Re: New Open Access Repository for Unrefereed Preprints: PLoS Contents

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:29:30 -0400

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Klaus Graf<klausgraf_at_googlemail.com> wrote:

> (1) Peer Review is absolutely overestimated. In the humanities there
> is outside the anglo-american world few peer review.

Not relevant to PLoS, which is biological and medical research, and
all peer-reviewed (fortunately for us all).

> (2) Scholars need all publications OA in which the essential scholarly
> progress is made.

Agreed, for all give-away journal articles (and any other author
give-away scholarly texts).

> In the humanities these are monographs and
> contributions in books/conference proceedings. Most of these are not
> peer-reviewed.

Authors are free to give away their monographs free online if they
wish to. The trouble is that most do not wish to (yet). But all
journal-article authors already do.

This issue has next to nothing to do with peer review.

Conference proceedings fall under the same category as journal
articles (author give-aways, written solely for usage and impact).

Edited book chapters are an in-between area. The best strategy is to
get all the journal articles safely and universally self-archived, and
the rest will follow soon enough. Don't get hung up on the exceptions
and outliers.

> 3) It is wrong to think that all relevant research is made from
> university affiliated scholars. It would be good to have valid numbers
> for scholars without deposit access to an institutional repository.

True again -- but again, no point getting hung up on the exceptions
and outliers: Get all institutionally generated research articles
self-archived (85% still waiting!) and don't worry about the
exceptions and outliers for now.

But, yes, central repositories (like DEPOT -- or CogPrints or Arxiv)
are just fine for self-archiving institutionally unaffiliated
research.

> (4) Institutional repositories are NOT better than central
> disciplinary repositories.

Opinion duly registered.

> Repetition [does not] make... false things... true.

You can say that again...

Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Aug 25 2009 - 22:26:40 BST