I suspect that this is going against the grain of online research journals
where the advantage is that people can publish new research results faster
than by orthodox means. Such research is an open and un-organised activity
and to set given topics in advance would be too constraining.
>
>Question:
>
>Why go the traditional pattern of peer review and referees? Can't we rely
>on listmembers to exercise good judgment and scholarly practice in the
>preparation of contributions?
>
There is a distinction between a pre-print server, and an online journal.
A pre-print server like the one run at Los Alamos for physics takes papers
without refereeing them. It runs the risk of having papers with technical
errors in them that peer review would pick up. I know this from my own
experience of putting in a paper to the Los Alamos server, and then
submiting to Physical Review Letters ( you can submit to them by
just giving a reference to the paper number on the server ) and
having a serious mathematical error spoted by one of the two
referees.
Whilst people may exercise good judgement and scholarly practice
by their own lights, unless third parties look at the paper you can
not be sure that your own oversight or ignorance may not have led
to errors.