On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Arthur Smith [APS] <[email protected]> wrote: > [Los Alamos Lemma]: sh> "If you think you know an alleged obstacle to public self-archiving sh> -- let us call the obstacle "X" [X could be copyright, sh> preservation, plagiarism, whatever], an obstacle that must allegedly sh> be overcome before we can self-archive, and yet X did NOT stop Los sh> Alamos, then X is not an obstacle to public self-archiving." > > the lemma of course doesn't prove the theorem:
No, the success of Los Alamos is the (constructive) proof of the theorem. http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph > assuming the theorem is: > > "There are no obstacles to public self-archiving" > > Given the lemma, what obstacles do remain? Things which might apply for > other fields but did not apply in the case of the Los Alamos archive. Correct. It could be the case that there are indeed no obstacles to self-archiving in general or in principle, but there could be some in particular cases. > Some such obstacles in the way of peculiarities of physicists, the > applicability of intellectual property produced in (some fields of) > physics, academic politics in other fields, etc, have already been > raised. They have, and they might be real, but I am betting they are only apparent (having to do only with habit, not optimality), and will fade with time and familiarity of the principle of open self-archiving of refereed research (thereby freeing the refereed journal literature). > However, I'd like to mention one other particular obstacle: the > essence of timing. Los Alamos grew wildly at a time when researchers in > those particular fields had few other options for reasonably rapid > communication of research. Los Alamos got a toe-hold before the web even > existed (the web itself, not coincidentally, also grew out of the need > for physicists to communicate amongst themselves, and far surpassed the > success of xxx or pretty much anything else...) Of course the web has > helped Los Alamos be even more effective, but it has also revolutionized > communication throughout the sciences, and in fields where there is no > Los Alamos archive, researchers either have now or will soon be > electronically communicating about research in a myriad of different > ways, some of which include the formal publication of research in > journals. All true, but I can't quite see what the point is: Yes, there's much much more to the use of the web in the service of research than just the open self-archiving of refereed research (and the resultant freeing of the refereed literature) -- but that does not mean that freeing the literature through self-archiving is not one of the important, indeed revolutionary, uses of the web. And it's about "communicating" both unrefereed AND refereed research (and that's the point), not just the fast distribution of unrefereed findings (or discussion ABOUT them). Online submission to and online availability of refereed journals is certainly happening fast anyway (and very welcome), but there is a world of difference between accessing online journals through a financial firewall (S/L/P) and accessing them free from an open archive of self-archived versions of exactly the same papers. > That hasn't ceased in physics either, by the way. For a field > with a now established rapid electronic publication culture, does author > self-archiving actually add much utility? I don't know. Anyway, if this > isn't an obstacle now, it will be soon: at least in my opinion, time is > of the essence if author self-archiving is to succeed as well as it > could. If I understand correctly, you think it is an obstacle to self-archiving that there are further uses of the web too, including (for-fee) online versions of journals. If "self-archiving" is reformulated as the "refereed-literature-freeing" that it really is, do you still think the availability of all these other goodies is an obstacle to it? Why? How? -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
