On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, John Peel wrote: > Stevan, you said: > > 'Hence the very same desideratum that Pieter was explicitly endorsing -- > full access for every researcher to every journal -- can be met another > way: through open archiving by every researcher.' > > I don't claim to speak for Pieter but I'm pretty sure he was NOT endorsing > an open archive. What he did endorse was a paid-for distributed network, > the CrossRef model, but it he didn't say anything about it being open. In > his view publishers would still retain the copyright to the work and they > would still set tariffs if they chose to. I inferred from what he said that > they would also oppose self-archiving. Perhaps we could call on Pieter to > clarify that position?
Happy to ask Pieter Bolman to clarify, but I am sure you are right, and I think Steve Hitchcock's point (which I was merely trying to explicate to Joseph Ransdell in that posting) was not that Pieter was endorsing open archiving, but that he was endorsing an outcome (online access to all refereed research for all researchers) that could not be even remotely realized by the avenue Pieter himself is advocating -- a click-through online oligopoly of publishers providing access to the refereed research corpus FOR-FEE, for the simple reason that there isn't faintly enough money to pay for all of that for all researchers) -- whereas the exact same outcome could indeed be realized, and realized immediately, through open self-archiving by all researchers, now. To anticipate your own reply, John, you will add that that same outcome could also be realized immediately another way, through all reseachers' switching their allegiance from the established journals that don't allow free access to their contents, to new journals like BioMed Central, that do. The empirical and practical question, then, is which of these options for freeing online access to the refereed literature will prove simpler and more attractive to researchers: self-archiving or giving up their established journals? -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
