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

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Joseph J. Esposito wrote:

> I agree with you completely, which means that if we have any point of
> disagreement, we have to look elsewhere.
> 
> I view the peer-review process as part of the publishing process. While
> the publishing process is often thought (especially by authors) to be
> entirely a matter of dissemination, publishers see it very differently,
> as a matter of selection. Publishers select by appointing editors whose
> principal job is to say no. Peer review is a subset of that. When I say
> "publishers," I don't mean the individuals but the institutions (which
> are mostly commercial) that employ them. These institutions (even the
> nonprofits) deploy capital to winnow the huge amount of material that
> is written down to the merely gargantuan amount that is published.
> 
> My point (which is where I believe we may disagree) is that publishers will
> not go away. They may be called something else, and they may find a mode of
> survival that does not include copyright restrictions, but a value-added
> intermediary will continue to sit between the people who create information
> and those who consume it.

Alas, we agree completely-completely! I too believe (and hope) that
(refereed-journal) publishers will not go away, that there's no need
to call them something else, that they will find a mode of survival
that does not include access-restrictions, and that they will continue
to a be a value-added intermediary between researchers as authors and
researchers as users. I will even venture to name precisely what their
enduring, essential added-value will be: It will be the implementation
of the service of peer review (quality-control) and the certification
of its outcome with their journal-name.

A possible economic model for this essential service is:

    http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1
    In: Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410:
    1024-1025
    http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/42/index.html 

Stevan Harnad