Publish or Perish

Blogger Larry E. Ribstein (ideoblog) is a a law professor who once talked about the virtue of the law review system is that it provides a law school subsidized outlet for just about anything a law professor or lawyer wants to publish. The system lets a million flowers bloom and lets this vibrant intellectual market ultimately decide merit. There is no lengthy bottleneck at a few peer reviewed journals, no chance that widely shared intellectual prejudices (such as we have seen on the causes of Alzheimer's disease) blocking publication.

The problem, of course, is that there's little vetting or intermediation. The quality of the law school publishing the review says something about the intelligence of the students, but there's only so much they can really understand, and the quality variations aren't that great. Once out there, the writer's reputation and other quality signals matter more.

Moreover, there is an alternative -- the Social Science Research Network, which makes thousands of working papers free on line with no real review process. If the purpose is to disseminate work and let the market decide based on the author's reputation, this would seem to be the way to go. And SSRN does have a kind of vetting process measured in number of downloads.

In a later blog entry Larry discusses whether blogging should be subsidized, and said at least in the law school environment, the issue isn't really direct subsidy of costs (expenses are low, and we waste our time on lots of stuff), but whether we law professors should be paid for blogging in the currency of raises, tenure and promotion....

He is referring to the fact that in the academic world, one must "Publish or Perish", and does blogging count as publishing

traditionally we've relied on student law review editors. Blogging will force us to come up with new standards and, even, read and judge the stuff for ourselves.

Blogging will not, however, force us to do without intermediaries. In my blogging article I point out that while anybody can blog, not everybody can get noticed, and this involves making investments in reputation. Intermediary blogs could, and have, developed (e.g., Solum's), which can serve as the academic filters of the future.