Frank Tipler, Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?ISCID Archive, June 30, 2003. A common question, whose importance is not diminished by the fact that more cranks take it seriously than serious scientists. It has an uneasy relationship to open access. On the one hand, BOAI, PLoS, BMC, and other leading open-access initiatives emphatically and unambiguously support peer review. On the other hand, the same organizations endorse open-access archives that accept unrefereed preprints, and these are sometimes seen (not by the same organizations) as liberating ways to escape the ideological filters of a corrupt system of peer review. Frank Tipler takes this view: "The unknown patent office clerk has a problem. For him the physics community has the lanl database [better known as arXiv] which is the modern equivalent of the early 20th century Zeitschrift für Physik. Anyone can place a paper on the lanl database. There is no referee to stand in the author’s way. Of course, a great deal of nonsense is placed on the lanl database, but in my own field of general relativity it seems no worse then the huge amount of nonsense that appears in the leading refereed journals, including Physical Review Letters." But this connection notwithstanding, no one should mistake the open-access movement for a movement to bypass or even reform peer review. It's compatible with the existing system of peer review and with nearly every proposal for reforming peer review. Apart from advocating open access to peer-reviewed journals and unrefereed preprints, the movement is neutral in this debate. (Thanks to LIS News.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/11/2003 11:12:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
