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Richard Cowen wrote:
>There has been some talk on discussions about the pro's and con's of
>making manuscripts available on the Web. Here's one of mine, on the
>functional morphology of air-breathing aquatic vertebrates - but with a
>distinct emphasis on ichthyosaurs. It is in the final stages of editing
>for inclusion in the "Valentine Festschrift" later this year. It has been
>reviewed and revised, and is basically my final shot. I have not yet
>signed over any rights to any publisher, so it is my copyright.
>
>Here are the rules that I would expect to apply to this document.
>You have my explicit permission to download it and use it for your
>personal convenience, and that includes copying it and *giving* it away.
>You may not charge anyone any money for that - in other words, you may
>not put it into a class manual that is then sold to students, or into an
>anthology that you publish. If you want to use it for that purpose, ask me,
>and I'll see what the prospective publisher will and will not allow, and
>what I can and can't do.
>
>You certainly may publicise it and its URL as much as you want.
>
>As far as its academic status is concerned, I view it as a "personal
>communication" until it is officially published. It is not (quite)
>officially "in press" since I have not yet had the final edited version
>from the editors, nor have they sent it to the printers. In times to
>come, I expect that one may be able to include E-references in manuscripts
>and published papers, but that has not yet happened in paleontology as
>far as I know.
>
>Have fun with it, and feel free to blast me directly by E-mail.
This is important enough that you should be blasted on Paleonet rather than
just by direct e-mail, Richard. The temptation is great to shortcut the
slow publishing process of the regular journals, particularly the
paper-based ones (still the majority and the only ones usually recognized
by Academia). But we shouldn't yield to it, at least not in this way!
The promise and threat of Internet and the Web is that anyone can put
anything on it instantly. A lot of people do, as we know (sigh!). So why
shouldn't we put all our scientific manuscripts there as soon as they are
in a readable state rather than wait nine months to three years before we
can get it published? I feel base to bring up the old
"what-if-everyone-did-the-same" argument, but this is exactly the problem:
if individual dumping of manuscripts became the common means of spreading
scientific results, then premature, erroneous, or simply falsified results
would be an immeasurably more serious problem than it is today. There are a
lot of things to say about the present peer-review system, but its
function, to keep the noise level bearably low, is important. As long as we
have not come up with something better, we should stay with this system and
try to improve rather than bypass it.
I haste to add that this is no criticism against your particular paper; you
tell us it has been reviewed and accepted for publication, and I, for one,
believe you. Had you been someone unknown to me (or someone whose ethics I
have reason to doubt), I would have been more wary.
The dynamics and possibilities of Internet are already profoundly changing
the ways we are communicating science. The paper medium will survive in
some way or another, but publishers of now paper-based journals will have
to revise their strategy sooner than some of them may think (though the
issue is certainly at the forefront of most of today's discussions on
publishing). Exactly what the electronically distributed information
systems will look like even in the near future no-one knows. A couple of
things are predictable, however:
(1) Direct submission of research results to the net without peer review
or similar quality control will continue to be suspect and, as a practice,
will generate more noise and disinformation than anything else.
(2) Would-be employers in Academia are likely to take a dim view of such
publications. Colleagues may be more generous if they trust you (they get
the results quickly), but if they don't, or if they don't know you, they
may just see it as so much more information noise (unless they have a
particular interest in the subject and are able to assess the value of the
contribution directly).
(3) Publishers and editors, whether of electronic "journals", of databases,
or of good ol' pulps, will not be interested in publishing "papers" that
are already freely available on the global network. (That might even go for
the editor and publisher of the Valentine Festschrift, though I presume you
asked them first?)
Peer review, editing and publishing is costly and takes time. One positive
thing with the "threat" of uncontrolled and cheap private publishing on the
net is that the journals (or their electronic cousins) are now challenged
to find less expensive and time-consuming ways of getting the stuff into
print or onto a server. Publication time need not be 5 minutes (who can't
wait a couple of weeks or even months?), but when everyone is used to cheap
and instantaneous communication with any colleague in any place, nobody
will want to wait for a year or two for results to become freely available.
If we can't get the costs and publication times of peer-reviewed outlets
down, we shall certainly drown in an unstructurized and very noisy sea of
unsolicited electrons.
Stefan Bengtson _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/
Department of Palaeozoology _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/_/
Swedish Museum of Natural History _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Box 50007 _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/
S-104 05 Stockholm _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Sweden _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
tel. +46-8 666 42 20
+46-18 54 99 06 (home)
fax +46-8 666 41 84
e-mail Stefan.Bengtson@nrm.se
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