on Thu, 7 Feb 2002 Marcia Tuttle <[email protected]> forwarded:
> Re: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright (Stevan Harnad)
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 03:55:55 +0000
> From: Stevan Harnad <[email protected]>
> Subject: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright
[snip]
> Finally, the reason I now favor institutional self-archiving over
> central self-archiving is that the university is the natural entity to
> drive, mediate, reward, and benefit from the transition: It is the
> university and its researchers and research output that benefit from
> maximising their research impact by making it freely accessible to all
> would-be users by self-archiving it. It is the university and its
> researchers and research that benefit from having all refereed research
> from other universities freely accessible to its researchers (something
> its library serials budget could never have afforded) and it is the
> university that stands to gain from the annual windfall savings from
> serials cancellations, only a portion of which (~10-30%, or $200-$500
> per paper) will need to be re-directed to cover peer review costs per
> outgoing paper, once the journals have downsized to the essentials.
What Stevan will never admit is that university
managers have plundered library budgets since the
1970s in anticipation of windfall savings from
interlibrary photocopying. Any windfalls go right
to the bottom line. University profitability has
never been greater. Doubling library spending
would not harm any academic program.
In spite of strong opposition from faculty senates
and individual researchers, the cancellation
projects proceeded. Libraries now have half the
share of academic spending that they enjoyed in the
1960s. Impoverishment impacts not only collections
but staff. The profession of academic librarianship
is at risk. Stevan's proposals would replace
libraries and librarians with computers -- many off
campus.
Moreover, researchers have never faced such an
impossible challenge to acquire and digest new
knowledge as they do today. Because of poor library
collections, many research projects have their own
subscriptions, paid by grants and unavailable to
library patrons.
Preprints are not considered "archival," as journals
are. They have the aroma of conference papers and
abstracts. Steven's solution promises to serve up
sewage to researchers now drowning in peer-reviewed
information. He fails to admit that the oxymoronic
"preprint archives" proposed for biomedicine and social
sciences will attract trash, quackery, and fraud mixed
in with papers of value. NIH's e-Biomed program was
soundly rejected by the scientific community largely
for this reason. What works in relatively small and
mathematically-oriented fields would stumble badle
elsewhere.
Albert Henderson
[email protected]
past editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
