Re: Does More Mean More?

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

Though I agree that filtering need not be the exclusive province 
of journals, filtering is more than peer review, and the 
filtering that journals do is not yet antique.

In addition to peer review and the assurance of quality, 
filtering also involves the aggregation of content relevant to a 
particular community, the selection and presentation of the 
canonical version of manuscripts, and the conferring of 
professional recognition on author-researchers.

Though some OA journals (PLOS Biology, say) perform these 
functions quite well, OA models as a whole do not. That's not to 
say they can't in the future; it may simply be that currently the 
emphasis is on the broad distribution of information rather than 
on the careful filtering of information.

That said, there is no doubt that the relevance and role of 
journals in the filtering process will change and evolve. 
(Publishers like me had better change and evolve--or else go into 
an easier field, like hazardous waste disposal, say. )

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk 02/06/06 10:04 PM >>>

The idea that "readers want the journal to do the filtering for 
them" is really quite quaint, it seems to me. Perhaps not 
surprisingly, as Sally mentions the term 'paper'. We need to be 
careful about terminology here. In the electronic environment 
journals do *peer review* rather than filter. If you want to see 
what electronic filters are, see e.g. Citeseer, Google Scholar. 
In these services peer review and associated journal titles are 
labels (tags), more or less important depending on the user, that 
go into the filter mix.

The changing role of journals in the overall scheme of filtering 
and selection is a fascinating and critical point of enquiry, but 
the old points of reference in this discussion are completely 
inadequate.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865