Stevan Your points 1 to 4 do NOT answer my worries, they simply brush them aside.
>(1) Self-archiving is a transitional phase in the >freeing of the refereed literature online. > >(2) It occurs IN PARALLEL with the continuing existence >of the official "copy of record" (the refereed journal). YES. I DO understand all this. Transitional it may be, but you have acknowledged that the transition may be long(ish), so, MEANWHILE, users are faced with the quality judgements - the kinds of worries I have already spelled out - on authority, version and usability. To say that "archives are not publishers; they are archives" is pure semantics when at the same time you are explaining that the archives exist to get papers to a wider audience. If the archives are accessible to the world at large, the archive owner has "published" the papers he or she adds to it. Thus, the same strictures that relate to convention publishing must relate to archiving. Access and control go hand in hand. Something IS better than nothing so long as the user is aware of the kind of deal s/he is getting. >And adults are capable of taking both differences into >account. Yes - but evidence shows that frequently adults (and students!) fail to do so. Caveat emptor is all very well, but somewhere in the information chain someone has to take responsibility (for ensuring and labelling quality) for what I insist on calling the PUBLICATION of papers. They may well even be liable (in legal terms) should the paper cause 'harm'. Just as ISP are frequently held to account for the content of email passing through their servers and publishers for the content of their books, archive publishers will be a liable party: I think that they will find they need the kind of expertise traditionally associated with a conventional publisher - and that this brings with it the need for publisher-like roles such as editors. You talk of self-archiving but in reality, this will be done on a university/institution computer/network and the institution will be culpable. >Much money (S/L/P) will be saved, not spent. Yes but the money saved will probably come from the library journals purse while the money spent will be computer services who will need to administer the archives (in most cases). I would bet that these are too far apart to balance! 'To imagine that we need to abstain from self-archiving because the self-archived refereed draft is not yet the authenticated refereed draft' may well be "Zeno's Paralysis" but to imagine that self-archiving is SO different from publishing - different enough that the established management models/rules need not apply - is surely Zeno's Folly. >Please, let's not keep confusing LIBERATION with >PUBLICATION. Please, let's not keep pretending that we are NOT talking about PUBLICATION and that LIBERATION makes everything OK. LIBERATION may be good, but it does not absolve the publishers (quasi-publishers, if you will) of their responsibilities. Chris Armstrong Centre for Information Quality Management (CIQM) (+44) 1974 251441 [email protected] <http://www.i-a-l.co.uk>
