Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

A return to a question of distinguishing "publishing" from other forms of network-public discourse. What seemed fairly simple in the world of print (for example, knowing the difference between a publication and a private letter) begins to be more complicated in a medium where formal discourse and chit-chat flow in the same pipeline. Does "esoteric" do justice to the significance of scholarly publishing?

From harnad Tue Jul 19 12:12:54 1994 serialst@uvmvm.bitnet (Lib Serials list) vpiej-l@vtvm1.bitnet (Pub-EJournals) Subject: Re: Paying for the Pipe vs. the Piper in Esoteric Publishing

Date: Mon, 18 Jul 94 19:56:04 -0600 From: Paul Ginsparg 505-667-7353

stevan,

little to add to what you say (reminds me how helpful your participation would have been in october for us were you not already slated to be abroad).

i do have one minor nit to pick regarding the occasional:

sh> So far, the amount of quality control on the Net is negligible. The Net sh> began as a Global Graffiti Board for Trivial Pursuit (as I've had sh> occasion to call it) because it was put together mostly by hackers and sh> students, rather than by scientists and scholars;

while a delightful metaphor, i believe the "GGBfTP" tends to promote some confusion. there is a very important distinction between UseNet (a collection of distributed access newsgroups) and the Internet (a linked group of networks that includes UseNet as a small subset) -- indeed this distinction is frequently blurred in the popular press (for example during recent mass advertising postings to usenet newsgroups, so-called "spamming" incidents, the n.y. times et al. write this as a dreaded challenge to The Internet [read prototype infobahn], not understanding that usenet is irrelevant to the vast majority of internet usage. indeed these news reports are universally "flamed" on comp.admin.misc with USENET != INTERNET [!= shorthand for "not equal"]).

surely you do not mean the internet when you say "put together mostly by hackers and students" though later on you do specify:

sh> ... uses of the Internet (the Global Graffiti Board) from

in fact my little corner of the internet was assembled by "scientists and scholars," starting from the high energy physics decnet in the early 80s (one of a number of autonomous networks that in the mid 80's joined together to form "the internet"). as i mentioned in some earlier correspondence, we never formed the negative association of "electronic communication = low quality" since the electronic communication within my community by electronic mail, etc., was always of arbitrarily high quality and has been an invaluable research resource for the past decade (part of the reason the "e-print archives" were such a natural development for us). the nature of the internet is such that any background static never affected us since it never came unsolicited.

moreover it is not even true that the majority of material available via the Internet is unmoderated. currently, anyone who sets up a www server gives some thought to the construction of the pages, and as well some thought to the links to other resources collected. we may not agree with much of the judgment exhibited at some sites, but then we simply avoid them. (just as in research where i can learn whom to trust, when i browse web sites i can get a feeling for who has assembled the higher than average quality information). similar remarks apply to long standing automated anonymous ftp sites -- typically someone puts some thought into organization and what is archived (it is much rarer for anon ftp sites to allow arbitrary uploads; usually things go into incoming/ and are archived or removed). i am not of course arguing that the standards are at the levels of conventional peer review, but it is important to note that they are far from nonexistent.

sure there are many silly bulletin boards that spring up, and we've seen the usenet statistics from news.admin, but have a look at http://www.gatech.edu/gvu/stats/NSF/merit.html (link no longer available) for the overall nsfnet backbone traffic to see just how negligible a fraction of the overall internet traffic usenet constitutes.

so i think you may be doing a minor disservice by coming down too hard on the current quality of electronic communication with an all-too-colorful metaphor that applies only to a small segment of the current total bandwidth. and my impression is that many new entries are continuously increasing in quality (you recently mentioned unsworth et al's iath site which includes pmc -- for numerous other such examples see http://botw.org/ ).

it will be far easier to build what we want metaphorically on the much larger sector of the internet that possesses incipient quality, rather than overemphasizing the much smaller anarchic sector at this point.

hope these comments are helpful.

regards, pg

From: Stevan Harnad Tue Jul 19 12:12:54 1994

Paul,

You may be right that there is and has all along been more quality in some regions of cyberspace than I have given it credit for. Historians will have to sort this out.

But my concerns are specifically with scholarly/scientific PUBLICATION, and, as far as I know, the uucp-style Usenet Groups and the BITNET listserv groups were the first mass circulation electronic forums. Personal email, file retrieval, collaborative computation, data exchange, etc. among scholars and scientists certainly constitute traffic on the Internet, but they are not the kind of mass-circulation communication that is directly comparable with the paper scholarly literature -- at least not until your HEP preprint archive came into existence.

In any case, for present purposes this much can be said with high confidence, and without the aid of careful historic research (and I don't think you'll disagree): With the prominent exception of your preprint archive (which is a special case, because, for the time being at least, it is parasitic on the refereed paper literature for which most of its PREprints are ultimately destined -- the "Invisible Hand" effect I have spoken of before), if one were to make a direct comparison between (say) the latest 20-, 10-, 5- or 1-year paper scholarly/scientific literature, within or across disciplines, and the electronic literature, there would be ABSOLUTELY NO CONTEST. The current electronic literature's quantity and quality is still infinitesimal in comparison to the corresponding paper literature. The point of my metaphor was to emphasize that this is just an artifact of demographic initial conditions (which is certainly is), and not intrinsic to the two respective media, as many Luddites are eager to infer. (And the point of my "Subversive Proposal" was that this very disparity could be turned to the dramatic and speedy advantage of electronic publication through immediate universal public ftp archiving by all authors of the esoteric scholarly preprint/reprint literature).

I don't really think you disagree with this; you number among the converted, where it is safe to insist that the Net HAS generated a good deal of quality to date after all. But that's an absolute judgment, whereas I was making a relative judgment. I admire the nuggets that the anarchy has generated so far, but the fact is still, I think, that the lion's share of it is junk, just as the paper scholarly literature would be mostly junk if it were unconstrained by economics and anarchically generated (with mostly students and hackers at the helm, instead of the peers of the realm, who are so far still the UNconverted to whom I am preaching).

Out of this anarchy are now at last emerging the traditional structures of scholarly/scientific quality-control; once these achieve a critical mass, what I said about the Global Graffiti Board will be past history. But for now, to hasten that day, those who sample or hear about the Net's CURRENT state (qua publication medium) -- in comparison, I stress, with the paper scholarly literature -- must be reassured that these are just initial conditions and not at all representative of the potential steady state.

I do know the distinctions among Net, Internet, Usenet, etc., and use them loosely because, as I said, my preaching is intended for the UNconverted, who are not impressed by computational nuggets from DARPA days but can see clearly (if they even go so far as to look) that most of what passes for scholarly/scientific publication and communication on the Net to date looks a lot more like Trivial Pursuit among dilettantes than the quality-controlled literature they associate exclusively with paper.

Best wishes,

Stevan

Date: Tue, 19 Jul 94 11:54:31 -0600 From: Paul Ginsparg 505-667-7353

stevan,

tks for clarifications. my comments (doubt these need public posting...):

that most of what passes for scholarly/scientific publication and communication on the Net to date looks a lot more like Trivial Pursuit among dilettantes than the quality-controlled literature they associate exclusively with paper.

yes, i had forgotten your concerns to be focused entirely on scholarly/scientific PUBLICATION (and of course this will never be more than an infinitesimal fraction of overall network bandwidth, but we hope a larger percentage than at present of the scholarly communication that's to be network available).

regards, pg

p.s. to some extent, this recalls to me the "n.y.er's map of the u.s." which shows manhattan and n.y. city reaching somewhere out past the mississippi, and the rest of the country squeezed onto the western coast (states like kansas, maybe even texas, appear as small towns in california). in a medium which sees few geographic and physical constraints (excepting of course speed of light limits on propagation), it is easy (and probably beneficial) to conceptualize the "majority" of the network as the part with which we're regularly in contact, and to ignore the rest. i can usually get what i want with relative ease from the network, so that's my overall picture (and i'm anxious to see it remain that way despite the upcoming commercial onslaught), hence my current reaction to "global graffiti" (which a half-year ago seemed perfectly accurate, so perhaps i've since changed more than the network...)

Date: Tue, 19 Jul 94 14:32:49 EDT From: "Stevan Harnad" Subject: Esoterica

From: Ann Okerson ann@cni.org Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 09:18:03 -0400 (EDT)

Stevan, for what it's worth, your use of this word makes me and a number of others quite edgy and uncomfortable. I know the dictionary meaning of "esoteric" and you kindly provided it recently as well. However, the commonly understood meaning of the word (among the general educated population) is something related to the inner circle, the anointed, and often the somewhat mysterious, occult, etc. It is not a word that creates a positive impression throughout the land.

As in Joe Citizen: why should I fund universities if what they are doing is esoteric? I thought they were doing research and scholarship that promoted, whether directly or indirectly, the well-being and progress of society...if what they are doing is so esoteric, let them find ways to pay for it themselves.

Please, for the sake of the continuance of the research and information you (and I) so intensely believe in, find language that will not be misunderstood by the taxpayers and will not jeopardize our missions. Think about losing "esoteric" as a repeated word to characterize what we do. To call it scholarship and research surely cannot be offensive to you and will be better understood by folks in general. Ann

One can't please everyone. I am not at the moment writing texts for Joe Citizen, but for a somewhat more sophisticated constituency: Scientists, Scholars, Research Librarians, Scholarly Publishers.

I will try to find something in place of "esoteric" for talks to lay audiences, but "scholarship and research" does not convey the MESSAGE behind my esoteric terminology: that the (ONLY) literature for which I am advocating the non-trade, advanced-subsidy model is a no-market literature with only a few specialists qualified to and interested in reading it, yet with ALL of us -- scholars/scientists and the population as a whole -- the BENEFICIARIES of this free flow of esoteric research and information: Not because every citizen needs or wants to read the International Journal for Numerical and Analytic Methods in Geomechanics or the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, but because we are all better off if these specialists can read one another's work without having to pay for it as if it were a market commodity; the enhanced contributions the qualified specialists can consequently make to science, learning and culture are then everyone's reward.

I feel strongly that if we collaborate in the mentality that the only research worthy of public support is what can be "sold" to the taxpayer then we will all get exactly what we pay for...

Yours esoterically,

Stevan

P.S. Remember that some of the scholarly/scientific literature is NOT esoteric; it may have a wide intra- or interdisciplinary and general readership, even the occasional nonfictional best-seller. If I cater to the view that all or most of science and scholarship ought to be like that, then we may as well just stick to the trade model! Think about it... The real issue here is not public support for scholarly research, but public support for specialists' access to publicly supported specialized research. What's the point of pretending that's supposed to be of general interest?

Date: Tue, 23 Aug 94 12:57:20 EDT From: "Stevan Harnad" Subject: Esoterica/Exoterica

Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 12:34:01 +0500 From: fred@brainmap.med.umich.edu (Fred Bookstein)

You're just about to leave, so I'll be brief. In re the discussion of the word "esoteric" in your exchange with Ann Okerson, you might want to take advantage of a wonderful English word, "exoteric," that has precisely the opposite main meaning. "Exoteric" crops up in the anthropology of religion, the sociology of the professions, and similar places. I extract from the 1961 Merriam-Webster unabridged, 1981 printing, page 798:

"exoteric adj. 1a. suitable to be imparted to the public, readily comprehensible. 1b: belonging to the outer or less intimate circle. 1c: publicly known, popular. 2. relating to the outside. "exoteric n. layman, outsider. "exoterica n.pl. exoteric doctrines or works. "exoterics n.pl. doctrines or discourses for the uninstructed or the general public."

So I think we've got our word here. "Trade publications" = "exoterica"; what the discussion in who.payspiper is about is esoterica, which is, of course, the more frequently encountered term. Okerson may have been subliminally troubled by another connotation of "esoterica," namely, pornography, but better to direct the connotation via an opposition than to disallow the more frequently explored pole.

Fred Bookstein

Many thanks for the flip-side term, "exoteric." I had not known it, but "exoteric/esoteric" captures exactly the trade/nontrade distinction I had in mind (with the qualification that there is nothing RARE about esoterica in primary scientific and scholarly publication: it constitutes the bulk of the corpus). I'll use it!

I think you are confusing esoterica and erotica in your second comment, though... Ann was worried that the elitist connotations of esoterica might have a bad effect on scholarly/scientific funding (and it just conceivably might, but attempting to join the endless populist beauty contest that politics has become would, I believe, leave all sides the losers: yes, most of primary scholarship is by the few, for the few; but the many are still the ultimate beneficiaries).

Stevan Harnad

Forward to Chapter XIII

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