Parallel Paper Submission

[John F. Kolen]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 02:42:15PM +0900, Adriaan Tijsseling wrote:
> An additional problem is that the reviewing process itself is not
> particularly efficient. How many times does it not occur that reviewers'
> reports do not agree? Or that one reviewer suggests a modification, which
> another reviewer actually requests to be removed?
> 

I think you're talking about consistency here, not efficiency.  The editor,
not the reviewers, is the final judge in such situations.  

> An ideal, but certainly attainable option is to have one single online
> repository for papers, in the same vein as citeseer or cogprints.
> Researchers can then retrieve the papers they are interested in, read them,
> and return a score based on relevance, originality, and the like. Perhaps
> they can submit a more detailed commentary anonymously, visible to the
> author(s) only. 
> 
> In this age, one should optimally try to benefit from modern internet
> technologies. Let the academic public decide which articles they deem
> relevant and useful. This way articles are much faster distributed (the
> current 1, 2, 3 year delay between writing and publishing is really becoming
> ridiculous nowadays).

The big time sinks are collecting reviews and then getting the paper to press.
The former is a necessary evil, the magic stamp of approval.  The latter,
however, could be dispensed with by personally providing access to 
electronic versions that index engines, such as CiteSeer, can latch onto.

And don't we already decide which articles are relevant and useful?  Does
it really matter if the information comes from a peer-reviewed journal or
self-published technical report?  Neuroprose was full of such documents.

The real issue, IMHO, has nothing to do with disseminating information.
Want everyone to have your paper?  Just post it, don't bother submitting
it to a journal.  The true problem is the apparent value of a published 
article to those committies and administrators outside our field.

-- 
John F. Kolen				  voice: 850.202.4420 
Research Scientist			  fax:   850.202.4440 
Institute for Human and Machine Cognition 
University of West Florida