[Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

[Alex Halavais]

This argument seems to be chasing its tail a bit.

Wikipedia is peer reviewed. It has evolved a peer-review structure
that meets its needs as an open, public encyclopedia. If you think
Wikipedia is open to all comers and all ideas, you clearly haven't
been reading the vitriol heaped upon it from the margins. I think
there may be models of collaborative filtering that *might* be
borrowed from Wikipedia for scholarly communication, and I am not
entirely satisfied with the current process of collaborative filtering
that occurs in many journals. But peer review, in one form or another,
is a vital piece of the conversation of scholarship, and replacing it
will be difficult precisely because it has demonstrated its
effectiveness.

There is a reason Wikipedians insist on citations to peer-reviewed
work. They know that it represents a good collaborative filter of
informed peers.

There is a space for the exchange of ideas, where you can be your own
editor, where you can comment on other people's articles: it's called
a blog. (As an aside, have folks seen this:
http://researchblogging.org/ ?)  Or, you can upload your paper onto a
large pre-print server. Both are very good alternatives, but they do
not address the problem of filtering.

I read a lot of things as a referee so you don't have to, and I rely
on my colleagues to do the same thing. If you think about it, it's
actually a pretty elegant distributed system. Instead of all of us
randomly reading the "not ready yet" or "never will be ready" papers,
we divide that work among us, allowing for more attention to be paid
to work that is most deserving of attention. Is it perfect? Clearly
not. But it works.

The question of open access is different from the question of
filtering, and contrary to what you have said in an earlier post, I
believe an important question. Once we have sorted out the most useful
materials, it benefits everyone to have them as widely available as
possible. The question is simply how best to make this happen, from a
practical perspective.

- Alex

On Feb 9, 2008 3:31 PM, Christian Nelson <xianknelson at mac.com> wrote:
<snip>
> C'mon, doesn't anyone on this list believe in the open exchange of
> ideas and the ability of Internet tools and models like Wikipedia to
> help people find the truth. Not even the founder of Wikipedia. Gee Whiz.
>
> Christian Nelson
>
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