but there is another fly in Stevan's ointment large numbers of articles submitted to biomedical journals NEVER appear in print after being unfavorably reviewed they do not deserve publication editors and reviewers REALLY DO protect both readers and author in this process what is then done with those "pre-print" versions that are available to all? gdlundberg
Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> on 09/08/2000 07:35:24 AM Please respond to September 1998 American Scientist Forum <[email protected]> To: [email protected] cc: (bcc: George Lundberg/Medscape) Subject: Re: Electronic archiving and IIS talk On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Chris Armstrong wrote: > [RE] <http://www.iis.org.uk/events/agm2k/index.html>. > > In your scenario, we would have pre- and possibly post-print versions > of a paper co-existent with the final, formally published version - and > it is here that I have to take issue with it. How is the user to know > which is the copy of record? Which should be cited - and which will HEI > authorities consider in RAE or tenure-testing exercises? The copy of record for the refereed postprint is the draft published by the refereed journal in which it appears, just as it has always been! There is obviously no "copy of record" for the pre-refereeing preprint, of which there might even be multiple updates http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/Images/Image3.gif but that is of course normal at that prepublication phase of the embryology of knowledge. There may also be post-publication revisions of the refereed postprint. But the canonical version will always be the one that was accepted for publication and appeared in the journal, just as it always was. In other words, NOTHING CHANGES except accessibility! In the first phase of the "subversive proposal," the self-archived versions simply provide a free means of ACCESS for those who do not have access to the official journal version (whether on-paper or on-line). http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html How refereed journal publishing will adapt to the availability of free access is a later phase, and one can only try to make educated guesses as to the exact form it will take. My own guess is that user preference for the free version will reduce subscription revenues and cause publishers to scale down to providing only the SERVICE of Quality-Control & Certification (QC/C: peer review and certification as accepted by that journal) instead of providing a for-fee product (the text itself, on-paper or on-line). There may continue to be a market for ADD-ONs for-fee, but the final, accepted, refereed draft will no longer be held hostage to those add-ons (and the much lower QC/C service will be paid for by the author-institution in the form of up-front QC/C costs per accepted paper out of its annual savings from the cancellation of its Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View expenditures). The QC-certified version will then have its own "official" sector in the Eprint Archives, in which authors can neither modify nor remove anything, and that will become the canonical version and locus classicus, etc. That's all there is to it. There are no substantive problems with getting exactly the same level of authentication, protection and preservation for digital data as for printed paper. I think that you are merely confusing the first (subversive) parallel phase, in which the free self-archived versions will be SUPPLEMENTS to the official version, with the later phase, in which journal publication practices adapt to this new PostGutenberg phase for this give-away research literature. > Further, what > is to prevent accidental or intentional changes, not to mention further > electronic copying and publishing - again with possible unauthorised or > accidental alterations (see Graham, 1992/3) - of the electronic > original? In the first, subversive phase, nothing -- although the Eprint Archives are designed so all versions remain, and authors simply add new drafts to supersede them if they wish: http://www.eprints.org But this first phase is, as I said, a SUPPLEMENT, not yet a SUBSTITUTE, for the journal version, which co-exists with it. Once the free version drives the restructuring of journal publication, the Eprints Archives can have unalterable official-version sectors (authenticated, date-stamped, encrypted, backed-up, etc.) that will do the job of what used to be the paper-on-shelves -- and will do it with at least as good a level of protection and security and permanence as paper-on-shelves did. The unofficial pre-refereeing drafts and post-publication revisions need not be as lapidary as the canonical version, but there is no reason in principle why they too cannot be, if that is how the Learned Community prefers it. There is no problem here; you simply have to think in terms of a digital archive rather than an analog one, a for-free archive rather than a for-fee one, and a protected, dedicated sector for the "copy of record." > We try to inculcate good practice which includes the > evaluation of resources in users of the WWW, but it seems to me that > your proposal, if widely adopted, would muddy the water, at least to > the extent that indication of authorship and corporate source will no > longer necessarily help to define authority, accuracy or currency. Not at all! For now, it will simply be a free way to access versions of papers that otherwise are only accessible for-fee. And when the system restructures to adjust to this, the official version will be accessible for free too, authenticated, protected and preserved (and suitably sign-posted for navigators). > Other issues that cannot easily be ignored are those of access (few > _formally_ published electronic papers find their way into BNB or its > equivalent) and legal deposit. I do not understand what you are asking here at all. I don't know what BNB is, but ACCESS is the core issue here! The objective is to free access to both the official published literature and its precursor and successor drafts. That is what subversive self-archiving is all about! > Most arguments that electronic publishing will take over from print > hinge on mechanical rather than social advantages; your imposition of a > human-originating variable is an unknown. Mine is not just a prediction, it is a strategy for bringing it about. Nor is it merely about "electronic publication": Virtually all refereed journals now have online digital versions already. It is about FREEING ACCESS to this give-away literature; and the means of achieving this is author self-archiving -- for the time being as a (subversive) for-free SUPPLEMENT to the for-fee journal version, and eventually, after the restructuring this induces, as an authenticated substitute for it too. > Ginsparg has suggested 10 to > 20 years before electronic supersedes conventional scholarly > publishing, others and you, I think, somewhat less. No one knows how long the restructuring will take; but the freeing can literally take place overnight, if all authors simply self-archive their current papers in an Open Archive. And Universities who wish to increase their authors' research impact (while perhaps eventually even saving on their serials budgets) need only mount the interoperable Eprint Archives for their authors to self-archive in. > The interregnum > will prove difficult for users who are faced with such choices - I fear > that all but the most committed will remain faithful to the tried and > tested formal publishing. Again, nothing of the sort. No "choice" needs to be made! Authors continue to do everything they did before (do research, publish it in refereed journals), giving up nothing, but merely take one simple additional step: Popping a copy (of both the preprint and the postprint) into their institutional Eprint Archives. Open archiving and interoperability http://www.openarchives.org will take care of the rest. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
