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The heart of Peter Rauch's comment is "careful and deliberate review by
experts. ...
... every published paper is a permanent member of the library of all
scientific literature." Amen.
If I may waste a few moments on curmudgeonly comment, this seems to strike a
different tone than the vision of the netfreaks, which might find such
deliberation and permanence a barrier to communication. The possibility that
some of our more wired colleagues seem to be thirsting for is a permanent
brain link between researchers in which papers are never really finished and
new findings are disseminated as fast as they are identified. With thinkers
no longer isolated while they polish and prune, and then wait to get their
work through typesetting and printing and into the mail, we could see a
cybermind, forged through electronics, which consists of reports and
comments and data sloshing back and forth, changing and growing like kudzu.
While this is anti-print, certainly, and makes permanence irrelevant, it may
well lead to too much peer review, in that nonstop publication would require
nonstop peer review and the temptation would certainly be to open up one's
analysis and research to comment at earlier and earlier stages.
Good or bad? Something I have yet to experience, perhaps.
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