[Bioperl-l] 'Papers'

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "Andrew" == Andrew Hynes <Andrew.Hynes@ogs.co.uk> writes:

  Andrew> The obsession that scientists have over referencing papers
  Andrew> is due to quality control. Articles published in journals
  Andrew> (paper or online) are vetted by the peer review process.

The obsession that scientists, in the public domain at least, have
over referencing, and publishing, papers is due to the grant bodies
taking citation impact as the primary performance metric.

This is changing slowly, of course. Its important that it changes for
three major reasons. Firstly the citation metrics are all skewed
toward journals which do not allow free redistribution of the
papers. Secondly because annotation, and other forms of publication,
which are of increasing importance, can not be put forward to many
grant bodies. And thirdly neither can software, despite the obvious
importance of freely redistributable code bases toward a science like
bioinformatics. 

Perhaps I should get off my hobby horse here....

Phil