Dear Peter, According to my own construal of it, the "big koan" is the puzzle of why, when free online access to their give-away work is at last within reach, giveaway authors do not go ahead and grasp it.
In your FOS essay "Why FOS progress has been slow" http://makeashorterlink.com/?C59220BE you equate open-access almost completely with publishing in open-access journals (BOAI Strategy 2). But if that were the case, there would be no koan: Most authors don't publish most of their work in open-access journals for the simple reason that almost no open-access journals yet exist! So is the koan then why don't authors found more open-access journals? But that would begin to sound less and less like a koan, because founding new journals (let alone open-access journals) is certainly not within the reach of most authors. It isn't even a koan to ask why all authors who can do so do not publish in the (few) open-access journals that do exist: Why should they publish there, rather than in their preferred journals of established quality and impact? It has never been a koan to explain why authors do (and should) prefer established journals. And by the very same token, it is not a koan that promotion and tenure (and prize and funding) committees likewise prefer to continue to rely on the known quality standards of established journals rather than the not yet established quality standards of new journals. (JHEP managed to establish its bona fides within just a few years.) I think it is very important that FOS and BOAI should not head exclusively or primarily down the BOAI Strategy 2 route (founding new open-access journals, converting old ones), otherwise I'm afraid that we will not see much progress in this decade. For the fact is that if Strategy 2 were the only way to free access, or the primary way, then free access would still be a very long way off -- and there would be no koan in why we are not there yet! My koan was formulated specifically about self-archiving (BOAI Strategy 1): It is THAT that is entirely within researchers' reach already. (You do S1 a bit of a disservice to say it only frees "some form of their postprints": In the majority of cases it already frees the final peer-reviewed draft, and in all cases it frees the equivalent of it. And the koan is predicated on the fact that immediate free access to the full peer-reviewed corpus, right now, even in the less convenient form of preprint+corrigenda, would still be infinitely better for both authors and users than no access at all. And no-access is indeed the relevant baseline for comparison here, not toll-based access to the deluxe postprint for those few lucky enough to afford it!) So my koan was an expression of socio-historical perplexity about why researchers do not immediately grasp BOAI Strategy 1; for it's the only one of the two that's entirely within immediate immediate reach, right now! IF FOS and BOAI become preoccupied instead with the much more remote road of BOAI Strategy 2, they merely add to the koan, preferring to focus on the not-yet-reachable instead of grasping what is already there! Cheers, Stevan
