Re: "Accepted Manuscript"

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

If you are content with a system of scholarship that makes 
mistakes in citations to sources and misquotes sources and 
accepts that most scholars don't ever bother to go back to check 
the originals but simply repeat what another "authority" has 
written (as studies have shown), then multiple versions of 
articles won't be a problem. But sloppy scholarship, at a certain 
point, always leads to sloppy thinking, in my experience.

To Joe's retort about Harvard and MIT, I would answer that as 
institutions that presumably want to maintain high standards of 
scholarship, posting sloppy scholarship is not going to do their 
reputations any good. I would also think that they have a certain 
responsibility to the scholarly community worldwide to help 
maintain high standards.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


>You are surely not the only one who worries about such matters,
>Sandy, although you no doubt articulate your concerns better than
>most.  Let's look at this from another angle, though.  What
>exactly is the potential harm here?  Do we think that a scientist
>is going to read the "wrong" version of a paper and, as a result,
>make catastrophic errors in her own work?  Do we think that a
>student will cite something other than the version of record in
>his honors thesis and get dinged by his advisor?  Do we think
>that a cancer patient will read a draft rather than the finished
>version of an article and, as a consequence, will be misinformed
>about treatment options?  These all seem like rather unlikely
>scenarios from my perspective, though I am more than willing to
>be shown there are other, more realistically harmful
>possibilities I have failed to consider.
>
>I think that as a discipline, scholarly communication is very
>concerned with the notion of authority (not the Stalin kind, but
>rather the definitive source of information kind).  Perhaps our
>real fear here is that eventually the notion of version authority
>will erode completely.  Stevan Harnad would applaud this; Joe
>Esposito might shed a tear.  This mirrors the other lively thread
>bouncing around Liblicense this week.  Lots of versions of the
>same basic paper likely means better access.  It also likely
>means some consumer-side confusion.
>
>The question, at least in my mind, is whether this confusion
>amounts to anything more dangerous than a case of the queasies
>for the scholarly communication space.  Is there the chance of
>real harm - tangible, demonstrable - here?  And, if so, can
>someone articulate it for the list?
>
>Best, Greg
>
>Greg Tananbaum
>Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
>(510) 295-7504
>greg@scholarnext.com
>http://www.scholarnext.com