On Sun, 18 Feb 2001, Peter Singer <[email protected]> wrote: > when do you expect this threshhold of ready availability > [of OAI-compliant University Eprints Archives} will be reached?
As soon as the Provosts' Initiative http://www.econ.rochester.edu/Faculty/PhelpsPapers/Phelps_paper.html http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/ or something like it is reactivated worldwide, and Universities and research institutions mount (OAI-compliant) Eprint Archives (and help their researchers fill them): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#7.2. > At that point, my hypothesis is that we will see sub-optimal use of self- > archiving in medicine. Here too, the Universities' initiative will be critical. Universities must initially be proactive in encouraging and helping their researchers to self-archive their pre- and post-refereeing papers in their University Eprint Archives (see the URL above). > The preliminary evidence supporting the hypothesis is that the BMJ > Netprints preprint server has not caught on the way the Los Alamos physics > one did a decade or so ago. Netprints is (1) only for unrefereed preprints (not refereed postprints), it is (2) not OAI-compliant (so far -- though eprints.org could make it so), hence not interoperable, and (3) it is a central, rather than an institutional Archive. The hope is that distributed, University-based Eprint Archives will now at at last divide and conquer this obstacle locally. Here is the target: On the rough (under)count I gave before (20K refereed journals x 100 papers per journal = 2 million refereed papers per year from all the disciplines and around the world), that amounts to 2 million annual papers becoming available for free for all online: a vast new free resource for all researchers and a huge boost to the potential impact and productivity of all research. > I think this is because of the incentives in > medicine to publish in brand name journals that disallow prepublication. > Presumably the physics journals do not have restrictive prepublication > policies, yes (ie no "Ingelfinger-like rule")? As I said before, I doubt very much that it's the "Ingelfinger Rule" (i.e., journals declining to referee submissions that have been "previously publicized") that's holding medical researchers or anyone else back, for the reasons I've already adduced: The Rule (besides being arbitrary, unnecessary, unjustifiable, directly contrary to the interests of research and researchers, and invoked solely to protect journals' current revenue streams and past modera operandi) is (unlike copyright) not a legal matter and UNENFORCEABLE; moreover, it is invoked by a shrinking minority of journals and it did not stop the Physicists! (Yes, there are Physics journals that invoke the Ingelfinger Rule, among them Science and Nature -- but Nature has since dropped it, and there is reason to expect Science soon will too.) Harnad, S. (2000) E-Knowledge: Freeing the Refereed Journal Corpus Online. Computer Law & Security Report 16(2) 78-87. [Rebuttal to Bloom Editorial in Science and Relman Editorial in New England Journal of Medicine] http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm Harnad, S. (2000) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing. The Lancet Perspectives 256 (December Supplement): s16. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm > However, if my hypothesis proves true (which i think it will), and the > remaining name-brand journals persist with restrictive pre-publication > policies (and frankly i do not see the NEJM backing away from the > Ingelfinger rule any time soon), then realigning incentives by producing > brand-name independent quality measures and incorporating them into the > incentive system in medicine will become the crucial step to free that > literature. I repeat. The Ingelfinger Rule is not just indefensible, it is unenforceable. The physicists, in their wisdom, duly ignored it. The rest of the world research community will realize it can and should do the same. > I am not sure we can go much further with this debate in the abstract. > We need more data now which we should have as the open archives > initiative unfolds. I agree. But please note. As mentioned before in this Forum: "The OAI is a much broader initiative than the self-archiving initiative. "OAI is dedicated to providing shared interoperability standards for the entire on-line digital literature, whether self-archived or not, whether for-free or for-fee, whether journal, book or other, whether full-text or not, whether centralized or distributed. "It is true that the OAI was originally proposed as the "UPS" (Universal Preprint Service), which was indeed a form of self-archiving (though a limited form, focussing on the unrefereed preprint rather than on both the unrefereed preprint and the refereed postprint, as self-archiving does). But "UPS" was quickly dropped and the OAI has since vastly outgrown those limited original objectives." http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/scripts/ wa.exe?A2=ind01&L=september98-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&P=9802 So what we must now follow is the progress of the self-archiving sub-initiative of the OAI rather than the OAI itself. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): 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]
