www.eprints.org is dedicated to freeing the research
www.eprints.org
literature through open archiving:
www.openarchives.org .
To help the Open Archiving initiative to gain
momentum, self-archiving software has been
developed at the University of Southampton.
Eprints is a successor to the CogPrints Cognitive
Sciences Eprint Archive, cogprints.soton.ac.uk, an
open archive for research literature, pre- and postrefereeing.
The CogPrints software’s generic successor Eprints is
designed to be as flexible and adaptable as possible,
so that all universities worldwide can adopt and
configure it with minimal effort for all their
disciplines and needs.
Eprints is fully interoperable with all other Open
Archives, compliant with the October 1999 Santa Fe
Convention.
The Eprints software, will be available (for free, of
course) from eprints.org in September 2000.
Technical information about the software is available
on the software page. To be alerted about the
availability of the software, you can join a mailing
list.
Background: http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad
Peer Review in the On-line Era
Medium-independent invariants
and
On-line improvements
What Is Peer Review?
• Quality-Control:
Experts evaluate the
work of fellow-experts
• Guided feedback, not
“red/green” light
(“publish or get lost”)
• Part of science’s
collective, cumulative,
self-correctiveness
peer review on-line
• Rejection rates
(normalized) as rigor
indicators
• Journal hierarchies
and the wheat/chaff
ratio
• Discipline differences
and interdisciplinarity
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3
The “Invisible Hand” of Peer
Review
• Unrefereed preprints
• Usenet: The Global
vs. refereed postprints
Graffiti Board for
Trivial Pursuit
• The true “populists”:
“Why aren’t preprints • Cautionary example:
life/death matters
enough?”
(i.e.,Why can’t it all be • Science and
just Vanity Press Selfscholarship: Do they
Publication?)
matter less?
peer review on-line
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4
Peer Review’s Imperfections
• Editors: The weakest
link:
• Editorial bias
• Sampling bias
• Referee incompetence
• Referee disagreement
(destructive or
creative?)
peer review on-line
• Why do referees
referee?
(1) Golden Rule
(2) Interest (including selfinterest)
(3) Supersition
• Scarce, overused
resource
(Refereeing is a give-away
service, just as research reports
are a give-away product.)
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5
Improving Peer Review:
Untested Empirical Conjectures
(Usually voiced as immediate recommendations)
• Number of
referees/refereeings
• Author anonymity
• Referee anonymity (open
review)
• Interactive review
• Public review
• Open (peer?) commentary
• Referee self-selection
• Referee payment
peer review on-line
• “Levels” of
acceptance/certification
• Multiple certification
• Individual journals vs.
multiple generic “entities”
• (your conjecture here…)
• Abandoning peer review
(self-publication)
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6
Online Optimizations
(technical and tested)
• Web-based submission
(eprints.org)
• Email/web-based
sampling/solicitation
• Web-based refereeing
• Web-based
dispositions
peer review on-line
• Web-based Editing,
copy-editing, mark-up,
formatting (JHEP)
• Reference-checking
• Citation-linking
• Referee evaluation and
monitoring
• Reducing delays
• *Reducing costs
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7
What is the true cost of
implementing peer review?
• 70/30 currently
(confirmed by APS)
• 10% optimally?
• optional add-ons vs.
obligate "added value”
• access-barriers and
hostage-holding
peer review on-line
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8
Scientific Skywriting in the
PostGutenberg Galaxy
citation, download and
navigational analysis:
an embryology of
knowledge
http://opcit.eprints.org
peer review on-line
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9
“Hits” vs. Downloads
Preprints vs. Postprints (for Los Alamos Archive)
Hits are mixed and
include “browsing”.
Full-text downloads:
27%
Preprints are updated to
include journal
postprint references
71% at a particular time
peer review on-line
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10
The finer-structure of “impact”
(for Los Alamos Archive)
Positive Correlation between
downloads and citations (top right)
Two phases in timeline: downloaded preprint and cited postprint
(bottom left)
Download time-line for high,
medium, and low citation impact
papers (bottom right)
peer review on-line
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Relevant URLs
•
•
•
•
•
•
www.openarchives.org
www.eprints.org
opcit.eprints.org
cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad
arXiv.org
cogprints.soton.ac.uk
•
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html
www.eprints.org