On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 [email protected] wrote: > As someone who takes the maxim, if it looks too good to be true, it > probably is, I confess to being skeptical about publisher guarantees > of an author "right" to self-archiving. > > Let's see what publishers do when someone does the obvious thing: provide > an open access software engine that takes an article title and takes one > directly to the corresponding self-archived article w/o a lot of > background noise.
Too late: The engine(s) already exist. For starters, see: http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ and http://citebase.eprints.org/ And, for example, a quarter of a million articles have been self-archived by physicists since 1991, since well before any physics publishers were green: Far from trying to get those articles taken off-line, most physics publishers have since given self-archiving their formal green light. http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html (APS was, as far as I know, the very first publisher to go green): "Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)" (1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0471.html So may I suggest to the research community and its funders that, rather than listening to the armchair prophets of gloom (who have been speculating for over a decade now), they should look instead at the empirical facts and then go ahead and self-archive? The light is green, and it doesn't get any greener... http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31-worries In other words (to paraphrase Pogo), we have seen the enemy, and he is *us* (not our publishers!)! Swan & Brown's (2004) JISC/OSI survey reported asked authors "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in... [OA archives]. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly..." Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224. http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/ So 100% OA simply awaits the implementation of the UK Select Committee's and the US House Appropriations Committee's recommendation to mandate taking the green road to OA. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php Stevan Harnad UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php 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 AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected]
