

     There will be political problems in implementing a resource
such as the one I am trying to outline, but the economic problems
appear to have been solved by the technology that we are all
using this very minute.

     If people wish to kick ideas like this around next week in
San Francisco, then maybe Bob Barger can bring some comments back
to ERL-L and we can pursue the topic. Have a nice visit in the
City by the Bay.

_______________________________________________________________________

GENE V GLASS                                    ATGVG AT ASUACAD.BITNET
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION                            ATGVG AT ASUACVAX.BITNET
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY                        INTERNET ADDRESS:
Tempe, AZ 85287-2411                            ATGVG@ASUVM.INRE.ASU.EDU
602-965-2692
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU