Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 12:41:37 +0100 (MET)
From: aiello@dis.uniroma1.it (Luigia Carlucci Aiello)
Subject: Re: Proposal for ETAI electronic journal

Erik, [...]

I have read your proposal on the ECCAI publication system and I believe it is interesting and worth launching.

The only remarks I point to you are the following two.

First. You say: once a paper is posted in a FPA it cannot be removed. I'd modify this to be: once a paper is certified. Otherwise authors are no longer free to remove their junk, in case it has been proved so during the certification phase.

Second. Of course public reviewing is an interesting challenge. The risk is that all the papers will remain in a FPA and then go to Journals that have a more traditional way of reviewing and not to ETAI. But this is a risk worth taking. I am against anonymous shooting....

In conclusion, my impression is that you are optimistic, i.e. you assume that most/all of the papers posted in a FPA are of high quality. This amounts to saying that most/all the papers submitted for publication are of acceptable quality. I believe this is false: you are underestimating the boldness of authors. So it will be interesting to see how your proposal evolves.

By the way. The publication system you propose brings us back to the origin of the word "publication". In the old Roman times publishing a writing meant to go to a public place (a kind of theather in Rome, I do not remember exactly where, but I can check my books) and read your stuff to the public. With your proposal we are almost there: you only miss a speech synthesizer that reads the paper with the appropriate intonation and then we are done: we make an advancement that brings us back a couple of thousands years. But in many ways it is really ok!!!

Ciao, Gigina