Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing , 11 (4). pp. 283-292.

Download

HTML 40Kb

Abstract

Peer Review and Copyright each have a double role: Formal refereeing protects (R1) the author
from publishing and (R2) the reader from reading papers that are not of sufficient quality. Copyright protects
the author from (C1) theft of text and (C2) theft of authorship. It has been suggested that in the electronic
medium we can dispense with peer review, "publish" everything, and let browsing and commentary do the
quality control. It has also been suggested that special safeguards and laws may be needed to enforce copyright
on the Net. I will argue, based on 20 years of editing Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a refereed (paper) journal of
peer commentary, 8 years of editing Psycoloquy, a refereed electronic journal of peer commentary, and 1 year of
implementing CogPrints, an electronic archive of unrefereed preprints and refereed reprints in the cognitive
sciences modeled on the Los Alamos Physics Eprint Archive, that (i) peer commentary is a supplement, not a
substitute, for peer review, (ii) the authors of refereed papers, who get and seek no royalties from the sale of their
texts, only want protection from theft of authorship on the Net, not from theft of text, which is a victimless crime,
and hence (iii) the trade model (subscription, site license or pay- per-view) should be replaced by author
page-charges to cover the much reduced cost of implementing peer review, editing and archiving on the Net, in
exchange for making the learned serial corpus available for free for all forever.

Tools

Metadata

Download Statistics

Members of ECS may view the download statistics dashboard for this record.

Corrections

ECS staff and postgraduates may modify this record