I have proposed that TWO dimensions should be implemented in the archival continuum that begins with an inchoate thought and ends in a lapidary entry in the literature:
"The idea is to have a vertical (peer expertise) and a horizontal (temporal-archival) dimension of quality control. The vertical dimension would be a pyramidal hierarchy of email groups, the height of each depending on degree of expertise, whether in a subspecialty, an entire discipline, or even an interdisciplinary field. An accredited group of peers at level i would have read/write access at level i; those at level i-1 would have read-write access at level i-1 and read-only access at level i but with the right to post to a read-write peer at level i who could in turn post their contribution for them, if it was judged good enough. An individual with an established record of valuable mediated postings could eventually be voted up a level. A single editor or an editorial board are simply special cases of this very same mechanism, where one person or only a few mediate all writing privileges through peer review.It would be at the late horizontal stages of such a two-dimensional system that Gardner's proposal for an interactive, searchable archive would come in, although there seems to be no reason to assume that the process should end there: It may be just as important to skywrite in response to an archived contribution as to one at a softer stage of the process. Thus the continuum would swallow its own tail."This vertical hierarchy would be based on the contributors' degree of expertise, specialization, and their record of contributions in a given field. In principle, the hierarchy could trickle down all the way to general access groups for nonspecialists and students at the lowest read/write levels. (Such unrefereed groups would carry the equivalent of what is called "flaming" on the network today; unfortunately, this anarchic level is the only one that exists among the net's current "unmoderated" groups; in the so-called "moderated" groups all contributions are filtered through a single person, but usually one with no special qualifications or answerability. There is not yet any real peer review on the net.)
"So far, even at the highest levels, this would still be just brainstorming, at the pilot stage of inquiry. The horizontal dimension would then take the surviving products of all this skywriting, referee them the usual way (by having them read, criticized and revised under peer scrutiny) and then archive them (electronically) according to the level of rigor of the refereeing system they have gone through (corresponding, more or less, to the current "prestige hierarchy" and level of specialization among print journals). Again, an unrefereed "vanity press" could be the bottom of the archiving hierarchy."
[From: Harnad 1990: "On the Scholarly and Educational Potential of Multiple Email Networks" from COMMED (Electronic Discussion Group on electronic communication and education commed@rpiecs.bitnet commed@vm.ecs.rpi.edu nrcgsh@ultb.isc.rit.edu N.R. Coombs, Editor.]
Scholarly inquiry in this new medium will proceed much more quickly, interactively, and globally; and it is likely to become a lot more participatory, though perhaps also more depersonalized, with ideas propagating and permuting on the net in directions over which their originators would be unable (and indeed perhaps unwilling) to claim proprietorship. An individual's compensation for the diminished proprietorship, however, would be the possibility of much greater intellectual productivity in one lifetime, and this is perhaps scholarly skywriting's greatest reward:
In accordance with the Zeigarnick (1972) effect, our memory for tasks we have not yet completed is better than for tasks we are already done with. With the slow turnaround time of conventional publication, by the time the literature takes up a theme that we had in mind when we published something, we may no longer be actively thinking about it. Intellectual communication has its own natural pace. Perhaps real-time verbal conversation is its most natural tempo; writing, though slower, has the advantage of being more disciplined and reflective, and of preserving an archival record of what we said. Yet we all know that we can think faster than we can write; and we can certainly think faster than it takes for a letter to reach someone and be answered. So consider how much faster still we are able to think than the time it takes for an article to be accepted, published, read by others, and responded to! How many are the stillborn thoughts that might have survived and flourished if they had but been stimulated by feedback at the right time, while they were still active in one's mind?
Skywriting offers the possibility of accelerating scholarly communication to something closer to the speed of thought while adding a globally interactive dimension that makes the medium radically different from any other. To be truly forward-looking, Gardner's (1990) proposed searchable electronic archive should be embedded in a continuous stream of electronic communication among scholars.