As I detect signs of a trend toward tumbling into intemperateness if the exchange continues, I will not reply to the two postings by Jean-Claude Guedon that follow this one. The attentive reader can, I think, draw his own conclusions from what has already been said. The rest would just have been repetition.
One substantive point, however, should be noted. At some point Jean-Claude Guedon introduces his "overlay journal" notion into the discussion of institutional self-archiving. It must be pointed out that this notion betrays a profound misunderstanding of the very nature and essence of institutional self-archiving: The purpose of institutional self-archiving is to make all the articles published by the institution's authors in peer-reviewed journals today Open Access (OA), today. It is the peer-reviewed journal articles that are self-archived. These have already been peer-reviewed and published. Hence they are not looking for peer-review, or a publisher, or an "overlay journal." They are only looking for OA, so that all their would-be users can access and use them. Jean-Claude seems to keep thinking of self-archiving as something authors do with their unpublished, non-peer-reviewed preprints, rather than with their published, peer-reviewed articles, something that still requires peer-review and publication by "overlay journals." This is an error, and it is not what OA is about, or what self-archiving is for. Self-archiving the various embryological stages of a paper -- including pre-peer-review drafts and post-publication revisions, corrections and updates -- is certainly to be encouraged, and one of the added bonusses of self-archiving, but it is not primarily what self-archiving or OA are about, or for. OA self-archiving is done in order to make the published article's contents (not necessarily its form) OA, for all of its potential users worldwide, whether or not their institutions can afford to pay for access to the publisher's proprietary version. Hence the "overlay journals" proposal is really just another speculative hypothesis about the course that journal publication might or might not eventually take. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the nature and purpose of institutional self-archiving, which is to provide OA to all articles published by the institution's authors (mostly in non-OA journals) in order to maximize their usage and impact. This straightforward, atheoretical, non-hypothetical rationale for institutional OA self-archiving -- already well-demonstrated empirically to be both feasible and to produce the desired benefits -- should be strictly separated from any speculative hypotheses about the future course that journal publication might or might not one day take. Stevan Harnad
