E-journal credibility

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> "...ELECTRONIC = NOT PRESTIGIOUS must be counteracted, by spreading
> the contrary meme, that electronic journals are BETTER than their
> hard copy counterparts..."
>
>You will not be able to do this because of the _law of credibility_
>proposed by Thomas Schelling and Amotz Zahavi:
>
> +--------------------------------------------------------------+
> | |
> | For a message to be credible, it has to be costly to fake. |
> | |
> +--------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>Examples are abound: lion's roar, Dirty Harry's "Go ahead, make my day",
>Job's commitment to god despite all the sufferings the latter sent on
>him, driving a RR vs a Yugo, etc, etc.
>
>That's why people will always value publications in "Nature" and "Science"
>higher than publications in most other journals or self-publications.
>
>
>Boris Katz
>bkatz@dh.com

I'm failing to understand your implication. "Nature" and "Science" are
probably not that hard to produce. (DTP has probably helped them as much as
anybody else.) (After all, they do get out an issue every month - or are
they bimonthlies? I forget.) Or fake. I've seen knockoffs of just about
every other magazine that look convincingly like the real thing... But they
are distributed less widely and rapidly than most electronic publications.

E-publications may be distributed to larger numbers of people at greater
speed and at less cost. That does not necessarily mean that less effort
must necessarily go into their production, or that the standards for
accepting and reviewing articles submitted to them must be lesser than
Science or any other journal...

Credibility, as I think someone else once said on this list, is earned, not
a birthright. E-publications will gain credibility by displaying the same
commitment to excellence that any other academic journal does...

I just don't see why altering the mode of distribution makes them easier to
"fake" - there are various methods of encryption, ROM-burning, etc. that
could make them very *hard* to fake - or less credible.


Seeker1 [@Nervm.Nerdc.Ufl.Edu] (real info available on request)
CyberAnthropologist, TechnoCulturalist, Guerilla Ontologist, Chaotician
Discordian Society, Counter-Illuminati Operations Branch
"The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
"The menu is not the meal." -- Alan Watts

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