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The quality of a consensus journal can be assessed by the degree of
consensus achieved. Readers might select only those articles
resulting from a consensus-based invitation, thereby controlling the
quality of articles they see.
Rules of dialogue
The rules of operation of a consensus journal can be thought of as
specifying an action system, or language game, where the actions
relate to the placement of articles in a network of interconnected
nodes. Participants in the game try to maximize their influence.
Reputation is a crucial resource in scientific argumentation
(Smolensky, Fox, King, Lewis, 1988). Participants are expected to
maximize this resource. While there may be other payoffs available
within a given system, such as royalty payments, this discussion
assumes only reputation maximization as an individual objective.
There are several opportunities for reputation enhancement in the
cycle of operation. Selection as an author is a major opportunity
for reputation enhancement. However, refereeing also offers
significant opportunities that are not available with conventional
journals. Referees can commit themselves to delivering a rebuttal to
an article and thereby improve their reputation (assuming they make
good on their commitment given an opportunity). If an author
examines the reviews an article receives and decides to cancel it
before a rebuttal is written, the referees offering rebuttals would
have their reputations enhanced, without any further risk or effort.
With a consensus journal, the review message can be thought of as an
offer to deliver a certain type of article before the deadline.
Obviously, a review message that claims a target article is
erroneous, and thereby offers to deliver a rebuttal, plays a
different structural role in a debate than one that criticizes an
article for not being original. Thus, reviews can have a great deal
of structural impact and can express a level of commitment, which
would not be relevant in an environment that limits referees to a
gatekeeping role.
Structural Aspects
With electronically published documents, it is very desirable to
structure interconnections so that retrieval is facilitated and the
relevance of statements becomes clear (Smolensky, Fox, King, Lewis,
1988). Thus, review messages can deal not only with the quality of
an article, but also its relationship to its target article.
Explicit relationships among articles becomes more necessary as the
size of articles decrease and number of articles increases.
With conventional journals, reviews are used to determine whether or
not an article should be published. The publication decision is not
dominant with electronic media, however, since distribution
constraints are greatly relaxed (Quarterman, 1990, p. 259;
Stodolsky, in press). Because of this, the period during which an
article remains on-line assumes importance, because storage is
limited. It is in this connection that the reviews of articles and
the relations between articles becomes critical. In the simplest
case, an article that is found incorrect by an overwhelming
consensus is cancelled by its author. Failure to cancel an the
article results in a continuing devaluation of the author's
reputation as more and more readers come to agree with the majority.
In the case of conflicting consensus positions, a rebuttal claiming
that a target article is flawed is explicitly linked to the target.
Failure to rebut that claim in turn has much the same effect as an
overwhelming consensus that the target article is incorrect. Most
interactions, therefore, take place at the knowledge frontier, as
various positions are argued. These interactions generate very
"bushy" argument trees, that require sophisticated navigation
strategies, if large amounts of effort are not to be expended
unnecessarily (Stodolsky, 1984a). The trees are thinned in the
process of argumentation. Positions that are sustained remain on-
line until they are thoroughly integrated into summaries or
overarching theories.
Decentralization
A central mediator has been assumed in this description to simplify
explanation. There is no reason why the calculations necessary to
select new authors could not be performed decentrally. In fact, this
would be necessary if readers preferred different methods of
calculation for author selection. Then coordination in the selection
of new authors would be shifted from consensus calculation to
collection of invitations. Various types of voting rules could be
applied. Authors receiving the most invitations would then be
expected to submit articles. Thus, decentralization leads to an
integration of the two types of invitations (consensus and
individual) already discussed.
The task of protecting review judgments until the deadline is
reached is another required function. It is necessary, for example,
because analysis of earlier submitted judgments could permit a
referee submitting at the last moment to simulate a competence that
did not exist, thus violating assumptions of the model. Protection
can, however, be achieved decentrally using cryptography, assuming a
"beacon" that emits enciphering and deciphering keys at fixed
intervals (Rabin, 1983). Use of cryptography would be necessary, in
any case, to ensure the authenticity of messages.
Summary