Re: Trust a high value in electronic content

[Peter Suber <peters@earlham.edu>]

At 07:41 AM 6/16/2003 -0400, you wrote:

> Here's an insightful piece from Outsell, Inc., regarding our need for
> trust in electronic content, these days when increasingly huge amounts of
> information are available.  It's particularly apposite at a time when we
> speak of for-free access to materials that authors of articles put on
> their or others' web sites.  Do we really believe that peer reviewed
> journals can be replaced in this way?  Do we really imagine a huge mass of
> unfiltered content can substitute for content that is filtered and
> categorized?  How?
>
> Outsell, Inc., has given us permission to reproduce these snippets on
> liblicense-l.
>
> Sincerely The Moderators
___

This is a damaging myth.  The open-access movement does not support using 
personal web sites to bypass peer review.

Excerpt from the Budapest Open Access Initiative FAQ:

> BOAI seeks open access for peer-reviewed literature. The only exception is 
> for preprints, which are put online prior to peer review but which are 
> intended for peer-reviewed journals at a later stage in their evolution. 
> Peer review is medium-independent, as necessary for online journals as for 
> print journals, and no more difficult. Self-publishing to the internet, 
> which bypasses peer review, is not the kind of open access that BOAI seeks 
> or endorses.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm

Excerpt from Peter Suber, "Open Access to the Scientific Journal 
Literature," _Journal of Biology_, 1, 1 (June 2002) pp. 3f:

> Researchers could put their own articles on their home pages and bypass 
> peer review, but that is not the kind of open access advocated by the 
> Public Library of Science, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, or BioMed 
> Central (the publishers of Journal of Biology). All the major open-access 
> initiatives agree that peer review is essential to scientific journals, 
> whether these journals are online or in print, free of charge or 'priced'. 
> Open access removes the barrier of price, not the filter of quality control.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/jbiol.htm

----------
Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy
Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374
Email peter.suber@earlham.edu
Web http://www.earlham.edu/~peters

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