Re: Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal communication channels

["Mark Funk" <mefunk@med.cornell.edu>]

I hardly see how requiring the deposit of manuscripts into PubMed 
Central or an institutional repository *AFTER* the formal 
refereeing and publication acceptance process is in any way 
"formalizIng the informal." Nobody is mandating that scientists 
deposit their preliminary results. These post-acceptance deposits 
in no way affect the traditional informal communication channels 
that scientists use.

Anyway, has arXiv.org "dismantled the institution of science as 
we know it today?" "Today," of course being 1971 -- the embryo 
years of the internet, pre-web, mainframe computers, and three 
television networks. Communication has changed just a bit in the 
last 37 years, and applying old pre-internet communication 
research to today may not be very useful.

Mark Funk
Head, Resource Management - Collections
Weill Cornell Medical Library
New York, NY 10065-4805
mefunk@med.cornell.edu

> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 9:22 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal communication
> channels
>
> In the early 1970s, the American Psychological Association 
> entrusted two psychologists, William D. Garvey and Belver C. 
> Griffith to make sense of the "crisis in scholarly 
> communication."  In doing so, they embarked on research to 
> first better understand the communication processes of 
> researchers -- both the *informal* where most of the 
> communication among peers is done, and the *formal* which 
> describes the traditional journal and book publication process.
>
> In one of their first published reports [1], the psychologists 
> warn about formalizing the informal communication channels. 
> They write,
>
> "accelerating the flow of scientific information in the 
> informal domain and expanding its dissemination is a problem 
> precisely because it occurs in systems that obscure the 
> boundary between the informal and formal domains. This boundary 
> is one that science has deliberately erected to curtail, 
> temporarily, the flow of information until the information has 
> been examined against the current state of knowledge in a 
> discipline. Non-scientists view procedure of curtailment as 
> ultra-conservative; experienced, practicing scientists perceive 
> it as the essential feature of science....The long judicious 
> procedure by which this conversion is made is unique to 
> science. To reorganize it for the sake of speed, or for open 
> communication with other spheres of intellectual endeavor, 
> would almost certainly dismantle the institution of science as 
> we know it today." (p.362)
>
> Manuscript depositing mandates (e.g. Harvard, NIH, etc.) could 
> be seen as essentially formalizing the informal. Most of the 
> discussion surrounding the debates have been on immediate 
> effects (the time and resources devoted to archiving, the 
> mechanisms required to streamline the process). Little has been 
> devoted to possible unintended consequences of such mandates. 
> Unintended consequences are not necessarily negative [2], and I 
> don't want to imply that I'm implying an argument against 
> institutional archiving. Still, is there reason to argue (like 
> Garvey and Griffith) that we should strive to keep the informal 
> and formal communication processes separate?
>
> --Phil Davis
>
> [If these graduate student ramblings are tiresome, I'm happy to
> return to more pedestrian dialogs].
>
> [1] Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1971). Scientific
> communication: Its role in the conduct of research and creation
> of knowledge. American Psychologist, 26(4), 350-362.
>
> [2] Merton, R. K. (1936). The Unanticipated Consequences of
> Purposive Social Action. American Sociological Review, 1(6),
> 894-904.