Journal Publisher Click-Through Monopoly: A Trojan Horse Libraries, with their hard-strapped serials budgets, should beware of the Trojan Horse described in the Reuters article below. It is designed to further entrench the status quo for research journals. That status quo is that authors GIVE AWAY their papers, asking only that they be made as accessible as possible to one and all, only to have access denied to users unless publisher access fees are PAID (via Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View S/P/V, mostly by university libraries).
The online medium can free this anomalous, give-away research literature from financial firewalls through Open Archives; and the entire corpus can be citation-linked exactly as will be described in the Click-Through Monopoly proposal, but with no access-fee barriers to cross in navigating it. <http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm> <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html> The Click-Through Monopoly described in the Reuters piece below is a Trojan Horse. It is founded on the perpetuation of S/L/P access barriers. If the appeal of immediate citation-linking distracts authors and readers and their institutions from the importance and urgency of freeing the give-away research literature through self-archiving then it will delay the inevitable transition to what will be the optimal solution for this anomalous literature, and the only just and stable solution, for research and the researchers who both create, give away, and use this literature. Some comments follow below: > Story Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. > > WASHINGTON--Twelve publishers of scientific and scholarly journals > yesterday said they were linking up on the Internet to make it easier > for scientists to do research. > > The agreement allies some of the biggest rivals in the highly lucrative > arena of scientific publishing, including Oxford University Press, > Macmillan Magazines and Elsevier Science. > > They said the agreement would link 3 million articles at first and more > later. > > "This is extremely good news for the active scientists and researchers > all over the world," Johannes Velterop, publishing director of the > science journal Nature, said in a statement. > > "The interest of the users of scientific information is put at the > center of the stage again, and publishers clearly recognize the > imperative of serving the research community in the very best way the > new technology allows." The interest of the users of scientific information is to have FREE access to this literature at last, not to keep it held hostage to S/L/P through a click-through citation monopoly. > Scientific publishers wield a huge amount of clout in the research > world. Generally, a piece of research is not recognized until it is > accepted by a scholarly journal for publication and subjected to review > by "peers"--usually other scientists in the field who can say whether > the basis of the study is sound. And who all review the papers for free, just as their authors give them away for free. > Scientists also cite the work of other researchers in their studies. > This appears as a series of footnotes at the end of their reports, and > the citations can refer to a large number of reports published in other > journals. > > Unless scientists have a subscription to all the journals, or access to > a library or Internet resource that carries them, they cannot read the > cited articles, which may provide crucial background. > > The new agreement will allow them to link automatically from an > Internet version of one journal to the article cited in another. But what this leaves out is that the only way to get TO and FROM any of this literature is through the financial firewalls of S/L/P: the click-through monopoly. > "More researchers today are using the Internet in their work, and this > service will allow them to do so more quickly and efficiently," said > Richard Nicholson, executive officer of the American Association for > the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal > Science. Not more quickly and efficiently than the optimal solution, which is to SELF-ARCHIVE all their papers publicly on the Web, accessible to everyone, everywhere for free, in interoperable Open Archives, which can then be completely citation-linked without any financial firewalls: http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html > The agreement links Academic Press, a Harcourt Science and Technology > company; the AAAS; the American Institute of Physics; the Association > for Computing Machinery; Blackwell Science; Elsevier Science; the > Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Kluwer Academic > Publishers; Nature, which is published by Macmillan; Oxford University > Press; Springer-Verlag; and John Wiley & Sons. > > They said they expect to launch the site in the first quarter of 2000. > > Story Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Let us hope that the Open Archives Initiative gathers enough momentum to head this retrogressive development off at the pass. If these publishers wish to be progressive, let them remove all barriers, purported and real, to author self-archiving (in the form of restrictive, unjustifiable, and unenforceable copyright agreements). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0019.html Publishers can then make their proprietary click-through archives available as an option, rather than the ONLY option. Users can then decide for themselves whether they wish to pay for the Closed Archives or use the Open Archives for free. Refereed journals will then scale down to their true and permanent niche, which is quality-control and certification. This service can be paid for by each author-institution out of only a small portion of the annual savings from cancelling the S/L/P expenditures that are currently overwhelming its libraries. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
