David Shulenburger's NEAR proposal was advanced in its time, but today -- as a *proposal* -- it is behind the times and greatly underestimates both what is needed and what is (easily) attainable.
The NEAR proposal is the same as it was six years ago: that journal articles should be made freely accessible after an embargo period of 6 months or more. http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/133/shulenburger.html We still do not have even that; so the point of this critique is not that free access after a 6-month delay is not preferable to no free access at all! The point is that even six years ago, this was asking for too little, too late -- and far less than what could already be had without asking, and had already been enjoyed (without asking) for six years (then, twelve years now) by, for example, physicists: http://arxiv.org and computer scientists http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs Harnad, S. (2001) AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late. Science dEbates [online] 2 April 2001. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b "Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1411.html But today, when "open access" has found not only a name, and several active movements (e.g., http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ ) and international declarations in its support (e.g., http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html ) but an explicit strategy for attaining it: "(1) Publish your article in an open-access journal if a suitable one exists, (2) otherwise publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it." it seems curiously anachronistic, if not counterproductive, to still be calling for free access only after a 6-month embargo! I think I know why David is still so NEAR and yet so far: He is still thinking of open access primarily as a cure for the universities' serials crisis (which it may eventually become, secondarily -- but surely not before it comes to pass!). The primary need for open access, however, is not in order to cure the serials crisis, but in order to put an end to cumulating loss in research impact, hence research productivity and progress, because of access-denial to all would-be users whose universities cannot afford the journal access tolls. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0006.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0007.gif And this needless loss in research impact, productivity and progress would still continue even if (1) all journals were sold at-cost, and (2) all articles were accessible for free after a 6-month embargo. For it would still be true even then that most universities could not afford access to most of the refereed journals (there are 24,000 in all) and hence that most research would lose most of its would-be users during the all-important first six months from when it is accepted as having met the journal's peer-review standards (not to mention the potential use of the pre-peer-review preprint for as much as a year or more before that). This is research's growth region in many fields, and the NEAR proposal proposes to cut it off! Why still propose providing open access only after a 6-month embargo when one can propose providing open access throughout the research cycle, from the pre-refereeing preprint to the peer-reviewed postprint? "(1) Publish your article in an open-access journal if a suitable one exists, (2) otherwise publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it." http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html Is it still because of copyright concerns? But why does David still have those copyright concerns when 55% of journals already formally support open-access provision through author/institution self-archiving (and many others would agree if asked)? And if you must ask something of the remaining 45% of journals, why ask them to provide delayed access after a 6-month embargo, rather than just that they support self-archiving like the rest? http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 Better still. Don't ask publishers to provide anything and simply mandate that researchers provide open access -- one way or the other -- and then trust nature to take its course. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif > Posted by Peter Suber in Open Access News at: >http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2003_12_07_fosblogarchive.html#a107133393104011529 > > Shulenburger on the path to open access > > David Shulenburger, "The High Cost of Scholarly Journals (And What > To Do About It)", Change Magazine, November/December 2003 > http://www.aahe.org/change/ (not online). Excerpt: "Scholarship, > and hence the content of scholarly journals, is a public good. A > public good is one for which on consumer's use of the good is not > competitive with, or exclusive of, another consumer's use of the > same good. [He then gives examples of national defense and clean > air.] It has long been recognized that provision of public goods > cannot be organized efficiently through the private market....The > United States government believes so strongly in research as a > public good that it funds NSF, NIH, and the research divisions of > other federal agencies with public dollars so that scientists will > create research on behalf of the larger society. It is nonsensical > to provide billions each year for research and then completely > ignore the mechanism by which the results of that research are > disseminated... A federal statute should require that, as a condition > for accepting a federal research grant, the scientist or scholar > agrees to place each article reporting results from the research > in a free, publicly accessible electronic domain after some period, > say six months, of exclusive publication in a journal or other > medium." PS It can't be "scholarship" or "knowledge" simpliciter that is the "public good," otherwise we are asking book-authors to provide open access too, even if they don't want to. But all refereed journal-article authors want to -- and that's the point. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Post discussion to: [email protected] Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
