On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote: > Thanks for your reply. > > Let's assume that Psycoloquy was fully open access. > > Would you (or your contributors) care if a commercial publisher > took Psycoloquy, reformatted it, indexed it, published it in print > form, sold it, and kept all profits? > > Would you care if they also offered an electronic version for a > fee that had system capabilities not found in the original, such > as reference links to articles in commercial journals? > > Best Regards, > Charles > > Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Systems, > University of Houston, Library Administration, > 114 University Libraries, Houston, TX 77204-2000. > E-mail: [email protected]. Voice: (713) 743-9804. > Fax: (713) 743-9811. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm
Dear Charles, First, Psycoloquy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ is indeed fully open access. Second, I am really not sure what answer to give to your question. Perhaps I have not thought the possibilities through sufficiently. But here is my first approximation to an answer (thinking as an author/contributor): (1) The material in full-text, open-access journals (e.g. Psycoloquy) consists of peer-reviewed research. (2) The authors of this peer-reviewed research do not seek fees or royalties for their work. They seek only research impact (i.e., that it should be visible, read, cited, used). (3) If a commercial secondary publisher (or anyone else) decides to "use" the texts by repackaging and enhancing them, and offering them for sale, it seems to me that this is a victimless act. (It is a crime only if the authorship and original source are not clearly indicated, or the text is altered or corrupted in some way -- but those are other matters: you asked about simply re-using it for sale.) (4) At worst, commercial re-packaging and sale can simply fail to sell, because users will prefer to use the free version; at best, it can add a bit more impact to the research. (5) Most of the world's 20,000 refereed journals are not online-only at the moment, with their full-texts accessible online from the publisher toll-free: The paper version, as well as the publisher's online version must be paid for by users. This too is no problem for the author/institution self-archiving of the refereed final drafts of those same papers. The two versions -- for-free and [possibly enhanced] for-fee -- can peacefully co-exist as long as there is a market for the for-fee version. In summary, I think (unless your concerns are indeed about text-corruption or plagiarism, which is another matter), that you might be mixing conventional concerns about royalty-seeking literature (such as books) with the special case of this give-away corpus (peer-reviewed research), whose authors do not seek royalties, but merely seek to maximize visibility, access, useage and impact. Best wishes, Stevan -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
