Re: Correction (RE: Thatcher vs. Harnad)

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 4 Jul 2007, Pippa Smart wrote:

> If peer review is the way to filter information then where does
> this leave the repositories

The point of the institutional repositories is that researchers 
will deposit in them their final peer-reviewed drafts of their 
published articles, to provide supplementary access to those 
would-be users who cannot afford subscription/license access to 
the publisher's version.

OA is not about bypassing (or reforming) peer review, nor about 
replacing journals by institutional repositories. It is about 
supplementing fee-based access with OA.

     http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#7.Peer

Stevan Harnad

> noise in the information environment, their content lacking the 
> credibility of the journal because they have no peer review 
> system? (i.e. only the journal articles within them have 
> credibility?) I am sure there will be content of some worth 
> within them that has not been published in a journal - so how 
> can this be assessed?
>
> Unfortunately peer review is also terribly flawed -
> http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/287/21/2784 and
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/293/5538/2187a but
> is the best system we have at present. Post-publication comments
> only seem to work well in certain disciplines (perhaps the ones
> where people have more time!)
>
> Time constraints require some "barriers" (probably not the best
> term) to provide pre-selected lists to make research more
> efficient - what is required is not a barrier to publish, but a
> barrier to be selected as quality.
>
> Pippa Smart
> Research Communication and Publishing Consultant
> Tel: +44 1865 864255
> Mob: +44 7775 627688
> Skype: pippasmart
> pippa.smart@googlemail.com