Interesting article on the role and nature of quality in online research reports. The author argues that the errors themselves are not the source of any misfortune arising; "problems start when it becomes difficult to discern the intended user of a piece of information, or when users expecting one quality level encounter information built to a different quality level." A primary research paper may contain errors, and so is not intended for the general public. Online publication, argues the author, has compounded this problem. "The primary literature now contains a larger proportion of material that has not been peer-reviewed at all," he writes, and "The quality audit provided by the secondary and tertiary services, which attempted to place the primary literature in its proper context, has largely been swept away." Well it may be true that textbooks, kept out of free circulation by publishers, are being bypassed by readers accessing free primary research reports. But it does not follow that the secondary literature has been "swept away" - and of course the author produces no evidence to show this. This blog (and the billion or so other blogs in circulation) are increasingly taking the role of secondary literature by studying, questioning and correcting primary literature.
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