Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!pucc!PSYCH@TCSVM From: harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: sci.psychology.digest Subject: PSYCOLOQUY V1 #13 (discussion : 201 lines) Message-ID: <9009160521.AA14163@psycho.Princeton.EDU> Date: 15 Sep 90 18:25:21 GMT Sender: VMNNPOST@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Listserv to Netnews Gateway) Organization: Listserv to Netnews Gateway at pucc.Princeton.EDU Lines: 196 Approved: PSYCH@TCSVM PSYCOLOQUY Sat, 15 Sep 90 Volume 1 : Issue 13 Electronic journals. (line 12) Comment on Emotion and Performance Symposium (line 153) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dr J A Pickering Subject: Electronic journals. Some thoughts on electronic journals. Quite a bit, perhaps the majority, of the recent literature on electronic journals has concerned things like access, security and organisation/distribution. These issues are important, but just as important are the more usual editorial problems such as how to get refereeing done in time and how to ensure it is good enough to make a journal one in which it is worth publishing. There is perhaps a tendency for academics to be functionally fixed on what constitutes a journal and to see electronic communication primarily as a way of doing more rapidly what they used to do on paper rather than exploring the properties of the medium in innovative ways. Consider, for example, that electronic journals may provide a unique teaching as well as research resource. Making journals more accessible is certainly one way to encourage students to read them, but as those who teach know, the problem is not only how to provide access to journals but also how to get people to read them. A good way would be to make them more enjoyable to read. Accessibility is related to the questions "who gets to read it?" and "how can they get hold of it?" Enjoyability is perhaps more related to questions like "who gets to write and edit the articles?" and "how carefully are the articles inspected and selected?" All these questions are important and one of the exciting things about electronic journals is that they might offer new answers. Answers, moreover, which may promote new forms of communication within the academic community. For example, a novel aspect of electronic journals is the speedy interconnectivity they support between editors, referees, authors and readers, as pointed out in a previous paper (Harnad, Psycoloquy, March 21st., 1990). This not only has implications for access, though it is clear that electronic distribution is faster and more flexible than paper journals, but also, or at least potentially, for the speed of peer review. The slowness of paper journals is more a function of the necessarily slow process of refereeing as it is of the laborious processes of typeseting, copy editing, proof reading, printing and mailing. Not that this slowness is a bad thing. It encourages the considered presentation of carefully prepared texts which is an important and unique form of academic communication. It is not, however, the only one. Others, such as debate, discussion and dialogue generally are just as vital a part of academic life but they occur on a shorter time scales than those involved in conventional paper journal publication and response. As Harnad points out, an intriguing aspect of electronic journals is that their comparatively greater speed may permit new forms of rapid editorial and peer response which may in turn permit the contents of electronic journals to be more like the record of a dialogue in progress rather than the interchange of relatively finalised positions. As an example, consider the following proposal for an electronic journal promoting new ways to share ideas. It is fairly similar to Psycoloquy as it now stands, but perhaps with the editorial and refereeing proceedures made more explicit. This might be a necessary step if contributions to an electronic journal are to become as significant as those to paper journals. The journal would be mainly, or even entirely, for abstracts. Numbers of the journal would appear regularly and thus would be more identifiable when reference is made to papers in them. The journal could also appear relatively frequently, say monthly, carrying a small number of items, say four. Abstracts must observe a firm length constraint set at, say, no more than two thousand words or, the more draconian limit proposed by Harnad of one screenfull. Authors submit abstracts to a single editor whose email address is a gate from which abstracts are copied in parallel to a relatively large board of referees. For each number of the journal, every referee sees the same cohort of abstracts and, if they wish to obtain them from the authors, the articles behind them. Prior to the deadline for a particular number, referees return to the editor a list of what they consider to be the best abstracts in the cohort. The list could have some agreed length limits, say, no more than eight and no less than one. Returning no list could be a sign that a referee wishes to resign. Referees might also be required to rank their lists, and perhaps to add terse comments on the abstracts in it, though that increases their workload. The returned lists are accumulated in a central register. To be considered for publication an abstract must have been selected by more than some agreed proportion of the board of referees. Once that condition is met, an abstract is given a score based on how many editors selected it or on their rankings, if rankings were given. This score is used to give an overall ranking to all abstracts in the central register. Assuming that more than four abstracts make it from the cohort into the central register, the top four are published. The rest are returned to authors along with their scores and any comments they received. Authors of the 'near miss' abstracts might be invited to resubmit abstracts for inclusion in the next edition's cohort. Anonymity of refrereeing is no problem, since authors just get a score and comments without any information about which referee selected or did not select their abstract. Anonymity of submission perhaps is a little more difficult although it would be relatively easy for the editor to replace author and referee details with aliases. Refereees and authors could then use these aliases and the editors email gate as the channel of communication. So what do participants in this form of interchange get that they don't already get with paper journals? Well, referees get to do a fair deal of reading but little writing. Readers get to see a select sample of abstracts of hitherto unpublished work. Authors get two relatively novel forms of peer review. The first is the score their abstract achieves. This will be more rapidly received and will be based on the judgement of a greater number of refereees than is usually the case in paper journals. Assuming their abstract gets published, the second form of peer review is the number of requests authors get for the full paper: this is a barometer of interest in the ideas laid out in their abstract. Requests for the full article could either be answered electronically, which would presumably be faster than using something like the Psychological Abstracts system, or by paper mail if better graphics and layout than electronic trasmission permits were required. Some obvious questions would need attention. For example: can an abstract be too short? what if authors submit an abstract but don't actually have a significantly longer paper to back it up? does there have to be a longer paper anyway? what if editors don't look at their incoming cohort of abstracts? what if there aren't enough submitted abstracts? what if there are too many? ... and so on. However, these problems all look soluble. In any case, this particular scheme is clearly not the only way to run an electronic journal. It is offered merely to extend the point made by Harnad and others that electronic journals are a means to create new forms of academic communication rather than just ways to make old forms go faster. Reference: Harnad, S. (1990) Message 10/29, Psycoloquy, March 21st.,1990. ------------------------------ From: Jonathan Grudin Subject: Comment on Emotion and Performance Symposium The following paragraph appeared in Psycoloquy, Vol. 1 Issue 10: "In contrast, occupations in which negative, esteem-degrading emotions are used as tools of social influence have been studied much less frequently. Hochschild (1983) reports results from a modest number of interviews with bill collectors. She concludes that collectors are generally rewarded for the expression of nasty feelings towards debtors and that such esteem-degrading emotions are generally effective means for making people their bills. But her findings are preliminary, she provides little discussion of the conceptual mechanisms that explain these findings, and she does not consider the potential dysfunctions of expressed negative emotion for organizational or individual performance." Note that the subject of the first sentence can be seen as characterizing the final sentence. The final sentence could as easily and perhaps more effectively been written "In this paper, we extend her preliminary findings, discuss the underlying conceptual mechanisms, and consider the potential dysfunctions of expressed negative emotion for organizational or individual performance." A minor point, perhaps, but reading interesting work such as the paper this was taken from would be even more enjoyable if we were just a shade more generous with one another. -- Jonathan Grudin ------------------------------ PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association (202) 955-7653 Co-Editors: (scientific discussion) (professional/clinical discussion) Stevan Harnad Perry London, Dean, Cary Cherniss (Assoc Ed.) Psychology Department Graduate School of Applied Graduate School of Applied Princeton University and Professional Psychology and Professional Psychology Rutgers University Rutgers University Assistant Editors: Malcolm Bauer John Pizutelli Psychology Department Psychology Department Princeton University Rutgers University End of PSYCOLOQUY Digest ******************************