Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Anonymous wrote:

> There is a reason why the peer review process and the academic journals
> are still needed.  Online preprint archives are useless for the layman.

Laymen don't read online preprint archives. They stick with popular
science stuff (I read Science).

If you're even marginally competent the kooks have a telltale signature,
allowing you to filter out 90% of kook science with a cursory glance.

Names-based reputation is prevalent (I guess no one has yet bothered to
fake submissions often enough so that people use digital signatures to
authenticate authors of submitted papers) and seems to work. Typically
everybody knows everybody else in a small speciality, and newcomers are
very visible as such. They either rapidly establish a reputation track 
as valuable contributors, or fail to do so. Informally, that distributed
database seems to work well.

It is very easy to offer a for-profit peer review service of arXiv.org,
btw (just offer a number of arXiv links digitally signed to your identity
to paid subscribers). It's just there is not a market for it still,
because the dead tree media are hogging the ecological niche for it,
having been there first.  You need a reputation track before people come
to you, and you only get a reputation track if people come to you.

> Only experts can use these archives with safety; they are able to sift
> the wheat from the chaff.