On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Michael Eisen wrote: > This is the reason why we have organized our "boycott". Journal publishers > are a very conservative lot. We are hoping that economic pressure, rather > than good will, will force a change in policy.
But to make the boycott work, you have to get enough authors to be willing to sacrifice their preferred journals to make a difference. I would be delighted if that were possible, but all the more skeptical because it is proving so hard to get authors to do something that DOESN'T require any sacrifice and will achieve the same goal (self-archiving). I think authors can be educated to realize that self-archiving calls for no sacrifice or risk, and is guaranteed to achieve the goal (of freeing the refereed literature); I doubt that they can be persuaded that sacrificing their preferred journals is without sacrifice, hence likely to achieve the goal. > journals are concerned by the growing number of people who have agreed to > shun non-compliant journals and that they are looking to craft positions > that will satisfy them. So long as we respond successfully to their current > set of unacceptable proposals, I think they will move rapidly in the right > direction. I applaud your efforts. But what really needs changing is journals' copyright policies, which are a perceived deterrent to self-archiving refereed papers (even though they can be circumvented completely legally): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim > Three years ago we tried to organize [a self-archiving] effort in biomedical > sciences and it was not well received. Although there were many reasons > why this proposal did not fly, I think the main reason was a widespread > reluctance to adopt anything that seemed to be circumventing peer review. > I, of course, understand that self-archiving and peer review are not > in conflict, but I worry that this is still a difficult sell to many > biologists. It sometimes takes time to educate people about what is in their own interests, especially when it involves any significant change in habits. The physicists figured it out early (but even their self-archiving is growing only linearly, so would take a decade to free their entire refereed literature). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Tim/sld004.htm We know exactly what researchers have in mind when they hesitate about self-archiving (actually, I have counted 22 prima facie worries <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8.>, but the most prominent two are): (1) peer review and (2) copyright. The answer to the worry that self-archiving "circumvents" peer review is so simple that it is irrefutable (because tautological). We are talking about the SELF-ARCHIVING OF PEER-REVIEWED PAPERS! (It is the conflation of this with the additional self-archiving of earlier embryological stages of the paper, in the form of pre-refereeing preprints, that is the source of the confusion, but it can immediately be dispelled and that should be the end of the matter for a rational thinker. It's just that the confusion has to be dispelled over and over again before it becomes common knowledge.) (I might add that the task of dispelling the confusion is not made easier by the Simon-says/Simon-does confusions needlessly added by those physicists and mathematicians who self-archive and also have a "theory" about what they're doing, if their theory is that peer review is unnecessary! Because the fact is that all those self-archivers are still submitting all those papers for peer review, and publishing them in peer-reviewed journals, exactly as they always did. It is just that, IN ADDITION, they are self-archiving them -- both the unrefereed preprints and the refereed postprints, thereby freeing them for one an all online. The rest is just conjecture. Simon says, Simon does. Let us emulate what Simon does and ignore what he says...) Copyright worries are the other big deterrent, but they too can be dispelled once one realizes that there is a completely legal way to self-archive even under the most restrictive of copyright agreements, and here it is indeed a matter of "circumventing": http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim I am not sure which biomedical effort of three years ago you are referring to, but if it's Harold's 1999 ebiomed proposal, in my opinion it failed precisely because it was NOT a self-archiving proposal (for refereed postprints), but rather the proposal that you are promoting now (journal publishers should give their contents away online or authors should switch journals). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Ebiomed/ebiomed-harnad.htm If there was an earlier pure self-archiving initiative in the biomedical sciences, well then you gave up on it too early! After all, I've been preaching it since 1994 and I'm only now beginning to make some headway (thanks to the Open Archives Initiative and interoperability): http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl http://www.eprints.org This the right time to promote self-archiving in earnest, now that distributed, institution-based archiving is ready to complement centralized arXiv/PubMedCentral style archiving, all integrated by the glue of OAI-compliant interoperability. Authors should not be boycotting and waiting to see whether that will work; they should be self-archiving, which has face-validity, and we know it will work, now. At the very least, they should be boycotting (if they wish to make the sacrifice) AND self-archiving (which entails no sacrifice at all). > In recommending alternative publication options for the people who support > our initiative, we will include self-archiving, along with related options > that we hope will take. I hope self-archiving will not be represented to authors as an "alternative publication option," for that is precisely what gives them the wrong idea that to self-archive is to circumvent peer review! Self-archiving is a sacrifice-free, risk-free SUPPLEMENT to conventional publication, not a SUBSTITUTE for it. > One option we are considering is the production of > something like a GPL for scientific manuscripts which scientists would > attach to their manuscripts to remove any copyright restrictions associated > with publication. I'm not sure how an author who has signed an over-restrictive copyright can remove the restriction after publication by attaching a GPL, but I agree that there is a legal way to circumvent even the most restrictive copyright agreement and hence to self-archive legally. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim > > (iii) Creating new journals, without track-records, to draw away > > submissions from the noncompliant established journals, is another > > long uphill path, and again it is not at all clear why authors > > should prefer to take that path, renouncing their preferred > > established journals, when they can have their cake and eat it too > > (through self-archiving). > > We are planning on starting new journals on our own. One would be a > high-profile, editorially exclusive journal with a very prominent set of > editors and publishers (drawn from our organizers and supporters) and the > second would essentially be a series of branded self-archives. Establishing a secure niche for a new journal, whether on-paper or on-line, is always a risky enterprise. I can't see how the way to free the contents of the established journals will be by drawing them into new journals, but I certainly wish you the best of luck. I cannot wish you luck with the "branded self-archives," though, because that again sounds like a new form of self-publishing, rather than the self-archiving of refereed, published papers that it needs to be in order to free the refereed literature. There is only one thing that is even more risky than trying to establish a new peer-reviewed journal, and that is trying to establish a new form of peer review. I hope the "branding" technique will get a lot of testing, to see what quality it produces, before it is proposed as a viable alternative. (This too has been a part of my criticism of the otherwise commendable Varmus proposal all along: We are trying to free the peer-reviewed literature from access/impact barriers, not from peer review! Peer review reform is another agenda, with a long empirical testing period ahead of it, whereas the time to free the literature is now [in fact, yesterday!], and the means that will achieve it for sure is self-archiving.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Ebiomed/ebiomed-harnad.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
