Response to: Legal Issues associated...

Jon Knight responds to Charles Oppenheims Legal Issues associated with Electronic Copyright Management Systems article.

In his talk reported in Ariadne issue 2, Charles Oppenheim says the following about the prospect of taking publishers out of the loop between authors and readers:

"This will not be in the interests of publishers, nor ultimately in the interests of the libraries or users. Publishers provide a means of controlling the information explosion by maintaining quality. By-passing them will be a serious step with implications for bibliographic control and the quality of research. There is already a delicate and tense relationship between data owners and data users."

I found the rest of the article/talk to be very illuminating and useful but I had to pick up on this.

This is an argument that one hears time and time again on the various library and EP mailing lists but it fails to take into account one thing: publishers DON'T guarantee quality material any more than a home grown web page does. Sure, some journals are well respected, quality, peer reviewed publications but there are well respected, quality, peer reviewed web pages and there are also unrespected, low quality, sometimes peer reviewed paper journals published. Just because something has a publisher doesn't mean its worth reading.

In the long run you judge the usefulness of a publication based on your experience with it. I know that in my own field there are some mailing lists which are of far better "quality" and more useful to me than any paper journal that has gone through the traditional long winded peer reviewed publishing process. Why? Because I value immediacy - I like to know what is being done by the real "movers and shakers" now, warts and all, rather than the rose tinted reviews of the work we'll all see in the learned journals in two years time.

Don't get me wrong; I still see a need for publishers as organisations that form a catalyst for causing debate and recording knowledge. Its just that the publisher equals quality argument doesn't appear to hold water for me.

Jon Knight,
Computer teccie/researcher,
Department of Computer Science,
Loughborough University.

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