ABSTRACT
Maintaining standards of truth in scholarly communication is an important goal, but it is necessarily a shared obligation. Truth can be guaranteed when the exclusive publisher is the Government Printing Office. But a democratic culture must be protected from that kind of perfection. Aiming for the goal of truth in what is published is certainly no less compelling in commercial or trade publishing than in scholarly communication. Scholarly publishing has traveled a long way from serving as a printer to scholars in Renaissance culture to functioning as gatekeeper of truth in science and humanities. Books published as fiction are prima facie exempt from "truth-telling", and books published as pure scholarship are subject to a severe or vigorous review process that screens out works of serious deficiency. The wide gap in style and substance between book and journal publishing in the social sciences is indicative of this gap between information and knowledge.
