Learned inquiry and the Net: the role of peer review, peer commentary and copyright.

Learned inquiry and the Net: the role of peer review, peer commentary and copyright. I should begin by defining some of the metaphors I use in this paper.By the 'Gutenberg Galaxy' I mean the world of print on paper.Thus the 'PostGutenberg Galaxy' is its successor, the virtualworld of bytes on tape, disk and screen - and especially dispersal inthe fibre-optic cables enmeshing the globe and transmitting themeverywhere at the speed of light. I also use the term'Skywriting,' for the dissemination of the written word in thePostGutenberg Galaxy is very much like writing it all up in the sky, foreveryone to see and to append To add to the end of an existing structure. their own scribblings onto, rather likethe serial graffiti in public toilets, except on a galactic scale. Orperhaps a global Hyde Park Hyde Park, park, London, EnglandHyde Park,615 acres (249 hectares) in Westminster borough, London, England. Once the manor of Hyde, a part of the old Westminster Abbey property, it became a deer park under Henry VIII. , with the orations and cat-calls alldelivered graphically rather than orally.But perhaps the best simile simile(sĭm`əlē)[Lat.,=likeness], in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which an object is explicitly compared to another object. Robert Burns's poem "A Red Red Rose" contains two straightforward similes: for the Net is that it is like a cleannuclear weapon still being used mainly for children's games. For ifyou consider the only written corpus that matters to those who havetaken the path of Learned Inquiry, then it is a fact that as of this dayin late 1997, 99.9% of it is still available only as print on paper.There are a vast number of bits up there in the sky, but very few ofthem are the learned bits. And even those that are, are mostly hiddenbehind 'firewalls' that keep out anyone who has not paid toview them.Why not, you ask? People's writings were not given away gratis GRATIS. Without reward or consideration. 2. When a bailee undertakes to perform some act or work gratis, he is answerable for his gross negligence, if any loss should be sustained in consequence of it; but a distinction exists between non-feasance and in the Gutenberg era either: why should skywriting skywriting,advertising medium in which aircraft spell out trade names and sales slogans in the sky by means of the controlled emission of thick smoke. The technique was first developed (1922) by J. C. Savage, a pioneer English aviator. be free now? Afterall, Learned Inquiry surely isn't literally (if one can be literalabout a metaphor) a Hyde Park or Global Graffiti Board. But of coursethe authors of the learned serial literature - that means thecontributors of everything that appears between the covers of therefereed scientific and scholarly journals to which research librariesmust subscribe and on which all further research depends - are neverpaid a penny for their texts. Nor do they wish to be paid.It's time for another metaphor, not a flattering one toscholars, but a handy way of understanding the anomaly of this state ofaffairs, unique in the Gutenberg Galaxy, where most writers are paid fortheir texts, in some cases very handsomely: When the scholar/scientistis wearing his learned-journal hat - for scholars may wear other hatstoo, when they are trying to write popular books or textbooks ormagazine articles - when they are writing for their fellow-scholars intheir specialized periodicals, the text they publish is much betterthought of as an advertisement, rather than as anything analogous tonormal fee- or royalty-based publication. It makes about as much sensefor a learned author to restrict his work to those who have paid a feeto access it as it would for an advertiser to allow only those to readhis adverts who have paid for the right to do so.In his learned journal articles, a scholar is trying to make acontribution to knowledge. The only mark of having made a contributionto knowledge is to have one's work read, cited and built upon byone's fellow scholars. Otherwise one may as well not have done thework at all, pursuing instead a career with more tangible rewards. Thisis not to say that Learned Inquiry does not have material rewards. Fewget Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals, but promotion, tenure, travel - plusthe funds to perform further research (in the disciplines that rely onresearch grants) - all of these depend on one's scholarlycontribution; and the main measure of that contribution is one'slearned serial publications. (I am agnostic about those fields ofscholarship where it is books rather than journal articles that carry ascholar's intellectual goods, though I rather suspect that thestory for esoteric learned monographs will be similar to the story forrefereed journal refereed journal,n a professional or literary journal or publication in which articles or papers are selected for publication by a panel of readers or referees who are experts in the field. articles.)Although publish-or-perish bean-counting is still definitely with us,it was never a matter of publishing just anything, in just any journal:there is a hierarchy of learned journals in every field, and those atthe top are rightly assigned a heavier weight in reviewing ascholar's contribution than the ones at the bottom. So if journalarticles are like adverts, then their impact depends not only on thefact that they were published, but also on where they were published -in a street-corner flier or a Bergdorf-Goodman Catalogue. What theauthor actually wrote admittedly takes something of a back seat in allthis, but it is assumed, usually correctly, that the real triage - thereal 'quality control,' to use another revolting commercialdescriptor (1) A word or phrase that identifies a document in an indexed information retrieval system.(2) A category name used to identify data. (operating system) descriptor that makes scholarship sound like garment-manufacture or theinspection of pork bellies Pork BelliesThe commodities underlying the majority of futures contracts trading pork livestock.Notes:A pork belly is the actual name for the cut of the hog. This cut is then used for commercial pork supplies of bacon, pork meat, etc. - is performed by the referees and editors ofthe learned journals (and here the analogy with advertising breaksdown). It is the peers of each realm of Learned Inquiry who decide whatis worthy of publication, and where; refereeing is also called'peer review.'So, so far you have had a hint of why scholars publish at all:it's to make their work known to their peers, so others can buildon it in the cumulative, collaborative enterprise that is LearnedInquiry. But it is also in order to get credit for their work in thecumulative, competitive enterprise called making a living. So farthat's two reasons why journal articles are like advertisementsrather than trade books or articles. Another reason is the 'ImpactFactor'. This is a measure of how well-cited an author or journalis: it is the number of citations divided by the number of articles. AnImpact Factor of 1 means one citation per article. Even if that onecitation is not a self- citation, it does not attest to much of animpact: it's rather like zero population growth, except it'szero knowledge growth.It may surprise you to hear that an impact factor of i is actuallyquite high on average, because the average learned article gets nocitations (and many may never even get read at all, except by the editorand referees). This does not imply that we should cut back theliterature to only those papers that have high impact factors. First ofall, you can't know a paper's impact factor in advance;second, some papers are late bloomers, their importance picked up onlyyears after publication. But last, there is invariably in��var��i��a��ble?adj.Not changing or subject to change; constant.in��vari��a��bil a certain ratioof chaff chaff1. chaffed hay; called also chop.2. the winnowings from a threshing, consisting of awns, husks, glumes and other relatively indigestible materials. to wheat in every field of human endeavour; rather than tryingto cull cullthe act of culling. Called also cast. it all out in advance, it makes more sense to have a hierarchyof journals in which peer review determines how high in the hierarchy apaper should go. The most rigorously reviewed journals are at the top,and it all grades down into a vanity press at the bottom. This is how itis today in paper, and this hierarchy must be duplicated on the Net.But I'm getting ahead of myself again: we were talking about whyit would even enter anyone's mind that Scholarly Skywriting shouldbe given away, any more than terrestrial scribbling is. I'vesuggested an answer: what the scholar wants for his learned articles iseyeballs, not pennies, the eyes-balls of his peers, and the minds towhich eye-balls are normally connected, from which future knowledge willflow. Let us call all of this 'Impact' for short. It isbecause the learned author writes for Impact that he would much preferthat his bits reach every inquiring mind without any needlessimpediment.In the Gutenberg era there was an unavoidable impediment: thetechnology of print on paper, though simpler and cheaper than thehand-copying of illuminated manuscripts (which was itself an improvementon the oral tradition), is nevertheless quite pricey compared tostanding up on a soap-box in Hyde Park and proclaiming one'sfindings to one and all gratis. Nor is it very efficient, as the bits onpaper must be awkwardly transported to all readers by some means, whichis usually by carrying them to the subscribing library and then beingmet by an equal dose of legwork leg��work?n. InformalWork, such as collecting information or doing research in preparation for a project, that involves much walking or traveling about. on the part of the would-be reader, whomust fetch it from the library - if there is one, and if it subscribesto the journal in which the article appeared, or has an interlibrary in��ter��li��brar��y?adj.Existing or occurring between or involving two or more libraries: an interlibrary loan; an interlibrary network.loan service, or provides copyright-clearance-cleared photocopies, andif the author knows about the article, has the time to spare fromresearch and reading to devote instead to finding and fetching, and ifhe is lucky enough to be near a library that subscribes, or rich enoughto subscribe himself.These impediments are all real, and chief among them is the fact thatthe costliness of producing and distributing print on paper means thatthe publisher must make a sizeable investment in providing thetechnology and service if the author's work is to reach anyeye-balls at all. So the admission ticket must continue to be collectedat the door. As a consequence, it is a reality today that many scholarsand potential scholars the world over have access to very little of thelearned literature purely because of the economics and inefficiency ofdistributing and accessing learned serials as print on paper.And let it not be thought that the only real cost of publishing paperjournals is that of composition, type-setting, printing and distribution(plus the cost of real advertising, and of collecting the toll itself).There is also the 'quality control' I mentioned earlier: aneditor must first evaluate submitted manuscripts by sending them toqualified specialists for peer review, then he must oversee therevisions and perhaps a second or third round of refereeing, beforecertifying it fit for publication and hence for scholarly consumption.Let us call this quality control for content. There is then also qualitycontrol for form, in the form of editing, copy-editing, mark-up andproof-reading. All of this costs money: not the all-importantrefereeing, paradoxically, because the peers do that for free, acting ona tacit 'golden rule': referee others as you would have themreferee you. This is in part superstitious but in part also quiterealistic. (If no one were willing to referee, none of the manuscriptssubmitted to refereed journals could appear - or worse, all of themwould appear, leaving us with no clue as to what was or was not fit forconsumption.)But even with the peers voluntarily stooping beneath thereferee's yoke for free, the rest of the cost of quality control -that of implementing the peer review, copy-editing, etc - all calls forreal money, over and above the paper-specific expenses. It is so as torecover all these costs (plus a fair profit) that the printed word needsto be sold rather than given away, not only in trade publishing but inscholarly serial publishing as well.This is the point where I have to introduce the 'FaustianBargain,' but let me say at the outset that this is not meant to bedemonizing paper publishers at all; they, like the scholar, are jointvictims of the technology and the economics of print on paper. For theFaustian Bargain is this: if you wish to immortalize im��mor��tal��ize?tr.v. im��mor��tal��ized, im��mor��tal��iz��ing, im��mor��tal��iz��esTo make immortal.im��mor your words at all,you will have to surrender your copyright in exchange, so your publishercan recover the substantial cost of getting your intellectual goodsaboard the paper flotilla at all. The author must collaborate in denyingaccess to his adverts to anyone who (or whose library) has not paid forthem.These are mixed metaphors - 'Faust,"paper flotilla' -but we need the metaphor of the paper flotilla carrying the intellectualgoods of Learned Inquiry in the Gutenberg Era so we can contrast it withlaunching them as Skywriting in the PostGutenberg Galaxy. (I especiallylike the French counterpart of Skywriting: L'Ecriture Celeste Celeste is a woman's first name. Celeste may also refer to:in Music Voix c��leste, a Pipe Organ stop. Celesta, a musical instrument Other Spanish/Portuguese for Sky Blue, Light Blue, Baby Blue .)First, though, a little more about copyright, that forensic glue thatbinds together the shared interests of the trade author and the tradepublisher in protecting their joint product from theft. In the tradesector of the Gutenberg Galaxy (which is to say, almost all of it) therewas no conflict of interest, and this will not change in the tradesector of the PostGutenberg Galaxy either. Why should it? Whether youprefer to get my best-seller in paper or paperless form, I and mypublisher still want to get paid for it.But what about the scholar and his publisher? In the'Papyrocentric' Age, despite the conflict of interest inherentin restricting access to his work to those who have paid for it, thescholar/scientist had to collude col��lude?intr.v. col��lud��ed, col��lud��ing, col��ludesTo act together secretly to achieve a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose; conspire. in resolving the conflict in favour ofhis publisher (or rather in favour of the Mephistophelean Diktat dik��tat?n.1. A harsh, unilaterally imposed settlement with a defeated party.2. An authoritative or dogmatic statement or decree. of theGutenberg technology) if he wanted to advertise and immortalize his workat all. This epoch is over; the distribution of the fruits of LearnedInquiry can at last be freed from the Faustian grip of the paper era. Tosee it directly, you must turn your eyes skyward sky��ward?adv. & adj.At or toward the sky.skywards adv. toward XXX, the LosAlamos Physics Eprint Archive, created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991.This remarkable virtual entity began as a momentous decision made bya small community of high energy physicists: about 100 researchers who,like everyone else, had been sharing 'preprints' of their work- manuscripts submitted, or soon to be submitted for peer review - inthe old, expensive, inefficient way, by photocopying them and mailingthem to one another. As they all had logins on the Net and were alreadyin email contact with one another, it seemed sensible to exchangepreprints electronically, without the trouble and expense of generatingpaper. It was only one step more to realize: why even send themelectronically? Why not just archive them electronically and simply sendnotices of the contents of the publicly accessible archive to those onthe email list or anyone else who was interested, and let everyoneaccess whatever they want directly from the Archive?Paul Ginsparg did just this, and within a few years, XXX had grown toencompass more than half of the current literature in most areas ofphysics, and it is still growing at an astonishing rate, with hundredsof papers archived weekly, tens of thousands of users the world over,and no doubt millions of 'hits' of one sort or another, fromthe lookup of a reference to the download of a full 'E-print,'as they have come to be called. For XXX now contains not only theunrefereed preprint pre��print?n.Something printed and often distributed in partial or preliminary form in advance of official publication: a preprint of a scientific article.tr.v. literature, but also the refereed, published reprintliterature too.At this point, Mephistopheles stirs and emits a muffled subterraneanroar: 'What? Published reprints? But what about the price I hadexacted in exchange for immortality via paper? What aboutcopyright!'So what about copyright? Let's first remind ourselves of whatcopyright is intended to protect: the French expression for copyright is'droit d'auteur', 'author's rights'. Whatis it that copyright is protecting the author from? First and foremost,it is meant to protect him from the theft of the authorship of his text.If someone takes my text and publishes it as his own, and is awarded thePulitzer Prize in my place, then he has indeed done me wrong, whether Iam a trade author who seeks payment for his words or a scholar who doesnot. So there is nothing new about the Net insofar in��so��far?adv.To such an extent.Adv. 1. insofar - to the degree or extent that; "insofar as it can be ascertained, the horse lung is comparable to that of man"; "so far as it is reasonably practical he should practice as copyrightprotection from theft of authorship is concerned.It is true that it is easier to plagiarize pla��gia��rize?v. pla��gia��rized, pla��gia��riz��ing, pla��gia��riz��esv.tr.1. To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own.2. a text when you can scoopup its bytes directly, and repackage re��pack��age?tr.v. re��pack��aged, re��pack��ag��ing, re��pack��ag��esTo package again or anew, especially in a more attractive package.re��pack them as your own, as you can in theelectronic medium; but it is also easier to detect plagiarism Using ideas, plots, text and other intellectual property developed by someone else while claiming it is your original work. inSkywriting than on paper. For one thing, there are automatic gremlinsscampering around the Net day and night gathering and'caching' everything that appears, sifting its contentsbyte-for-byte in search of bit-strings that correspond to this interestor that. This is already true today, when most of what's up therein the sky is still junk. But it would be easy for an author or employerto send out such 'knowbots' to search for bit-stringscorresponding to samples from a particular text, to make sure it has notbeen plagiarized - or vice versa VICE VERSA. On the contrary; on opposite sides. , as the case may be (authorship theftcuts both ways: think about it!).Skywriting is also an excellent way of 'date-stamping' textso as to establish primacy. There are still some technical date- andsource-authentication problems that need to be ironed out, but sufficeit to say that if I post my Fields-Medal-Winning proof on the Web today,there will be many more ways to confirm that it was indeed mine, andindeed posted by me today, than there would be if I had mailed papercopies to colleagues or to a journal - or if I presented it orally at aseminar, for that matter. To 'publish' in the sky is to'go public' in a big way!So let us not dwell on the authorship-protection function ofcopyright; that's a red herring Red HerringA preliminary registration statement that must be filed with the SEC describing a new issue of stock (IPO) and the prospects of the issuing company.Notes: : it will be at least as wellprotected on the Net as on paper. But there is another protection thatcopyright is meant to bestow, over and above protection from the theftof one's authorship of one's own text, and that is protectionfrom the theft of the text itself. This is certainly what most peoplehave in mind when they worry about the Net as a copyright risk.Let me immediately say that a text anywhere on the Net is at greatrisk of being stolen, and that it will not be as easy to detect thatkind of theft as it will be to detect the theft of authorship. This iswhere the 'firewalls' I mentioned earlier come in - althoughthat is a double metaphor: not only are network firewalls not reallywalls of fire, but the term is normally used to refer to barriersagainst public entry into a private network, rather than to barriersagainst unpaid access to digital texts. But as you see, these two cometo much the same thing. There will be reliable firewalls that will blockaccess to texts until they are duly paid for, perhaps with digital cash,but I hope it is clear to you by now that this kind of firewallprotection is not at all what the authors of learned serial articlesneed or want. The authors of the preprints and reprints in XXX arearchiving them there precisely so as to remove all firewalls obstructingthe free flow of their bits to any mind that may wish to eyeball them,anywhere, at any time.So copyright protection from theft of text is literally moot in thespecial literature we have been discussing: copyright cannot and neednot be invoked to protect an author from something against which hewishes no protection: Le droit d'auteur n'est pus pus,thick white or yellowish fluid that forms in areas of infection such as wounds and abscesses. It is constituted of decomposed body tissue, bacteria (or other micro-organisms that cause the infection), and certain white blood cells. la pour meproteger contre moi-meme!What about the publisher? The reason scholars entered into theFaustian Bargain in the paper era was that if they did not assigncopyright to their publishers then the texts could be stolen, thepublishers would fail to recover the costs of publishing them, and sothey could not be published at all. If this is no longer true in the newmedium, what has changed to make it so?What is the difference in cost between a paper page and a skywrittenpage? It depends on whom you ask. Paper publishers will tell you thatthe difference is not that much, because the lion's share of thecost of publication is the price of producing that first page you print;the rest of the copies of that page cost little more whether you printten of them or ten thousand; and that first-page cost, which you willhave whether you go into paper or into bits, represents 75% of thecurrent cost of paper publication; the saving from going electronic is amere 25%, which does not sound like the basis for any revolutionarychange in economic model. Moreover, because for the time being therestill seems to be a demand for that much maligned ma��lign?tr.v. ma��ligned, ma��lign��ing, ma��lignsTo make evil, harmful, and often untrue statements about; speak evil of.adj.1. Evil in disposition, nature, or intent.2. paper edition, thecost of producing both a paper and an electronic incarnation of ajournal actually increases the total cost to 125% per page.On the basis of this reckoning, most paper publishers are proposingsomething along the following lines for the future: for now, as there isstill a demand for the paper edition, it can be subscribed to at theusual price; a subscription for both the paper and the electronicedition will cost a little more, and the electronic edition only, alittle less. This way publishers are ready for the transition wheneverwe are, and everything proceeds pretty much as it has been doing untilnow. The author's hopes of giving his texts away are, alas,quashed. As in the Gutenberg era, cost-recovery necessitates chargingadmission at the door. The Faustian Bargain continues to be the onlydeal in town.But if instead of asking a paper publisher how much it costs toproduce an electroniconly version of a learned journal you ask some ofthe brave souls who have launched electronic-only journals, you willhear that the savings are more like 75% per page, and probably evenbetter than that. What is responsible for the difference in arithmetic?I think it is that the paper publishers are reckoning the page costs thewrong way. They are wrapping all their current expenses into the pageprice, and then subtracting the line items that are specifically forgenerating the hard copy. This means they are retaining the costs of aninfrastructure that is purpose-built for producing and distributingprint-on-paper, and merely subtracting print-specific expenses. This islike a horse-drawn transport service calculating that if they switchedto horseless Horse´lessa. 1. Being without a horse; specif., not requiring a horse; - said of certain vehicles in which horse power has been replaced by electricity, steam, etc.; as, a horselesscarriage or truck s>. carriages all it would save would be the price of the hay!Electronic-only journals that have started bottom-up, without any ofthe papyrocentric infrastructure, are reporting much lower page costs,but unfortunately they are also having trouble filling those pages,because the hard currency for recognition and advancement in LearnedInquiry is still paper, for the simple reason that all the establishedjournals happen to be paper ones. So although it all sounds good intheory that free electronic journals are optimal and inevitable, theoptimal and the inevitable still look a long way off.I will now close with a breathless sketch of a viable transitionscenario to the optimal and inevitable outcome in learned serialpublishing, followed by a brief coda about the most revolutionaryfeature of Learned Skywriting, one that remains to be explored.I've made a subversive proposal for hastening the day: what isneeded is a way that scholars can have their cake and eat it too. Theyshould continue to submit their papers to the prestigious paper journalsof their choice, but they should at the same time archive them publiclyon the Web, first as unrefereed preprints and then, once they have beenreviewed, revised and accepted for publication by the paper journal, asrefereed reprints. The archiving can be done in either or both of twoways: on their local Web Server or on a centralized Eprint server,mirrored world-wide, like XXX, preferably both, to help the searchgremlins gather, organize and index it in more uniform ways. TheseEprint archives should be strongly supported by institutions andresearch funding agencies.Unless there is something unaccountably un��ac��count��a��ble?adj.1. Impossible to account for; inexplicable: unaccountable absences.2. different about physics, theother disciplines should follow the same pattern and come to use theArchive as the locus classicus for accessing the journal literature. Asthe Archive comes into its own, libraries should at last begin gettingthe green light from their users to start cancelling journalsubscriptions. The sooner publishers see the handwriting on the wall handwriting on the wallDaniel interprets supernatural sign as Belshazzar’s doom. [O.T.: Daniel 5:25–28]See : Omen -or in the sky, as the case may be - they should start to take steps to take action; to move in a matter.See also: Step forsome radical perestroika if they wish to continue publishing learnedserials.The scenario branches here for those publishers who do elect tochange and those who don't: those publishers who do not restructurethemselves, who persist in trying to use the subscription or sitelicense or pay-per-view model (S/SL/PPV) for cost recovery, especiallyif they attempt to use submission policy and copyright as a way ofpreventing their authors from publicly archiving their preprints andreprints, respectively (as many are doing now), will simply lose theirEditorial Boards, who will emigrate to the Web on their own, under userpressure (after all, they are us!), and will reconstitute re��con��sti��tute?tr.v. re��con��sti��tut��ed, re��con��sti��tut��ing, re��con��sti��tutes1. To provide with a new structure: The parks commission has been reconstituted.2. themselves aselectronic-only journals, with or without the old brand name, so as torecover the much lower page costs through author-end page charges,instead of S/SL/PPV, all of which block access by the reader.The page-charges will at first be paid entirely by government anduniversity subsidy. This will amount to less than $50 per page, to payfor the only remaining costs of learned e-journal publication: the priceof implementing peer review and providing editing, copy-editing andmark-up - in other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , the cost of quality control of form andcontent. As the culture changes, these page-charges will be covered aspart of the cost of supporting scholarly/scientific research itself. Thepreferred scenario is for the present paper publishers to restructurethemselves on the new model, ensuring continuity of the known andtrusted brand-name journals. Either way, learned serial publication willbecome an overlay on the Learned Eprint Archive, authenticating thepeer-reviewed sector with their imprimatur, but with the Archive itselfas the point of access.In exchange for all this, the learned serial literature will beavailable everywhere, for everyone, for free, forever, as it alwayswould have been, but for the tyranny of print on paper in the GutenbergEra.Now a coda about peer review versus peer commentary.I doubt I'm the first to notice that the World Wide Web today islike the Wild Wild West a couple of centuries ago: there's the samesense of limitless space where the shackles of the old order can at lastbe cast off. And of course there's no scarcity of cowboys. Thisdemography and this atmosphere have persuaded many scholars andscientists that the Net is not a suitable medium for serious work, apartfrom exchanging one-on-one email, perhaps.The Wild-West ethos has given rise not only to a touching butunrealistic animus Animus - ["Constraint-Based Animation: The Implementation of Temporal Constraints in the Animus System", R. Duisberg, PhD Thesis U Washington 1986]. against charging money for anything on the Web, butalso, when it comes to publication, a rejection of any form ofrefereeing or editing as censorship. These well-intentioned souls havesuggested that pre-publication peer review is best replaced bypost-publication peer commentary'. let everything appear, and thenlet readers vote with their eyeballs and skywriting.I have edited for 20 years a paper journal, Behavioral and BrainSciences Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), founded in 1978 and published by Cambridge University Press, is a journal of Open Peer Commentary modeled on the journal Current Anthropology (BBS (1) (Bulletin Board System) A computer system used as an information source and forum for a particular interest group. They were widely used in the U.S. ), published by Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). . BBS specializesin publishing important and controversial 'target articles' inthe biobehavioural and cognitive sciences. Each article is co-publishedwith up to 30 peer commentaries, plus the author's response. Thisfeature has earned a whopping Impact Factor of 15 for BBS, higher thanany but the widest spectrum interdisciplinary science journals likeScience and Nature. BBS's Impact Factor attests to the value thescientific community finds in having work treated in this interactiveway, and its 'open peer commentary' feature has since beenaccorded the sincerest form of flattery, as it has been imitated byseveral other journals, just as BBS itself was modelled on CurrentAnthropology, the first journal of open peer commentary.Peer commentary, however, is no substitute for peer review, andindeed, BBS is a very rigorously peer-reviewed journal peer-reviewed journalRefereed journal Academia A professional journal that only publishes articles subjected to a rigorous peer validity review process. Cf Throwaway journal. , with a highrejection rate, each accepted article going through several rounds ofrevision and re-refereeing before it is allowed to run the gauntlet ofopen peer commentary.Every editor of a learned journal, commentary journal or not, is in aposition to sample what the literature would have looked like ifeverything had appeared without review. Not only would a vanity press ofraw manuscripts be unnavigable, but the brave souls who had nothingbetter to do than to sift through all that chaff and post theircommentaries to guide us would be the last ones to trust for calibratingour finite reading time.Peer commentary is a superb supplement to peer review, but certainlyno substitute for it. If, however, you now imagine the refereedliterature appearing in the skies freely available for all, then ofcourse commentaries - both refereed ones and informal unrefereed ones -could enrich that literature at a speed and on a scale that thecollaborative, cumulative corpus of Learned Inquiry has never beforeknown. The wonders of skywritten peer commentary, however, are a topicfor a different paper.ReferencesGINSPARG, P. 1994. First steps towards electronic researchcommunication, Computers in Physics (August) 8(4): 390-96.http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/HARNAD, S. 1990. Scholarly skywriting and the prepublication pre��pub��li��ca��tion?adj.Of or relating to the time just before a publication date, especially of a book: The marketing department was amazed by the number of prepublication orders.continuum of scientific inquiry, Psychological Science 1:342-3(reprinted in Current Contents 45 (11 November 1991): 9-13.ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad90.skywriting.html1991. 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