Friends: Here is a note from Stevan Harnad which would be of interest to all those interested in open access. Arun -------- SENSE ABOUT SCIENCE Peer review and the acceptance of new scientific ideas http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/peerreview/ Summary of above report: (1) "If it (peer review) ain't broke, don't fix it" and (2) "Caveat emptor to journalists -- if you use non-peer-reviewed information" On the relation between peer-review reform and the open access (OA) movement: None! OA is about providing free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles (2.5 million articles a year, from 24,000 peer-reviewed journals). OA is about freeing those articles from online access tolls, not about freeing them from peer review! For more details, do the following search in Google: amsci "simon says" peer review In a nutshell: (1) Historical fact 1: The pre-refereeing preprint always comes before the refereed postprint (2) Historical fact 2: Since well before the internet, some areas of physics shared their preprints amongst themselves well before publication (3) Historical fact 3: With the advent of the internet and web, those same physicists took (quite naturally) to sharing their preprints -- *and postprints* -- via the internet (since 1991). http://arxiv.org (4) Historical fact 4: That practice -- of self-archiving preprints and postprints -- (not unique to physicists, but done most systematically by them) grew, and is still growing today, but not nearly fast enough (even among physicists). End of the catalogue of indisputable facts. Now we move to the area of interpretation and speculation: (5) Interpretation/Speculation 1: Some have hypothesized -- and Paul Ginsparg, the one who wrote the software for the physics Arxiv, was among the ones who made this hypothesis, but so has the mathematician and analyst of electronic publication developments, Andrew Odlyzko -- that the success and usefulness of preprint-self-archiving implies that peer-review (hence postprints) may either not be necessary at all (and done only to satisfy the demands of the author's tenure committee) or (6) Interpretation/Speculation 2: that peer review can be implemented as a kind of (optional?) "overlay," on top of preprints, possibly in the form of post-hoc peer commentary. But what needs to be carefully noted is that the empirical facts are equally compatible with a much simpler hypothesis, which is that it is extremely useful to the impact, productivity and progress of research to make both postprints (definitely) and preprints (optionally) open-access, by self-archiving them, and that this benefit has *absolutely nothing* to do with any hypothetical and untested reforms one might or might not one day wish to make of the peer-review system -- which has continued, absolutely unchanged, since self-archiving began in 1991, with virtually every preprint also being submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, hence also generating the revised, corrected, peer-reviewed postprint meeting the journal's quality standards, *exactly* as it had and has done all along! *Empirically* the only change has been open-access to preprints and postprints. The rest is all interpretation and untested speculation. For the sake of OA, it is extremely important to disentangle all that interpretation/speculation from the facts, which are that providing OA to one's postprints (all of them) and preprints (those one chooses to make OA) has great benefits, so not only 20% but 100% of postprints (and, optionally, preprints) should be made OA in this way. Entangling this theory-independent truth with untested conjectures about ways of reforming peer review simply serves to delay the long overdue passage from 20% OA to 100% OA still longer, needlessly. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#7.Peer In fact, the over-emphasis on preprint self-archiving (as if it were a *substitute*, rather than merely an optional *supplement* to postprint self-archiving, which in turn is a supplement to toll-access) was one of several of the incoherent components in the original e-biomed proposal that made it fail, generated opposition (from both publishers and those who did not want peer review tampered with needlessly) and eventually led to the non-optimal form of the NIH proposal we have now (with a 6-month embargo and only central archiving and only NIH-funded biomed) instead of the univeral self-archiving of 100% of postprints (and optionally, whatever percentage of preprints authors also choose to self-archive) that we need, that is still so long overdue, and that we are *at last* moving toward today! All this was already pointed out in the 1999 comments on the original e-biomed: http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 (1999) http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/comment.htm Pertinent Prior American Scientist Topic Threads: Re: A Note of Caution About "Reforming the System" (2001) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1178.html Re: Science Article (Roberts et al.) and Science Editorial (2001) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1241.html Re: Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute? (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2889.html Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum Chaire de recherche du Canada Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC) Université du Québec à Montréal Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8 tel: 1-514-987-3000 2461# fax: 1-514-987-8952 harnad@uqam.ca http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Friends: Here is a note from Stevan Harnad which would be of interest to all those interested in open access. Arun -------- SENSE ABOUT SCIENCE Peer review and the acceptance of new scientific ideas http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/peerreview/ http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/peerreview/ Summary of above report: (1) "If it (peer review) ain't broke, don't fix it" and (2) "Caveat emptor to journalists -- if you use non-peer-reviewed information" On the relation between peer-review reform and the open access (OA) movement: None! OA is about providing free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles (2.5 million articles a year, from 24,000 peer-reviewed journals). OA is about freeing those articles from online access tolls, not about freeing them from peer review! For more details, do the following search in Google: amsci "simon says" peer review In a nutshell: (1) Historical fact 1: The pre-refereeing preprint always comes before the refereed postprint (2) Historical fact 2: Since well before the internet, some areas of physics shared their preprints amongst themselves well before publication (3) Historical fact 3: With the advent of the internet and web, those same physicists took (quite naturally) to sharing their preprints -- *and postprints* -- via the internet (since 1991). http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org (4) Historical fact 4: That practice -- of self-archiving preprints and postprints -- (not unique to physicists, but done most systematically by them) grew, and is still growing today, but not nearly fast enough (even among physicists). End of the catalogue of indisputable facts. Now we move to the area of interpretation and speculation: (5) Interpretation/Speculation 1: Some have hypothesized -- and Paul Ginsparg, the one who wrote the software for the physics Arxiv, was among the ones who made this hypothesis, but so has the mathematician and analyst of electronic publication developments, Andrew Odlyzko -- that the success and usefulness of preprint-self-archiving implies that peer-review (hence postprints) may either not be necessary at all (and done only to satisfy the demands of the author's tenure committee) or (6) Interpretation/Speculation 2: that peer review can be implemented as a kind of (optional?) "overlay," on top of preprints, possibly in the form of post-hoc peer commentary. But what needs to be carefully noted is that the empirical facts are equally compatible with a much simpler hypothesis, which is that it is extremely useful to the impact, productivity and progress of research to make both postprints (definitely) and preprints (optionally) open-access, by self-archiving them, and that this benefit has *absolutely nothing* to do with any hypothetical and untested reforms one might or might not one day wish to make of the peer-review system -- which has continued, absolutely unchanged, since self-archiving began in 1991, with virtually every preprint also being submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, hence also generating the revised, corrected, peer-reviewed postprint meeting the journal's quality standards, *exactly* as it had and has done all along! *Empirically* the only change has been open-access to preprints and postprints. The rest is all interpretation and untested speculation. For the sake of OA, it is extremely important to disentangle all that interpretation/speculation from the facts, which are that providing OA to one's postprints (all of them) and preprints (those one chooses to make OA) has great benefits, so not only 20% but 100% of postprints (and, optionally, preprints) should be made OA in this way. Entangling this theory-independent truth with untested conjectures about ways of reforming peer review simply serves to delay the long overdue passage from 20% OA to 100% OA still longer, needlessly. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#7.Peer http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#7.Peer In fact, the over-emphasis on preprint self-archiving (as if it were a *substitute*, rather than merely an optional *supplement* to postprint self-archiving, which in turn is a supplement to toll-access) was one of several of the incoherent components in the original e-biomed proposal that made it fail, generated opposition (from both publishers and those who did not want peer review tampered with needlessly) and eventually led to the non-optimal form of the NIH proposal we have now (with a 6-month embargo and only central archiving and only NIH-funded biomed) instead of the univeral self-archiving of 100% of postprints (and optionally, whatever percentage of preprints authors also choose to self-archive) that we need, that is still so long overdue, and that we are *at last* moving toward today! All this was already pointed out in the 1999 comments on the original e-biomed: http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 (1999) http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/comment.htm http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/comment.htm Pertinent Prior American Scientist Topic Threads: Re: A Note of Caution About "Reforming the System" (2001) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1178.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1178.html Re: Science Article (Roberts et al.) and Science Editorial (2001) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1241.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1241.html Re: Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute? (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2889.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2889.html Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum Chaire de recherche du Canada Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC) Université du Québec à Montréal Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8 tel: 1-514-987-3000 2461# fax: 1-514-987-8952 http://uk.f113.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=harnad@uqam.ca&YY=51694&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b harnad@uqam.ca http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/