> antitrust implications of the project... > assured by attorneys that no one would challenge the project so long > as the founders didn't try to exclude anyone.
It can't be legally challenged under anti-trust, because each firewall can set its own prices; it's rather like a bunch of vendors (even competitors) all agreeing to sell their wares through the same catalogue, or in the same department store. Nor is it trust-like in its "competition" with free archiving -- for the simple reason that free-archiving is free, and hence its revenues are not at stake or at risk. A trust must be a collective entity that either fixes prices collaboratively instead of letting the market decide, or engages in some protective practise in order to prevent competitors from entering the field. So this is not technically trust behavior. But it certainly has all the relevant FLAVOR of trust behavior: They are joining forces to preserve the S/L/P revenue-source. The competition is Open Archives, which seek to free the literature (and have more trouble getting off the ground if the S/L/P providers collaborate). It is this monopolistic flavour, and this monopolistic practical effect, to which my posting was drawing notice, and people will understand. > How will scientific authors break free of publishers' claims to own > their work, if they cannot break free of the existing network of > scientific journals? They will break free of publishers' claims to own their work by striking out clauses forbidding online self-archiving in their copyright agreements. As the self-archiving grows, the demand for it, both from users and from authors will grow. And don't forget the Los Alamos Lemma: Whatever did not stop Los Alamos Archives will not stop the rest of the Open Archives either. Copyright did not stop the Los Alamos Archives. Nor did the career-grip of journals (nor did it have to, as self-archiving is subversive, being a supplement, not a substitute, to conventional submission practise). But public awareness will play a big role in the speed with which the inevitable outcome will be reached. So enlightened press coverage can always help (just as blinkered or partisan press coverage can always harm)... Publishers could do worse. There have been rumours lately that they have thought of preserving the golden goose with a Solomonian solution that goes straight for the heart of my "give-away" argument: They make so much money per paper that it would make sense for them to offer to split this with their authors -- effectively enticing them into becoming for-fee authors like yourself -- rather than sticking to the give-away/keep-it-all status quo, and risk losing it all. That enticement would not work for the top 20-30% of the literature, for those authors care more about free access than pennies per paper. But for the average and below average papers (2/3 of the literature) authors might resonate with that. My prediction is that this would yield a two-tier literature: High quality for-free, lower quality for-fee: That is what evolutionists would call "an evolutionarily UNstable strategy," because it would stigmatize the for-free literature (including its CV/promotion/tenure value) and would create a pressure toward preferring for-free and high-access/high-impact over for-fee and low-access/low-impact. So the inevitable outcome would eventually prevail anyway; the strategy would just temporarily retard it. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
