On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Sally Morris wrote: > I don't think due consideration has been given to WHY some publishers might > legitimately object. Their concern is that making their content freely > available may ultimately undermine their sales revenue - and, although this > has not yet proved to be the case, no one can say for sure that they are > wrong about the longer term.
Publishers who do not wish to make their own content freely available out of concern that it may ultimately undermine their sales revenue -- i.e., publishers who do not wish to convert to open-access publishing -- can certainly object, legitimately, to do being pressured to do so. But objecting to their *authors* making their own content freely available if they wish to do so is an entirely different matter. To attempt to pressure authors not to do that -- on the grounds that, although it has not yet proved to be the case after 12 years of self-archiving by physicists and others, no one can say for sure that it will not ultimately undermine their sales revenue in the longer term -- would be to attempt to hold authors' research access and research impact hostage to publishers' current bottom lines in an online era when that is demonstrably no longer necessary, hence no longer justifiable. Hence such an objection would not be legitimate. More important, it would not be legally enforceable, as it is perfectly legal for an author to self-archive his pre-refereeing preprint; and if the publisher insists on exclusive copyright transfer for the refereed postprint without the author's retaining the right to self-archive his refereed postprint, the author can simply self-archive the list of corrections and link them to the preprint. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 In other words, author pressure on publishers to convert to open-access publishing right now in order to provide the open access that authors seek right now (so as to maximise the impact of their articles) is not necessary, justifiable, or legitimate because authors have the alternative of self-archiving their own articles -- but it is not necessary, justifiable or legitimate for precisely the same reason that publisher pressure on authors not to provide open access to their own articles right now by self-archiving them is not necessary, justifiable or legitimate. It is legitimate for publishers to decline to convert to open-access publishing ("gold") right now, and prudent for them instead to wait, watch, and adapt ("green") to whatever the consequences of open-access provision through author self-archiving turn out to be, in the long term. The process will be gradual and anarchic, leaving plenty of lead time for any cost-cutting and downsizing that conversion to open-access publishing and the open-access cost-recovery model (author-institution publication charges per outgoing articles instead of user-institution access-tolls per incoming journal) might call for -- *should that turn out to be the ultimate outcome.* But it is certainly not legitimate to try to deny authors the maximised impact that is at last within their reach by attempting to prevent them from providing open access to their own articles through self-archiving -- right now. > Trying to circumvent publishers' objections by more or less devious means > does not seem to me to be a good way to proceed. A good way to proceed toward what? The objective is to put an immediate end to needless impact loss by putting an immediate end to access-denial, through self-archiving. And what is "more or less devious" about self-archiving one's postprint if one's publisher is gold or green, and one's preprint and corrigenda if one's publisher is white? http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm Or better still, self-archiving the postprint in any case, and waiting to hear if anyone has any objections (as the authors of over a quarter of a million physics articles have been doing since 1991, with only 4 copyright-based objections throughout all those years)? Publishers may be content to take a leisurely approach to what might be a "good way to proceed" to put an immediate end to all needless access and impact loss, but they will perhaps understand that authors, who are in it for the research impact and not the sales revenues, will not care to wait. 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] Unified 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
