> Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 15:25:57 -0500 > From: Antonella Pavese <pav...@shrsys.hslc.org> > > I have been following the discussion of the September98 forum with > great interest for quite a while, and I am trying hard, as a young > scientist, to work in a way that can sustain your initiative. My papers > are on your Cogprint server. I discuss with my colleagues about these > issues. However, when it comes to publish a paper, things become very > difficult.
Dr. Pavese raises some extremely important and pertinent questions, and, as a working researcher, highlights virtually all of the substantive issues under discussion in this Forum. Her plaint is well-timed, as it coincides with today's official release date of the Santa Fe Convention for Open Archiving: http://www.openarchives.org as described in two important articles in February's D-lib: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html and http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-ups/02vandesompel-ups.html I will reply to the best of my ability, but I urge others also to bring their own knowledge and expertise to bear on these pressing current concerns. > I would like to emphasize how bad this system is for young scientists. > One very visible problem is that scientific information produced by us > is hidden and sold only to institutions that can afford to buy it (I am > sensitive to this issue, because I am currently working in a small > research institute with limited resources and no possibility to buy > expensive subscriptions to many important journals). I found myself in > the ridiculous situation of not being able to read a paper that I wrote > because my institution did not have a subscription for that journal! The above says it all, in a nutshell: Research is conducted and reported so that it can have its deserved IMPACT, on other researchers and on research, primarily, and, secondarily, on the reporting researcher's career. Both these goals are gravely and NEEDLESSLY disserved by the gratuitous economic access-barriers of the present refereed journal publication system. Instead of taking this give-away research, and, after verifying and certifying its quality, making it available to all researchers who may wish to access it, the current journal publication system holds it back, to be sold, like a commercial product, only to those who are willing and able to pay. The author and the author's supporting institution give it away, and then they, and everyone else, need to buy it back (without making a penny on it -- or wishing to). This situation is grotesque, and we have been putting up with it until now for one reason, and one reason only: It is the quite normal and prevailing economic model for the much bigger TRADE (i.e., NON-giveaway) literature of books and magazines, for which it is perfectly appropriate; until very recently, there has not been any alternative economic model for the anomalous giveaway literature. Instead, if giveaway researchers were to have their reports made publicly accessible (i.e., published) at all, they had to accept the access-barriers that paid the costs of the whole expensive process of publication as a regrettable but unavoidable fact of life, in the Gutenberg age. But those facts have now changed, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy of Scholarly Skywriting! It is now possible to dissociate the provision of the SERVICE of quality Control and Certification (QC/C) from the provision of the PRODUCT of print (on-paper or on-line). Researchers' institutions can pay for the QC/C service (out of their annual serials cancellation savings) and handle the dissemination of their give-away product (the refereed papers) through open archiving instead of letting access to the research continue to be blocked by the financial firewalls of (non-research) interests currently vested in continuing to sell it as a product, exactly as if it were just another piece of the normal, NON-giveaway literature. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html What is keeping researchers from make this inevitable transition to what is optimal for their research immediately? > the reason I am writing is to ask advice on how to escape the > strict rules that govern our publications. I have a paper that I am > thinking to submit to one of the APA (American PSYCHOLOGICAL > Association)journal. This is a literal citation from the instructions > to authors of Neuropsychology, an APA Journal: > > Under copyright law, the transfer of copyright from author to > publisher must be completed before any article can be published in > Neuropsychology. The transfer of copyright enables the publisher to > assure maximum dissemination of the author's work (SIC!). Copyright > forms are sent to all authors prior to acceptance and must be > signed and returned to the Editor's office immediately. U.S. > government employees must sign the section of the form stating > exemption from copyright laws. Alterations to or substitution for > the form are not acceptable. All authors must sign this form to > verify authorship. > > I am not the only author in the paper, and I have to follow the > suggestions of my advisor, who thinks that Neuropsychology is a good > fit for our paper. It does not seem to me that we have much choice. If > we want our article to be published we HAVE to sign the copyright > transfer and we CANNOT alter or substitute the form. I guess one way is > to choose another journal, but unfortunately this type of policy is > enforced by all the major journals in psychology. You are in luck. The American Psychological Association <http://www.apa.org/> is a Learned Society, not a trade publisher. So, although all big and successful publishers tend to want to do things the same way they always did, the Learned Societies will come around once they (and their all-important memberships, which is US) come to realize what is really at stake here, and what is in the best interests of research and researchers. There is definitely a conflict of interest here (between what is best for research and researchers vs. what is best for publishers' current revenue streams and modera operandi), but in the case of the Learned Societies, there is no doubt about which way that conflict of interest will be resolved. http://trauma-pages.com/harnad96.htm By way of an example, a Learned Society that is somewhat more advanced than the APA along this road to the optimal and inevitable outcome for research is the American Physical Society <ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc> It already allows public self-archiving of both unrefereed preprints and refereed reprints. All Learned Society publishers will do so before long; and those of the trade publishers that survive the downsizing to becoming QC/C service providers only will likewise do so. But this does not solve the young researcher's problem now. My own advice is NOT to submit instead to a lower quality/impact journal. Submit to the journal of your choice AND: (1) ALWAYS publicly archive your unrefereed preprint when you submit it for refereeing. (2) Once it is refereed, revised, and accepted, try to retain the right to self archive by rewriting the copyright transfer agreement as indicated in: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/help/copyright.html (3) If the journal refuses to publish your paper unless you transfer full copyright, go ahead and transfer it, and then: (4) Publicly archive a second version of your original, publicly archived, unrefereed preprint, together with a list of the changes that were made in order to turn it into the refereed version. (Alternatively, archive an enhanced, expanded version of the refereed final draft, with some more data, figures, references and hyperlinks, and append to it a list of the changes that were made to the refereed draft, to turn it into the enhanced update.) The above is in compliance with the copyright transfer agreement. It is not convenient, but it meets most immediate objectives, and will soon usher in the optimal and the inevitable. Meanwhile, the literature will be freed, and the research community will become addicted to its newfound benefits, as the Physics community has already done: http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph If the journal also happens to have an embargo on the open archiving of unrefereed preprints, see the following for advice on how to get around that; but note that embargo policies are not legally binding, hence should not be a source of too much concern. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html > Another very serious issue associated with our current publishing > system, however, is that of the geological times required to publish > any work. If one wants to publish in one of the leading journals in our > area, for example the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human > Perception and Performance, it may take many months just to receive the > reviews, and even after complete acceptance, the waiting time for > publication is more than one year. This means that it takes AT LEAST > three years of work to see your work published. Reading the current > literature is like to watch a far star: what you see is what happened > many years ago. Although implementing online refereeing by journals will speed up the peer review somewhat, spreading the nets wider and faster, and distributing the refereeing load more equally, refereeing delays are as unavoidable as other delays in the duties of heavily loaded researchers. Please do not confuse the delays inherent in the use of a finite human resource, referees, who referee for free, with the other delays of publication, which are no longer necessary (such as the delay in coming out in print, or the delays inherent in the need to resort to interlibrary loan if one's institution cannot afford a subscription). > these delays create a lot of problems to > young scientists that are trying to look for a job.... > Making the paper immediately available on the internet > would also solve the problem of the temporal delay between the moment a > work is completed and the time it is available for the scientific > community. The delay inherent in getting your findings competently refereed and certified is worth the wait; but none of the rest is. Open archiving of the preprint solves part of the problem; immediate open archiving of the refereed reprint solves the rest. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu 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 NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of "Freeing the Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving" is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html