Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Date:         Tue, 14 Apr 1992 09:21:21 CDT
From:         Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
Subject:      Peer Review and the Net

2 Messages, 120 Lines
*-----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Peer Review and the Net

Peer review is far from infallible, but it's the best form of quality
control we can manage in scholarly and scientific publication. It also
provides a basis for calibrating one's reading in what would otherwise
be an overwhelming information glut.

As to Nets making journals obsolete: this is far from true.
Unfortunately, the transition to the Net is still far too slow; and the
current demography of Usenet is VASTLY different from the readership
and authorship of the tens of thousands of scholarly and scientific
journals that exist today.

There are indeed some academic elites, but I hardly represent them! I'm
considered a maverick in those circles. Nor is the kind of open peer
commentary I advocate the kind of thing that perpetuates entrenched
interests. There's room for reform in peer review, to be sure, but
let's not think of it as being all that sinister: Virtually everything
eventually gets published in some (paper) journal or other. Peer review
just channels it to a particular level in the qualitative hierarchy,
and the beleaguered readership is grateful for that. Grepping keywords
and citations is no substitute for prescreening by qualified
specialists in any given field.

> I would like to see libraries take, retain, and archive as much
> information as is possible (Usenet as well as other electronic
> sources), free of ivory-tower bias, and then make available to
> users/consumers powerful tools that permit them to search, sort,
> organize, annotate, and copy the desired information, and to obtain
> input on how other people, academics included, view that information.
> I consider it our mission as Usenet "librarians" to help build and
> distribute those tools, not to help perpetuate a backward system.

This seems to conflate the mission of Usenet and that of academic and
research libraries. The latter are currently specialized in the tens of
thousands of paper journals I mentioned. Their interest in Usenet, at
least initially, would be as a format for making the electronic
counterparts of those (mostly) peer reviewed journal available to their
readerships. Usenet's anarchic spirit is to be admired and encouraged
on its own turf, but it makes about as much sense to recommend this
unconstrained model on the scholarly community as it does to recommend
that all Usenet postings should first undergo peer review! The agendas
are different, even if they will converge and overlap in part.

For the record, though, I do think that new and powerful electronic
methods of bibliographic search, retrieval and evaluation will become
increasingly important to the scholar trying to make his way through
the information glut, but it will be no substitute for peer review.

Stevan Harnad

---------------------------------
Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement. The Sciences 19: 18 - 20.

Harnad, S. (ed.) (1982) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in
scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harnad, S. (1984) Commentary on Garfield:  Anthropology journals:  What
they cite and what cites them. Current Anthropology 25: 521 - 522.

Harnad, S. (1984) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific
knowledge. American Psychologist 39: 1497 - 1498.

Harnad, S. (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science,
Technology and Human Values 10: 55 - 62.

Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase. (Review of S. Lock, A
difficult balance: Peer review in biomedical publication.)
Nature 322: 24 - 5.
*----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: Peer Review and the Net

There is room for many approaches in this new medium, but I have a
rather specific agenda: Currently, the world scholarly community reads
and writes in peer reviewed paper. The proportion of them that is on
the Net at all (in the West, perhaps 10 - 40 %, depending on
discipline) uses the Net to send email and perhaps read some lists, but
virtually none would consider publishing an article in an electronic
journal. Why? Because the paper medium is fully "authenticated" (as you
put it) already, and the electronic medium is not.

I believe it is a foregone conclusion that the world scholarly
community will convert completely to the Net sooner or later, for
virtually all their reading and writing. I would like it to be sooner
rather than later (life is short). The one tried and true common factor
that the two media can share is classical peer review as their method of
quality control. In my judgment, nothing less rigorous and familiar
will make the world scholarly community consider the Net safe for their
publications in the immediate future. There is of course plenty of room
for innovation on the Net, but only AFTER the exodus has taken place
(or at least a critical mass has been reached). Until then, more
futuristic forms of peer review (or no review at all) will only retard
the process by compounding the novelty of, and hence the doubts about,
the new medium.

There is only one respect in which I have departed from this goal of
making the new waters as familiar and hence safe for swimming as
possible, and that is in stressing the Net's unique potential for rapid
interactive publication ("open peer commentary" in the paper medium,
"scholarly skywriting" on the Net), but this, too, would only consist
of REFEREED target articles and REFEREED peer feedback on them. I
believe, though, that this unique interactive capability of the Net,
which it can provide over and above providing classical peer-reviewed,
archived publication, may just be the factor that will put the Net over
the top, for it can extend a scholar's intellectual lifeline by an
order of magnitude, and the effect can be felt virtually at once, at
a biological tempo that is much more in phase with the potential speed and
scope of human thought than the hopelessly slow turnaround time of paper
publication.

So: Classical peer review (with peer commentary) on the Net for now;
innovations of peer review only once a significant portion of the world
scholarly community is already publishing on the Net.

Stevan Harnad
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU