In my essay "Stevan Harnad's 'Subversive Proposal': Kick-Starting Electronic Scholarship" I go into this argument in more detail:

Quality control must surely be the most central issue here. Considering the incredible pressure to publish, and the amount of junk scholarship that finds its way even into existing paper publications, and the incredible over-supply of publications that defies the most heroic efforts of scholars to keep up with their discipline, I am not terribly comfortable with Harnad's optimism that quality control mechanisms will automatically migrate to the net.

Harold Innis (1951) argues that media have a built-in bias toward certain types of social activity. The bias of paper is a function of its relative high cost, permanence and slowness (Innis calls it a "light" medium only in comparison to stone and clay). The cost of paper publication does not in itself ensure quality, but it represents a built-in incentive to establish quality control mechanisms. When a piece of research appears in print, the reader has the assurance of knowing that someone has spent aconsiderable amount of money to get it there and will therefore have taken some steps to ensure that it is worth the cost. Not so in electronic space.

In addition, paper publication provides tangible, object-centered quality indicators. Expensively produced, polished-looking journals naturally carry a prestige that cheaply produced journals do not, for the above reasons. The fact that journals are distinct entities in which individual articles are subsumed under a larger series, itself an artifact of print publication, also allows certain journals to acquire a reputation over time. Electronic publication, especially the individually archived preprint, has none of these quality-control signals. In other words, the "bias of the medium" means that the physical characteristics of print publication carry with them some important side benefits which may not migrate to electronic space as easily as Harnad assumes.

Anyone whose sins have compelled her to function as an editor will also know how poorly many scholars edit their own work. Material that would be returned unmarked if submitted as an undergraduate term paper somehow manages to get sent for publication. An editor who is earnest about getting material in print, and is not in charge of a journal of such high prestige that she can pick and choose freely from a significant oversupply of good manuscripts, must labour mightily to extract wheat from chaff. Because the boundary between chat forums and scholarly journals has no physical markers in cyberspace, the electronic editor must work even harder to convince both readers and writers that she is not running a "global graffiti board." This is not to say that such tasks are impossible, but it is to say that the bias of the medium may make them more difficult. If archived preprints do manage to "break down the doors" of electronic scholarship and break away from the Faustian bargain, the peer-reviewed electronic journals that follow will have to labour mightily to establish and keep their reputations without the hardcopy signals of quality that we have grown so attached to.
[ll. 430-483]

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