This Subject Thread begins (2000): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0661.html
Related Threads: "The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3147.html "The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3378.html Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html (Friday January 23 2004) contains the following item: > OA will transform scholarly communication > > David C. Prosser, The Next Information Revolution - How Open Access > repositories and Journals will Transform Scholarly Communications, > Liber Quarterly, 13, 3/4 (2003) (accessible only to subscribers). > http://liber.library.uu.nl/cgi-bin/pw.cgi/articles/000047/index.html > Abstract: "Complaints about spiralling serials costs, lack of > service from large commercial publishers, and the inability to > meet the information needs of researchers are not new. Over the > past few years, however, we have begun to see new models develop > that better serve the information needs academics as both authors > and readers. The internet is now being used in ways other than just > to provide electronic facsimiles of print journals accessed using > the traditional subscription models. Authors can now self-archive > their own work making it available to millions and new open access > journals extend this by providing a peer-review service to ensure > quality control." Posted by Peter Suber at 11:29 PM. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_01_18_fosblogarchive.html#a107491856636195137 I could not access the article as Liber is toll-access; but perhaps David Prosser could explain the last sentence in the above summary: > Authors can now self-archive their own work making it available to > millions and new open access journals extend this by providing a > peer-review service to ensure quality control Without the full text it is hard to know which of two possible senses is intended here. The first sense is spot-on and irreproachable: (1) Authors can now provide open access to the peer-reviewed articles they publish in toll-access journals by self-archiving them AND (2) there are also new open-access peer-reviewed journals in which authors can publish their articles. If this is the intended sense of the passage, it is a very welcome statement of the UNIFIED OPEN-ACCESS PROVISION POLICY: (OAJ) Researchers publish their research in an open-access journal if a suitable one exists, otherwise (OAA) they publish it in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it in their own research institution's open-access research archive. But unfortunately there is another possible construal of the above passage, and it would be very helpful if David would clarify whether it was in fact this that he meant: Authors can now (1) self-archive unrefereed drafts of their work and then (2) extend this by submitting them to open-access journals to peer-review them. I hope the latter is not what David meant, for it is merely the common error of thinking that self-archiving is only, or primarily, about unrefereed preprints. This is and has always been incorrect. "Eprints" are electronic drafts of various stages of the same paper. "Preprints" are drafts *before* the paper is peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, and "postprints" are drafts *after* the paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint Self-archiving can provide open access to either the preprint or the postprint draft of an article or both, but the primary target of the open-access movement is of course the postprint, not the preprint! There are 2.5 million postprints published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (<1000 of them open-access journals, >23,000 of them toll-access journals), and it is to those 2.5 million postprints, not merely their preprints, that self-archiving is intended to provide open access. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-self-archive Preprints are an extra bonus. It is highly recommended that authors self-archive their preprints too: It accelerates the research cycle, physicists have been doing it for decades, and the research community is quite capable (with plenty of prior practise from paper days) of making the distinction between an unrefereed preprint and a refereed postprint (bearing the journal name and date). The rule for unrefereed preprints always was and continues to be: "caveat emptor" (i.e., use with caution), and the cautious user will wait for the refereed version to appear before risking an attempt to build upon work that has not yet been validated and may prove unreliable or downright wrong (except in special cases where the name and reputation of the author justifies the risk, or the user is expert enough to peer-review it for himself). A delay of 8-12 months or more separates the preprint from the postprint. That is the interval in which the peer-review and the revision are being done. Self-archiving authors, including the physicists who have been doing it the most systematically, since 1991, do not leave their unrefereed preprints dangling after the peer-review and revision are done! If there have been no changes, they simply update the reference, inserting the name of the journal that accepted it and, when available, the volume, year, and page-numbers. If there have been changes, they self-archive the peer-reviewed final draft (i.e., the postprint, with its updated reference). I invite David to clarify that what he meant was *not* that self-archiving is merely for unrefereed preprints, which should then be submitted to open-access ("gold") journals for peer review. That would be fine if there were 24,000 open-access journals. But as there are fewer than 1000 open-access journals to date http://www.doaj.org/ with the rest toll-access http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ this would condemn the research community to a very long, uncertain, and unnecessary wait for open access: It would mean waiting for the creation/conversion of the remaining 23,000 toll-access journals (>95%), one by one! This would be neither a correct picture of the open-access reality today, nor a correct picture of the possibility and feasibility of further open access today: At least three times as many articles (postprints!) are being made open-access today by being self-archived by their authors as are being made open-access by being published in open-access journals http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif And (although this can only be quantified after the reporting rate for existing open-access journals stabilises) it is almost certain that the growth rate of open-access provision through self-archiving today is considerably higher than through publishing in open-access journals. (This stands to reason, as it is far easier to create and fill new institutional eprint archives with toll-access journal articles than to convert or create and fill new open-access journals.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif http://www.doaj.org/ Neither growth-rate is anywhere near high enough, however, so what is needed today is clear, correct information to the research community about the benefits of open-access and their two complementary means of attaining it. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/commitment.html I also note that it is ironic that David's article in Liber is not itself open-access! It has been often remarked in this Forum -- incorrectly! -- that it is ironic when a newspaper or magazine article about open access is itself not open-access. But that is not ironic at all, as journalists write articles for hire, and are paid fees for their writing, which is then sold by the newspaper or magazine for a fee (toll). Researchers, in contrast, do not write their peer-reviewed articles for a fee; they write them -- and give them away -- so that they will be used by other researchers, and that usage is called "research impact." It is for the sake of maximising research impact -- and putting an end to needless impact-loss because of access-denial to would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the access-tolls -- that the open-access movement exists. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0006.gif Now even a peer-reviewed journal -- I am not sure whether Liber is one http://liber.library.uu.nl/ -- is not obliged to convert from toll-access to open-access ("gold") if it does not wish to take the risk. So the irony here is not that Liber is not a gold journal (even though it is promoting the creation of gold journals!). The irony is rather that this article by David Prosser has not been made open-access by its own author, through self-archiving! David may indeed have self-archived it and the search-engines may just not have picked it up yet (in which case I apologise for having thought otherwise!). But if David did not self-archive this article, then he has forgotten to practise what he preaches -- or he is indeed preaching the wrong sermon (of the two construals of the passage quoted at the beginning of this posting)! In case David's reply is that he cannot self-archive this article because Liber is not a "green" toll-access journal (i.e., it does not yet formally endorse author self-archiving as 55% of journals already do http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif ), then I would like to respectfully suggest that part of the article's preaching ought perhaps to have been that Liber *ought* to be green! (Perhaps that *was* in the article, but alas, without access, one cannot know!) http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm For Liber's vision statement, see: http://www.kb.dk/guests/intl/liber/vision/visionstatement.htm Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html 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