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Interview : Hope for Synthesiology−132 Synthesiology - English edition Vol.1 No.2 (2008) the same as this new journal, Synthesiology. One of the reasons is that, as I said, the articles aren’t typically peer-reviewed. And in some cases also they tend to be less fundamental, less basic in character. So they may be more oriented toward product realization, or service realization or whatever. (Kobayashi)Later we would like to discuss more about peer review or reviewers because this is also very important. But, I’d like to go to the second question. We have made some requirements for the paper. Every paper should have some kind of objective toward society, a scenario to realize the objective, and elements of synthesis—this can be taken from Type 1 Basic Research, and the assessment and the future work. And among these, we also selected two main items: one is the scenario, and the other is the synthesis. To make a practical application, the objective and the scenario are very important. The second is the methodology to realize this scenario. We must take things and make a synthesis, and it is very important how to realize this synthesis. This is up to the author’s originality. So we selected these requirements for the papers. What do you think of them?(Lester)Let me ask you a question before I answer your question. What exactly does “scenario” mean in this context?When you ask the authors for a scenario, is it that you are really asking them to show how the development they are presenting can be reduced to practice, how it can be implemented -- how to get from here to there, how to get from where the development currently is to the actual use in practice?(Kobayashi)Yes, it is just a scenario and not an actual realization.(Lester)But might there be another way to say this? The author is asked to provide a sort of roadmap, to show that there is some pathway that could be followed in order to achieve implementation. Is that it?(Kobayashi)Yes. President Yoshikawa says that it needs a logical chain.(Lester)So each step must be related to the previous one. Now I understand. So now let’s get back to your question. These four things (objective, scenario, element and synthesis) are required of the author. And your question to me is what is my thinking about those, how do I think about those things. That’s the question, right? So clearly, these items differentiate articles published here in the new journal from a typical article published in an academic journal. In the latter case there may be a statement of objective, but there is rarely a statement of relevance to society, and there is almost never a statement about how one is likely to be able to move the development to practice. The elements, I think, probably do appear in other publications, but the focus on integration is different, because, in most cases, academic journals are organized around disciplines and so integration tends not to be part of the tool kit. And then assessment and future work, I think these maybe are somewhat similar to what appears in existing journals. So I think that the distinctive items here are relevance, scenario, synthesis; and it seems to me that those requirements are going to lead to a different kind of publication, practically speaking.(Kobayashi)Whether these are accepted among the researchers or not, that is a problem, right?(Lester)For some researchers, they will probably welcome these requirements because they are very much motivated by the desire to produce work that is somehow relevant to society. So I think these items will be received differently by different researchers. Some researchers will look at them and say, “I don’t think I have anything to say about these issues. But other researchers will say, “I’m very happy that these items are required because these are things that have motivated me and they describe how I do my research. So I think those requirements will be received differently by different scholars or researchers.(Kobayashi)One problem is how to review whether the objective, scenario and relevance are good or not. The review should be objective.(Lester)You are suggesting that there may not be an objective standard to apply to determine whether a particular statement of objective or a particular statement of relevance or a particular scenario is of high quality or not. Whereas in the case of a more traditional publication, your point is that you don’t have to justify the contribution by its relevance or even by what the objective is because the objective speaks for itself in a traditional journal. If the frontier knowledge has been expanded or extended, then that is a sufficient condition to judge that it is a good contribution, whereas in this case, the criteria for judging whether it is a good contribution may be subjective. But in fact I don’t think that’s quite true. I think that the judgment of whether an objective is good, or whether something really is relevant, or whether a scenario is a good one—I don’t think that these judgments can be made only by people who are working in the same technical field. Actually I don’t think they can be made by people working in the field (60)−

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