Re: Validation of posted archives

From: Guillermo Julio Padron Gonzalez <guillermo.padron_at_CIGB.EDU.CU>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 11:08:40 -0500

Dear Stevan:

The "name" of a journal is part of the validation of a published paper.
We all use the rigorousness of the peer review and the editorial
crite-ria of the journals to judge about the validity of a published
paper. I agree that there can be exceptions, but they are just that:
exceptions.

It is clear that nobody has the time or the willingness to dive into
each paper to find out whether it is the final version of a validated
paper or it is just electronic garbage. The fact is that a
non-administered archiving system may cause a proliferation of
non-validated, duplicated, misleading and even fraudulent information in
the web and there will be no way to identify the valid information, so
the readers will go to "validating sites", v. g. the publisher site.

Unless OAI included some kind of validation...

Regards,

Guillermo
-----Original Message-----
From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, 21 March, 2001 10:36 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Validation of posted archives


> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 09:26:46 -0500
> From: "Guillermo Julio Padron Gonzalez" <guillermo.padron_at_cigb.edu.cu>
>
> From your mail I see there is no administrator of files posted in
> Internet using OAI. May be it has been already discussed in the
> Forum--I am sorry if it indeed was--but I have two questions:
>
> 1. How can a reader differentiate a non-validated--non
> peer-reviewed--archive from a validated peer-reviewed version?

There is a metadata category "refereed" vs. "unrefereed". Also Journal
Name, etc.

http://www.eprints.org/

> 2. How can this system avoid the possibility of charlatans posting
> their non peer-reviewed or even rejected papers using OAI? As far as I
> know, any person outside the journal/publishers sites can post them.

It is self-archiving, so in principle I can post someone else's
article as my own (plagiarism), or can post my own and call it
"refereed" when it is not, or can post an inaccurate version of the
final draft.

All this is easily monitored and checked, if anyone wants to set up a
system to do so, but it is not necessary!

The archive of record for refereed papers, for the time being, is the
publisher's paper version, in libraries the world over. The
self-archived version is merely FREEING these papers online, for one
and all.

Peer review continues to be implemented by journals. If one retrieves
un unrefereed paper, caveat emptor. And the incentive to plagiarize or
to misclassify one's own work does not have much force behind it.

See:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
             Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
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Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT

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