-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Santa Fe Open Archive Convention Released Today
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 10:32:22 -0500
From: Simon Buckingham Shum <S.Buckingham.Shum@OPEN.AC.UK>

At 6:15 pm -0000 15/2/00, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>> Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 15:25:57 -0500
>> From: Antonella Pavese <pavese@SHRSYS.HSLC.ORG>
...
>> Another very serious issue associated with our current publishing
>> system, however, is that of the geological times required to publish
>> any work. If one wants to publish in one of the leading journals in our
>> area, for example the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
>> Perception and Performance, it may take many months just to receive the
>> reviews, and even after complete acceptance, the waiting time for
>> publication is more than one year. This means that it takes AT LEAST
>> three years of work to see your work published. Reading the current
>> literature is like to watch a far star: what you see is what happened
>> many years ago.
>
>Although implementing online refereeing by journals will speed up the
>peer review somewhat, spreading the nets wider and faster, and
>distributing the refereeing load more equally, refereeing delays are as
>unavoidable as other delays in the duties of heavily loaded researchers.
>Please do not confuse the delays inherent in the use of a finite human
>resource, referees, who referee for free, with the other delays of
>publication, which are no longer necessary (such as the delay in
>coming out in print, or the delays inherent in the need to resort to
>interlibrary loan if one's institution cannot afford a subscription).

We have been implementing online, *interactive* peer review (ie. authors
and reviewers can engage in a discussion) in JIME, the Jnl. of
Interactive
Media in Education <http://www-jime.open.ac.uk>. Our technological
infrastructure for document peer review is available for anyone to use
(as
happily, will soon be the case for e-print archives), so this is not a
bottleneck issue. JIME submissions are published as preprints as soon as
reviewers have been appointed, and final versions published as soon as
received. The notion of a calendar "issue" is now irrelevant (though
thematic issues are of course valuable).

It is, as Stevan points out, the *reviewers* who are typically the
bottleneck, as they're so busy and unpaid -- intellectual added value
doesn't come cheap. However, because we specify a set period (about a
month) for the asynchronous web-based review discussion, having verified
that period with the authors' and reviewers' diaries, and set their
expectations to aim for a productive dialogue, we usually get a
reasonable
degree of participation (but not always). In other words, this may be a
case of the medium changing the review process. I'd also add that once
the
reviewers have done their work, the authors are often slow in revising -
possibly 2 months added to publicaiton time.

Average publication time ~6 months -- noting again that relatively
little
of this is due to the technology of publication, although of course,
working with digital documents and multimedia demonstrations adds its
own
unique twists.

Simon

 ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
 Dr Simon Buckingham Shum              Knowledge  Media  Institute
 The Open University                   Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA,  UK
 Mailto:sbs@acm.org
 http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/            Tel: +44 (0)1908-655723
 Fax: +44 (0)870-122-8765 (personal)   +44 (0)1908-653169 (office)
 Jnl. Interactive Media in Education:  http://www-jime.open.ac.uk
 ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬