Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
more than a binary process - something whereby a paper has either
passed peer review or not. It needs to give readers a measure of the
likely importance of a given piece of information. Currently in many
(but by no means all) disciplines, a combination of peer review and
journal brand provides this authority.
The association with a journal brand is important and makes peer
review more than a mere binary process. The same peer reviewers could
well accept a manuscript for one journal but reject it for another, based
on the quality standards of the journal, its subject coverage or niche, the
support of a particular doctrine, etc. The reviewers know what is
acceptable for a particular journal (which is why it can be so hard for
journal publishers to change their quality standards) and, similarly,
readers get a great deal of information about an article by virtue of its
association with a particular journal before they even read a word. Of
course, the readers do not know from the journal title whether an article
is good, bad or indifferent, but they do have an indication of what they
are likely to find, and that is a very important filter on the literature. It
is why authors posting to online repositories are so keen to associate
their articles with a journal.
In the scholarly publishing environment this trustworthiness
currently comes from the brand of the journal or the topic publisher.
The publisher takes responsibility for the credibility (not necessarily the
correctness) of what it publishes. Some mechanism by which readers can
quickly determine the credibility and trustworthiness of what they find
online is a prerequisite for an orderly digital world, although of course
this mechanism may not always be the established system of reliance on
publisher brands.
Awareness - dissemination
In the days of print on paper, making content available was an
expensive business. Thanks to Johannes Gutenberg and movable type,
academics did not have to rely on monks copying scholarly works by
hand, but typesetting, printing and distribution were still a costly
exercise that needed expertise and expensive equipment.
Online digital publishing has changed all that, of course. Now
dissemination, at least as far as 'making available' goes, is the easy and
inexpensive part of the process. Some have replicated this function,
