Between Printed Past and Digital Future - CiteSeerX

Research in Science Education 32: 257–268, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Between Printed Past and Digital Future Katja Mruck1 and Günter Mey2 1 Freie Universität Berlin 2 Technische Universität Berlin Abstract Peer review – processes of quality control and certification – is well established in most sciences. In this contribution we limit ourselves to peer review in scientific journals. The main idea of peer review – to keep science free from individuals’ and groups’ interests and impact, and to select and publish only what is the best in a special field of research – is briefly summarized. Though peer review has a significant impact in the sciences, it is obviously hard to realize its objects. Highly publicized cases of fraud, large amounts of time necessary for the review process, the continued power of old boys’ networks, and so forth – such factors led to many debates, and while some demanded to abolish peer review completely, others looked for possibilities to revise the review process. The Internet appears to provide tools to improve the organisation of peer review and to afford the transparency of the review process and its results. But even if the use of the Internet leads to significant changes in peer review there is no value-free scientific knowledge and evaluation that are separate from (predominant and/or competing) paradigms and their proponents. Key Words: Internet, new media, old boys network, peer review, quality

Quality Control and Old Boys Networks In the book “Complexity. The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos” the economist Brian Arthur describes his encounters with some scientific journals and their review systems. He contacted them, because he was convinced that he developed a new and an important idea, and because he knew that an “idea not offered within an established journal . . . officially does not exist” (Waldrop, 1996, p. 63, our translation). Well, here is what happened to him: “The most prominent American journal . . . sent back the manuscript . . . together with a letter from the editor: . . . ‘That’s out of the question!’ ” Another journal informed him that “though the reviewers had not been able to find any mistake, they nevertheless declared the manuscript was useless.” So Arthur re-submitted the text to the first journal as the editors had been replaced: this time his work was accepted, but internally discussed for about two and a half years. During this time the reviewers requested a huge numbers of revisions, to finally decide against the publication once again. A British journal “just said ‘No!’ ”, “but accepted the 14th revised version.” Finally his work was published, six years after he had submitted it the first time. Some “bitter irony” Brian Arthur

258

K. MRUCK AND G. MEY

felt as he had to recognise that during these years the idea not only was processed at different parts of economics, but it led “to a real movement,” independently from him and his work. The process Arthur exposed himself to is called peer review (although this statement surely may have caused rather ambivalent feelings in him). According to Harnad (2000) peer review is: a quality-control and certification (QC/C) system. . . . The work of specialists is submitted to a qualified adjudicator, an editor, who in turn sends it to fellow-specialists, referees, to seek their advice about whether the paper is potentially publishable, and if so, what further work is required to make it acceptable. The paper is not published until and unless the requisite revision can be and is done to the satisfaction of the editor and referees.

To use “peers” to evaluate quality is not only a regular practice for many scientific journals, but also for the selection of grant proposals. Additional possible applications of peer review will evolve from the worldwide dissemination of the Internet, for example, to evaluate scientific web sites.1 Nevertheless, we will limit ourselves in this paper to peer review in scientific journals.

Interesting Ideas . . . The first forms of peer review – in a way similar to those we are familiar with today – came into being when the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London” was published. Nevertheless, it took until the middle of the 18th century that these starting points became formalised and then successively were adopted for scientific publishing in general (see Münch, 1986; Schaffner, 1994). Together with this new way of evaluating quality also some ideals took root in scientists’ consciousness: “The idea of peer review is . . . to free publication from the domination of any particular individual’s preferences, making it answerable to the peer community as a whole” (Harnad, 1996). Special standards like the so called blind review2 are used to assure that only the best of scientific knowledge should reach the respective communities – independent from external factors like the name, status or prestige of an author. Furthermore, ideally both parts involved – peer reviewer and author – were expected to profit from this process: The reviewer could expand or deepen his/her knowledge in a research field, be surprised by innovative research or thought or see his/her beliefs substantiated by a sound empirical study. The profit for the author would be pointers in polishing, revising or correcting the manuscript. The paper which is finally published would have undergone a noticeable improvement in quality. Indirectly, the author could gain new insights e.g. in planning possible follow-up studies. (Peniche & Bergold, 2000, p. 2)

Although peer review often means an enormous selection – in the “social sciences and humanities, journals pride themselves (and rank their quality) according to the magnitude of their rejection rates” (Harnad, 1996); rejection quotes of about 80–90 percent are not unusual for journals with special ambitions – for example, Roberts

BETWEEN PRINTED PAST AND DIGITAL FUTURE

259

(1999) is convinced that “[m]ost good quality work is published sooner or later – and many scholars would prefer to put their writing and research to the test, in their community of peers across the globe, before seeing it in print.” Additionally, some regard this “test” also as a bastion against arbitrariness and deceit: “The scientific community, under heavy criticism from the public and the highest levels of government, has claimed that the practice of peer review prevents widespread fraud and deception” (Schaffner, 1994).

Difficult Reality As we said before – to all expectations of the power and efficacy of peer review one has to add, ideally. Ann Schaffner continues, “On the other hand, the increasing number of highly publicised cases of fraud have made it clear that the system is failing in some important ways.” The difficulties Schaffner points to refer to peer review as a rather sensitive and delicate process, a process that largely depends on trust. The authors must trust that the knowledge they make available to an editor and that he or she is forwarding to unknown others, the peer reviewers, is not misused. They also have to trust in the expertise of the editor to select the “right” reviewers; they have to trust that these reviewers in fact are able to separate “quality” from “waste” and so forth. It had not only been the “highly publicised cases of fraud” that Schaffner mentioned, which partly disturbed this trust. “The entire system of peer review, based on a delicately-balanced combination of trust and volunteer labour, may be on the way to becoming dysfunctional, yet no new methods are readily apparent at this time” (Schaffner, 1994). That is, despite the maxim to free peer review from individuals or groups’ interests it is in no way only the quality of the manuscripts itself that is evaluated by this “rigorous mechanism for judging academic work” (Roberts, 1999). At least partly, the unusually high rejection rates in the social sciences are due to external reasons, as for example the editors wish to underline the exclusivity of their journal and its superior place within the “prestige hierarchy among journals.”3 This practice is closely linked to an extensive (and nowadays not per se uncritically accepted) conservatism: Most times the peers who review are – especially if the highranked journals of a discipline are considered – “recognised” scholars in their field, “prime representatives of prevailing opinion,” and they act as advisers for an editor, whose “goodwill” finally decides what is published or not. The “point faible” of the peer review system is not so much the referee and his human judgment (though that certainly is one of its weaknesses); it is the selection of the referee, a function performed by the Editor. Hence it is really the Editor who is the weak link if he is selecting referees unwisely. . . . In practice, the problem is less the saturation of the true population of potentially qualified referees but the saturation of that portion of it that an Editor knows of and is in the repeated habit of consulting. (Harnad, 1996, emphasis in original)

Last but not least one further striking attribute of this process should be mentioned, an attribute Brian Arthur – as described in our introduction – became familiar

260

K. MRUCK AND G. MEY

with in a way he surely did not expect. Sometimes those who expose themselves to this process need tremendous amounts of patience and time, a patience Roberts (1999), for example, nevertheless regards to be necessary (and fruitful) – “Meeting the imperatives of peer review takes time.” Robert’s plea for patience surely is due to his hope that “the imperatives of peer review” indeed are assuring quality and that only “the best” would be selected and published. But what (at a special place, in a special time) is regarded to be just “the best” is nothing defined or evaluated in a vacuum, but before the background of what Kuhn (1967) called a “paradigm.” Ludwik Fleck, to whom Kuhn explicitly referred unfolding his paradigm theory, used the term Meinungssysteme (“systems of belief”). According to Fleck, a very strong “tendency to persevere” (“Beharrungstendenz”) is one of the inherent attributes of these Meinungssysteme, and most of the time, they are of unquestioned importance for those working within them and following their rules. “Usually no way to contradict against the system seems to be possible. . . . What does not fit into the system, is not seen or . . . is withheld, even if it is known, or . . . with an enormous amount of power it is explained in a way seemingly not contradicting the respective system” (1935, p. 40, our translation). Because research (and also the evaluation of written research results) necessarily is tied to such Meinungssysteme or paradigms, “new knowledge” hardly passes these authoritative filters. For example Jaan Valsiner, the main editor of Culture & Psychology, stresses that peers, blind review and similar mechanisms must fail: I do not give any great value to the “refereed nature” of journals: I consider “refereed nature” to be an institutional construction of local conformity – editor and three reviewers establish a “consensual truth” that manuscript X is very good – and I will not accept that ‘blind conformity’ can guide science. (Mey & Mruck, 1998, p. 92, emphasis in original)

Some Initial Alternatives Misuse and fraud, the impact of individuals’ and groups’ interests and power, immunity against innovation4 – these are for sure some important reasons why peer review during the last decades became the object of many controversial discussions, most times running between two poles. On the one hand, peer review is still regarded as indispensable. Harnad, for example, is a prominent proponent of a position according to which the “refereed journal literature needs to be freed from both paper and its costs, but not from peer review, whose ‘invisible hand’ is what maintains its quality” (Harnad, 2000). On the other hand, others hold that peer review only helps to produce “unidirectional-authoritarian knowledge, blessed by the consent of the scientific brotherhood” (Rost, 1998, our translation): “The old boys’ network [is] still alive and well. . . . We need to explore alternative models of peer review” (Rost, 1998). Which alternative models are currently discussed? Their essence ultimately is to revise peer review in a way that the process becomes more effective and more transparent, for example by suggesting reviewers be unmasked – “Why not let the group


261

of reviewers know who each other are? This would inhibit intellectual theft through making detection more likely, and w[o]uld also provide some external check on the balance of interests and approaches” (Rost, 1998) – or by searching for ways that assure that the final publication decision not only depends on the editor, but wins a more fair and transparent base: “These may include training and certifying qualified peer reviewers beyond the editors’ own network, setting up independent tribunals to evaluate and adjudicate disputed peer reviews” (Rost, 1998). Implicit suggestions like the ones mentioned above are dealing with the question who – in view of the persisting power of the old boys networks – is and who should be a peer. Different ways to recruit peers are discussed. Thus, “[i]f everyone working in a given field – ‘absolute peers’ in the literal sense – contributed to selecting the pool of peer reviewers, both the people selected and the judgements reached would be substantially different from what we now see” (Fuller, 1999, emphasis in original). And especially relative peerage is some times regarded as “the final frontier of antidiscriminatory knowledge policy. . . . If a journal or agency is truly committed to integrating traditionally suppressed perspectives, then it must remedy this basic problem in the definition of relative peerage” (Fuller, 1999, emphasis in original). Efforts to include suppressed perspectives in the review process, for example “members of underrepresented groups,” have since even reached the mainstream as can be seen from APAs “Call for Reviewers” (http://www.apa.org/journals/underrep.html).5

Peer Review and the Internet: Improving Order against Anarchistic Conditions Rather important alternatives may arise from the Internet and the use of different Internet services, because within this field innovative potential exists and will continue to be developed with an eminent impact also for scientists. This is evident for scientific information and communication in general and – especially – for the realm of scientific publishing. In the meantime many journals are available in print as well as on-line (though more prevalent in some fields like natural sciences and in some of the North American countries or in Great Britain). So what is the difference between the new e-journals and the old print journals, what are the differences in terms of producing, presenting and distributing scientific knowledge and, more concretely, in terms of managing peer review for on-line journals? Surprisingly enough, there seems to be hardly any difference. Most journals provided by publishers are just copies of their print pendants in mostly any respect – towards the organizational structure (with an editor, co-editors, editorial board etc.) up to a standard length of about 3000 to 8000 words per manuscript in the humanities and social sciences (Roberts, 1999).6 Also, “there are no essential differences between paper and electronic media with respect to peer review” (Harnad, 1996, emphasis in original). But according to his experience as an editor of print as well as of on-line journals there are some important changes if peer review in fact is managed with the means of the Internet:

262

K. MRUCK AND G. MEY

1. Worth mentioning for editors, reviewers and authors is “the convenience that many are discovering in reading and commenting on manuscripts exclusively on-screen”; 2. additionally, “the Net does offer the possibility of distributing the burdens of peer review more equitably, selecting referees on a broader and more systematic basis (electronic surveys of the literature, citation analysis, even posting Calls for Reviewers to pertinent professional experts’ bulletin boards and allowing those who happen to have the time to volunteer themselves)”; 3. publication times are shortened enormously, compared to “unacceptable delays, especially for journal articles [in print journals] . . . which are frustrating for academics, and work against some of the ideals often set for research and scholarship” (Roberts, 1999); 4. and finally a decrease of costs for the online-only refereed journal literature; Harnad (2000) estimates “less than 1/3 of the current price per page.” The advantages Harnad describes for sure will become routine for an increasing number of researchers, particularly as the peer review software becomes available and successively improves (for demonstration purpose we would like to mention the Conservation Ecology Project [CEP]; http://www.consecol.org/Journal/consortium. html).7 But, in our opinion, innovation and challenges to traditional scientific publishing rituals and its instruments will be more essential ones, some of them also visible in the present. Even today some of the researchers started to manage and to force the publication of their work themselves actively and in ways, not foreseeable in the pre-Internet age. In the case of the Internet, an old rule – “only a small percentage of what is published is ever heard of again in the literature” (Harnad, 1996) and this small percentage usually comes from one of the core journals of a given discipline – does no longer hold true per se. The more familiar authors become with the Internet and its tools, the better they learn to use the international ways of distributing and circulating knowledge (e.g., using mailing lists), the more they become independent from the established control systems of the old boys’ networks: The most radical way being to do away with it altogether: Let authors police themselves; let every submission be published, and let the reader decide what is to be taken seriously. This would amount to discarding the current hierarchical filter – both its active influence, in directing revision, and its ranking of quality and reliability to guide the reader trying to navigate the ever-swelling literature. (Harnad, 2000)

Many view this drop of the old hierarchical filters with concern, often additionally complaining about the publication flood, facilitated by the Internet. Harnad also suggests imposing “order through peer review” against the “anarchic initial conditions on the Net.” While he regards the “scholarly communicative potential of electronic networks” to be really revolutionary, he suggests “only one sector in which the Net will have to be traditional, and that is in the validation of scholarly ideas and findings by peer review” (Harnad, 1996). Regarding what he calls the “revolutionary dimension of the Net in scholarly communication” – namely “scholarly skywriting,” that is, publishing interactively peer comments and authors responses to these comments, because the old constraints of limited publication space are no longer true with the


263

Internet – “too must be implemented under the constraint of peer review” (Harnad, 1996; for further discussions on “scholarly skywriting” see Harnad, 1990). Despite the anti-anarchic efforts by Harnad and others to re-establish order in the Net, some journals started to experiment under the new conventions of post-peer review times, for example the British Medical Journal: We’re dipping our toes into the water of online peer review by posting an article before we’ve peer reviewed it, let alone decided whether to publish it in the paper journal. We are soliciting your comments about the article, which we will post as we receive them. The article is also being peer reviewed in our usual way, and our intention is to post the reviewers’ comments, and those of the journal’s editorial department, as they become available (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/shtml/misc/peer/index.shtml).

Based on our experiences while editing the on-line-only refereed journal FQS (Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research; http://www. qualitative-research.net) we recognized that (at least for the present) we partly have to rely on traditional means – despite other wishes and despite the potential of the Internet (towards flexible time and space resources and towards immediate communication between researchers). This delay is due to the fact that while the Internet and its potential offer principal challenges, the expertise of authors, editors, reviewers, and readers to deal with these challenges is still rather limited. Clearly, manuscript submitting and tracking became simpler and quicker with the use of the Internet. Authors now submit their manuscripts via email and peer review is started as soon as the manuscript seems to fit the scope of our journal. If the reviewers recommend a publication in FQS, an on-line-proof version is created and published – after copy-editing and some revisions if necessary – and our readers are informed immediately that new publications are available on-line. But there are also problems in addition to the conveniences of this system: 1. We are interested (if authors and reviewers also agree) in public un-blinding and unmasking, because we are interested in opening a shared process of learning while the review process and its results are unfolded quasi in front of the readers. But from previous or past experience we know that prominent reviewers and authors especially will respond with insecurity and in some cases with displeasure to expose their work (submitted manuscripts or reviews on submitted manuscripts) to public control and critics. 2. Most times we ourselves would not necessarily prefer to read the first version of a manuscript submitted as a regular publication: Though we try to use peer review to improve the quality of manuscripts and in many cases we ask our reviewers for concrete suggestions for improvements, there are some cases, in which the results seem not worth publishing; in addition frequent revising cycles are often necessary. 3. To make all these versions, created within the process from the first submitting to the final publishing, available on-line – accompanied by readers’ comments and authors’ and reviewers’ responses – would mean an enormous effort of time and money as long as technologies like the previously mentioned CEP are only available for big groups, publishers, and so forth. The problem remains that those

264

K. MRUCK AND G. MEY

who have the most (financial) power to promote such processes are often less interested in such kinds of innovation (see also note 6). 4. By distributing submitted manuscripts to the reviewers in electronic versions the reviewers may not limit themselves to a traditional response form, but they may write their critics, proof correction, suggestions and so forth directly into the respective file (e.g., by using different coloured markers).8 This method seems to be confusing for some authors, while most of them express gratitude and also amazement, how quick and easy – independent from the real place of residence of the persons communicating in the review process – collaboration works. And finally in some cases the impact of reviews on the original manuscript may be so essential that the question of authorship in fact could be responded to by deciding for a co-authorship of the reviewer. 5. Additional difficulties – in a way increased by the Internet – come from the interdisciplinary and international scope of our journal, which at the same time is devoted to a rather broad spectrum of topics interesting for us (namely qualitative social research).9 So relying on peer review in the case of FQS is especially due to the constructive potential of this kind of cooperating “in a text,” that means that peer review in our eyes may lead to processes of learning for all sides involved and sometimes to the prevention of important mistakes. In view of our broad scope and audience, in view of the expansion and fragmentising of knowledge this means that we are in need of qualified reviewers, who additionally are prepared to spend sufficient time (within the requested time schedule) in reviewing, something one should not per se expect. We try to solve these problems by relying on a rather large interdisciplinary and international editorial board. But though we manage this practically, nevertheless questions concerning, for example, the interdisciplinary character of our work still remain without satisfying answers. Some of these questions were discussed during the cyber conference Peer Review in the Social Sciences, so for example: What constitutes quality in interdisciplinary work? Who decides this matter: one’s own discipline or the other discipline – or some combination of the two? Specifically, how does one judge the relative merit of a) importing ideas and findings from another discipline into one’s own and b) exporting ideas and findings from one’s own discipline into another? (Fuller, 1999, emphasis in original)

The Future Impact of Peer Review? Despite the difficulties summarised above – difficulties we have to face and to manage and that partly make our effort of finding alternatives to traditional peer review more difficult – and despite the difference between on-line and print publishing, one issue needs a special regard and acceptance. The central idea associated with peer review – to hold this process free from individuals’ and groups’ interests and impact, and to select and publish only what is the best in a special field of research – just this central idea is a fantasy. There is no value-free scientific knowledge and


265

evaluation on the other side of (predominant and/or competing) Meinungssysteme and their proponents. Scientists are always producing, recognizing, evaluating, and reading within the scope of a system they are belonging to or they would like to belong to. So imbalances sometimes increase dramatically if researchers are exposed to massive competition for scarce resources (grants, but also limited place in some core journals). According to Agger (1990, as cited in Roberts, 1999) one consequence is that “traditional canons of collegial respect and scholarly support can sometimes disappear.” Another consequence is that knowledge, at least “as far as the international scholarly community is concerned – can become largely ‘invisible.”’ We assume that the Internet and the scientists’ use of the Internet will progressively bring about changes regarding the definition of what is core and what is peripheral, towards what is visible for whom and so forth. Actual discussions of abandoning traditional publishing models reveal some indications of what might happen. These discussions were initiated first by making preprints and reprints of physicists available on-line, free of costs. This “intellectual perestroika” (Schaffner, 1994) was a fruitful ground for efforts to successively initiate “international on-line public libraries of science that contain the complete text of all published scientific articles in searchable and interlinked formats” (http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/; see also Roberts et al., 2001). In addition, we assume that this initiative – originating in the natural sciences and in North America – with some delay will bring also important changes for the social scientists’ (on-line) publishing routines, and we are, as far as the potential of the Net to promote such changes is concerned, cautiously optimistic. Promoted by the above-sketched processes and by an increasing acceptance of the unalterable positioning required for any theoretical position and research, some traditional bastions of (especially blind) peer review will be increasingly discussed. Emerging issues will be solved according to local practices and needs, leading to a further diversification of peer review practices. In the case of our own journal (FQS), a provisional practice is to reveal the identities of the reviewers and authors to one another if both sides agree, and to make some selected examples available open to the public discussion of standards of writing, evaluating, and publishing. Although we do not foresee that peer review “will have a vital role to play as we move into a digital scholarly future” in the way presupposed by Harnad (1996), we hope (and in some respects we assume) that it will never be the same as it has been before.

Notes 1. In non-scientific contexts and especially in the realm of IT peer review – sometimes explicitly named in this way – is in the meantime used to assure quality; see for example “Web Peer Review,” a mailing list for web developers (http://www.ironclad. net.au/lists/web-peer-review/). 2. Revising a number of empirical studies van Rooyen, Godlee, Evans, Smith, and Black (1998) mention different reasons that are often used to emphasise that “blinding,” that is, removing authors’ identities “may be beneficial. First, blinded reviewers

266

K. MRUCK AND G. MEY

may provide less biased reviews. Second, some editors believe blinding improves the quality of reviews, a belief supported by one small randomised controlled trial. Finally, articles that appear in journals that use blinded review are more likely to be cited than those published in journals that use nonblinded review.” 3. Different in the case of social sciences and the humanities “[p]restige in the physical sciences and mathematics . . . [is] not associated with such high rejection rates; indeed, they tend to be the reciprocal of social science rates, and biological, medical and engineering periodicals’ rates fall somewhere in between” (Harnad, 1996). 4. “Original work which challenges orthodox views, while ostensibly encouraged, is – in practice – frequently impeded by academics who have a stake in keeping innovative critical scholarship out of respected journals” (Roberts, 1999). 5. Nevertheless the qualification future peers are expected to possess is the oldestablished; see http://www.apa.org/journals/underrep.html. 6. It seems necessary to mention that the impression Roberts describes correctly for the bulk of the online-journals comes from the fact that most times old ways of thinking (and of producing knowledge and journals) are predominant. Important potentials for innovation, possible advantages for creating, presenting and distributing scientific knowledge and – more basically – for scientific communication itself still tend to be hindered instead of supported: The strategy of most publishers is just to copy print into online, and if there is something they are really concerned with, it is how to deny unauthorized accesses rather than to fully develop and enfold online facilities. (For more details see Mruck & Mey, in press.) 7. The software assistance supports the publishing process in all of its phases. The automated submission module manages the data bank entry and creates HTML and other files automatically; the manuscript tracking software assists, accompanies and controls the whole process of reviewing, copy editing and the final publication of the manuscript (http://www.consecol.org/Journal/consortium.html). 8. In the meantime the print journals are also using the Internet (especially emails) for organising parts of the manuscript tracking and review process. 9. Between January 2000 and May 2001, there have been five FQS-Issues; this means about 170 contributions from authors belonging to more than twenty different disciplines. More than 110 Texts are available online in German and an equal amount in English. This represents an enormous project, not only quantitatively – to which authors from about 25 countries contributed. Correspondence: Dr Katja Mruck, Schlossstr. 28, D-12163 Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany E-mail: [email protected] References Fleck, L. (1935/1994). Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Birth and


267

development of scientific truth. Introducing the theory of the patterns of thought and of thinking collectives) (Ed. by L. Schäfer & T. Schnelle). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Fuller, S. (1999). Towards a more inclusive absolute percentage? [WWW document]. URL http://www.sciencecity.org.uk.pdf/03_20docpdf (accessed February 18, 2002). Harnad, S. (1990). Scholarly skywriting and the prepublication continuum of scientific inquiry [electronic database]. Psychological Science, 1, 342–343. ftp:// princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting Harnad, S. (1996). Implementing peer review on the Net: Scientific quality control in scholarly electronic journals. In R. Peek & G. Newby (Eds.), Scholarly publication: The electronic frontier (pp. 103–108). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http:// www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/∼harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad96.peer.review.html Harnad, S. (2000). The invisible hand of peer review [electronic database]. Exploit Interactive, 5. http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/ Kuhn, T. S. (1967). Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. (English transl. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) Mey, G. & Mruck, K. (1998). A traveler through psychology. An interview with Jaan Valsiner. Studia Jagellionica Humani Cultus Progressus, 4(1), 61–100. Mruck, K. & Mey, G. (in press). Wissenschaftliches Publizieren in OnlineZeitschriften: Über das schwierige Vertrautwerden mit einem neuen Medium (Scientific publishing and online journals: The difficult process of becoming familiar with a new medium). Zeitschrift für Qualitative Bildungs-, Beratungsund Sozialforschung, 4. Münch, R. (1986/1993). Die Kultur der Moderne, 2 volumes (The culture of modernity). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Peniche, G. & Bergold, J. (2000). What does peer reviewing mean for FQS (19 paragraphs). Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 1(1). http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm Roberts, P. (1999). Scholary publishing, peer review and the Internet [electronic database]. First Monday. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_4/proberts/ Roberts, R. J., Varmus, H. E., Ashburner, M., Brown, P. O., Eisen, M. B., Khosla, C., et al. (2001). Building a “GenBank” of the published literature. Science, 291(5512), 2318–2319. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/ 291/5512/2318a Rost, M. (1998). Diskurs and medium. Electronische Foren als Medien für wissenschaftliche Diskurse und das Problem der Bewertung (Discourse and the medium: Elctronic forums as media for scientific discourse and the problem of evaluation). Telepolis, February 5 [WWW document]. URL http://www.heise. de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/on/1389/1.html Schaffner, A. C. (1994). The future of scientific journals: Lessons from the past [WWW document]. URL http://www.msri.org/activities/events/9495/fmc/ Schaffner.html

268

K. MRUCK AND G. MEY

van Rooyen, S., Godlee, F., Evans, S., Smith, R., & Black, N. (1998). Effect of blinding and unmasking on the quality of peer review. A randomized trial. Quality of peer review – July 15, 1998 [WWW document]. URL http://www.ama-assn.org/ public/peer/7_15_98/jpv71017.htm Waldrop, M. M. (1996). Inseln im Chaos. Die Erforschung Complexer Systeme. Reinbek: Rowohlt. (English transl. (1992). Complexity. The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.)