I hardly see how requiring the deposit of manuscripts into
PubMed
Central or an institutional repository *AFTER* the formal
refereeing and publication acceptance process is in any way
"formalizIng the informal." Nobody is mandating
that scientists
deposit their preliminary results. These post-acceptance
deposits
in no way affect the traditional informal communication
channels
that scientists use.
Anyway, has arXiv.org "dismantled the institution of
science as
we know it today?" "Today," of course being
1971 -- the embryo
years of the internet, pre-web, mainframe computers, and
three
television networks. Communication has changed just a bit in
the
last 37 years, and applying old pre-internet communication
research to today may not be very useful.
Mark Funk
Head, Resource Management - Collections
Weill Cornell Medical Library
New York, NY 10065-4805
mefunk med.cornell.edu
> From: owner-liblicense-llists.yale.edu
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 9:22 PM
> To: liblicense-llists.yale.edu
> Subject: Flashback to 1971: formalizing informal
communication
> channels
>
> In the early 1970s, the American Psychological
Association
> entrusted two psychologists, William D. Garvey and
Belver C.
> Griffith to make sense of the "crisis in scholarly
> communication." In doing so, they embarked on
research to
> first better understand the communication processes of
> researchers -- both the *informal* where most of the
> communication among peers is done, and the *formal*
which
> describes the traditional journal and book publication
process.
>
> In one of their first published reports [1], the
psychologists
> warn about formalizing the informal communication
channels.
> They write,
>
> "accelerating the flow of scientific information
in the
> informal domain and expanding its dissemination is a
problem
> precisely because it occurs in systems that obscure the
> boundary between the informal and formal domains. This
boundary
> is one that science has deliberately erected to
curtail,
> temporarily, the flow of information until the
information has
> been examined against the current state of knowledge in
a
> discipline. Non-scientists view procedure of
curtailment as
> ultra-conservative; experienced, practicing scientists
perceive
> it as the essential feature of science....The long
judicious
> procedure by which this conversion is made is unique to
> science. To reorganize it for the sake of speed, or for
open
> communication with other spheres of intellectual
endeavor,
> would almost certainly dismantle the institution of
science as
> we know it today." (p.362)
>
> Manuscript depositing mandates (e.g. Harvard, NIH,
etc.) could
> be seen as essentially formalizing the informal. Most
of the
> discussion surrounding the debates have been on
immediate
> effects (the time and resources devoted to archiving,
the
> mechanisms required to streamline the process). Little
has been
> devoted to possible unintended consequences of such
mandates.
> Unintended consequences are not necessarily negative
[2], and I
> don't want to imply that I'm implying an argument
against
> institutional archiving. Still, is there reason to
argue (like
> Garvey and Griffith) that we should strive to keep the
informal
> and formal communication processes separate?
>
> --Phil Davis
>
> [If these graduate student ramblings are tiresome, I'm
happy to
> return to more pedestrian dialogs].
>
> [1] Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1971).
Scientific
> communication: Its role in the conduct of research and
creation
> of knowledge. American Psychologist, 26(4), 350-362.
>
> [2] Merton, R. K. (1936). The Unanticipated
Consequences of
> Purposive Social Action. American Sociological Review,
1(6),
> 894-904.
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