An Interview With Stevan Harnad on a 'Special Science Initiative'

As part of APA's special science initiative, the Association is funding the experimental transformation of the electronic psychology journal, Psycoloquy, into a hypertext format. Stevan Harnad, PhD, Director of the Cognitive Sciences Centre and Professor of Psychology at Southampton University, is performing this conversion and agreed to answer a few questions about this project.

What is Psycoloquy?

SH: Psycoloquy is a refereed electronic journal covering all areas of psychology and related fields. It is now in Volume 6, having been in 'virtual' print since 1990.

How is Psycoloquy different from other journals?

SH: First, Psycoloquy is purely electronic; no paper version is published.

Second, Psycoloquy, apart from publishing peer-reviewed articles, also publishes Open Peer Commentary on those articles. It is free of the time and space constraints of paper journals, because commentary can be submitted at any time and appears as soon as it has been reviewed, accepted, and edited.

Third, Psycoloquy, thanks to generous support from APA, is available free of charge. About 3,500 subscribers receive Psycoloquy on Listserv. About 40,000 additional readers access it via Usenet, a free, global electronic service that carries Psycoloquy. But the largest incarnation of Psycoloquy is the permanent archive on the World Wide Web.

Last, Psycoloquy is being 'hypertextified.'

How is Psycoloquy similar to other journals?

SH: Psycoloquy is exactly like other peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals in that it publishes original research and theory, is citable (and being cited more and more), and has permanently archived volumes and article numbers.

APA gave you a grant to experiment with the use of hypertext in Psycoloquy. How will this format enhance the journal?

SH: Presently, Psycoloquy is available electronically in straight text. However, hypertext will enable a scientist to jump to other resources relevant to the text originally accessed.

For example, scientists reading a document can click with a mouse on the name of a source cited, and that article will appear on the screen. If, while reading the article, they see an unfamiliar term, they can click on that term, which immediately links to a definition. They can then return to the prior document and continue reading. And so it goes. In principle, anything and everything could be reachable that way.

What makes it difficult to make this conversion to hypertext?

It is not difficult in principle. Reference and keyword links are straightforward. An author can place links at any point to any other document that he or she judges relevant. But of course, the links must not be too intrusive.

The difficulty is...that most of the literature is not yet reachable because it is not in an electronic format.

How can one subscribe to Psycoloquy?

SH: By sending the following one-line e-mail message to listserv@pucc.princeton.edu:

(sub psyc Yourfirstname Yourlastname)

Better still, get someone to show you how to use the World Wide Web and just browse Psycoloquyþs archive. The Universal Resource Locators (URLs) are:

Five minutes of explanation from a seasoned surfer, and youþre set to hypershop 'til you are satiated...


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