Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
[From: FOS Newsletter http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z53834B71 ] Interview with Ingenta CEO Mark Rowse In my last issue (FOSN for 6/17/02) I wondered why Ingenta had appointed such an FOS-friendly advisory board. Ingenta produces electronic editions of scholarly journals for publishers of print journals. So far Ingenta produces no FOS or open-access journals. On July 15 I had a wide-ranging telephone interview with Mark Rowse, Ingenta's CEO, who answered my earlier question and many others. The short answer to my original question is that Rowse sees no conflict between FOS and Ingenta's current business. He wants to know what's happening in the FOS domain, wants Ingenta to advance some of the goals of the FOS movement (more below), and wants to position his company beyond the sometimes politicized conflicts in the scholarly communication industry today. For Rowse scholarly journal articles are not merely free or priced. They evolve, and are often both free and priced at different times or in different versions. In the earliest stages, they are usually free, for example in presentations at conferences and informal email discussions. They might also be free at some middle stages, such as circulating preprints to colleagues or posting them to a preprint exchange. The final stage tends to be publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Rowse does not rule out making this final stage free as well, but points out that, even when it is priced, it is compatible with free distribution of the earlier versions at earlier stages. Rowse believes that publishers are starting to recognize the legitimacy of free versions of published articles. This is shown by their growing acceptance of eprint archiving, at least of preprints. Having said this, Rowse emphasized that Ingenta is not a publisher and does not want to become one. Others can solicit content and organize its peer review. Ingenta's niche is to produce the ejournal of the resulting articles. Rowse's openness to free distribution of preprints is one factor that led Ingenta into the eprint services business. Background: On July 1, Ingenta announced its plan to produce a commercial version of the eprints software developed at Southampton University. Eprints is the open-source software for creating OAI-compliant institutional archives. The Southampton version of the software will remain free and open source, and will continue to undergo development. The free Southampton version and priced Ingenta version will coexist and serve different constituencies. Rowse is betting that some institutions will not want to bother installing and maintaining an eprints archive, even if the software is free. Ingenta will take on these jobs for institutions willing to outsource them, as well as the job of uploading content to the archives, a follow-through step that many institutions neglect. Institutions will choose whether to host the archives themselves or have Ingenta host them. The even when Ingenta hosts them, the archives will be open-access. For many institutions, Rowse believes that hiring Ingenta will cost less than doing the same work themselves. Rowse can't yet estimate the release date for the commercial version of the software. Ingenta is still writing the code and considering different charging models. Though Ingenta will sell the software and related services, Rowse does not expect them to produce a significant portion of company revenue. Ingenta has other reasons for entering the eprints and OAI services business. First, it would like to assure the consistency of the metadata generated by different archives at different institutions. It would like to provide researchers with searching tools that cover both refereed and unrefereed content, perhaps with different tabs on a search results page. It would like to interest commercial publishers in the OAI metadata harvesting protocol, even if these publishers will never adopt open access. It would like to enhance the protocol for various value-added research functions. In all these ways, it would like to make the free and priced worlds interoperable. Above all, it would like to be involved in scholarly communication at every stage in the life of an article. Finally, I asked whether Ingenta had considered producing open-access journals. The answer is yes, but Rowse noted that he has never been approached by an open-access journal. Ingenta's expertise includes the DRM system that limits online access to a journal's paid subscribers. But Ingenta only enforces the access rules requested by its publisher clients. Open-access journals might not have considered Ingenta in the past, because they would not take advantage of its DRM (true) or because they believed Ingenta was committed to priced access (untrue). But Ingenta is willing to produce ejournals for anyone, whether they wish to use its DRM or not. In fact, because open-access journals would use fewer of Ingenta's services, Ingenta could charge them less for
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
The posting on July 18th from Stevan relates to email messages sent to both Stevan and Ingenta by myself and the Electronic Publishing Trust (EPT), respectively. I would like to make clear that we were not concerned about copyright issues, the legitimate activities of commercial organisations, commercial publishers (we work with many from the developing world) nor even about filling the archives. Our concern is solely about the possible development of a two-tier eprint software system that would emerge as a result of a commercial development in parallel with the free-of-cost software. It seems to us that where this scenario exists, the non-commercial system will likely be of a less well-developed standard. Filling the archives is essential, but filled archives without the eprint software to provide global access to them must be as useless as empty archives. It is very true that scientists in developing countries are highly enthusiastic about the potential for free access to the world's scientific literature that institutional archives present. The EPT is active in raising awareness about the OAI and associated services (www.epublishingtrust.org). But scientists in the developing countries have important research information to contribute to the global knowledge base, and raising visibility of this through their own institutional archives is also seen to be a very important opportunity. Closing the S to N knowledge gap, making visible the 'missing' science, are real challenges that archives in developing countries can help to resolve. It is difficult for academic authors in the developed world to relate to the feeling of isolation and impotence that scientists feel if their research remains largely unknown and unacknowledged, as is too often the case at present in the developing world. Moreover, the importance of the research generated in these regions is of huge relevance to the development of international research programmes - particularly in such areas as AIDS, malaria, TB, ecology and conservation, where local conditions and local knowledge are significant factors. Therefore, the OAI movement was increasingly regarded as a light at the end of the tunnel and one-for-all software the ideal tool. We remain concerned that as the commercial system develops, the scientists in the poorer countries will have no choice but to use the non-commercial software. If the development of this will indeed forge ahead at the same rate as that developed by Ingenta, this will be reassuring. But the new commercial arrangement suggests that the current software has need of improved user support, so perhaps the BOAI initiative could be encouraged to focus on supporting archives in the developing world by funding the development of installation or self-archiving manuals. Archives in the developing regions would be quickly filled, since the global recognition they provide would be greatly encouraging to scientific development, both personally and nationally. Barbara Kirsop Electronic Publishing Trust for Development www.epublishingtrust.org Stevan Harnad wrote: This is a reply to another commentator's expression of concern (excerpt will be quoted shortly) about the license that Southampton University has given to Ingenta to develop a commercial service to install, customize and maintain Eprints Archives for Universities wish to purchase such a service. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2108.html The commentator's concern is that the Ingenta version of the software may become better than the free version, and that this will increase rather than decrease the digital divide for poorer countries. The gist of the reply has already made in this Forum: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2111.html The GNU license for the free version not only requires that the free version remain freely available, but it also requires that all alterations in the software be freely available, both to all users and to all programmers who are doing further modifications of the code. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2118.html Moreover, any revenues received from Ingenta by Southampton University will be used to continue to develop and support the free version. This has already been stated in this Forum. The point to be addressed here is the specific one, about developing countries and the digital divide: The commentator who is quoted (anonymously) below expresses some entirely understandable yet entirely groundless worries. I would have preferred to reply to the entire message in full openly, but as it was not posted, I reply only to the anonymized excerpt. I think we have come to a point where it is very important to express explicit commitment to the support of the free version of Eprints, by way of reassurance to the developing world. http://software.eprints.org/ This is not because there is any danger at all that Southampton University would betray the project, nor because there is
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
No. Someone is (passively) failing to provide free access to their own contributions to those journals, and that someone is the author of each and every article appearing therein (with the exception of a growing number of physicists and a few other disciplines at last beginning to do the right thing!). I would like to believe this, but my imperfect memory of the publication contract I got from CACM seems to say that authors are not allowed to do this if they sign such contracts. (That is part of the reason I always insist on renegotiating them.)
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
No. Someone is (passively) failing to provide free access to their own contributions to those journals, and that someone is the author of each and every article appearing therein (with the exception of a growing number of physicists and a few other disciplines at last beginning to do the right thing!). On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Richard Stallman wrote: I would like to believe this, but my imperfect memory of the publication contract I got from CACM seems to say that authors are not allowed to do this if they sign such contracts. (That is part of the reason I always insist on renegotiating them.) Here are some excerpts from the BOAI self-archiving faq that describe what to do in such cases: What about copyright? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 The author holds the copyright for the pre-refereeing preprint, so that can be self-archived without seeking anyone else's permission. For the refereed postprint, the author can try to modify the copyright transfer agreement to allow self-archiving, or, failing that, can append or link a corrigenda file http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#6.5 to the already self-archived preprint. See Is self-archiving legal? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal and What if the publisher forbids self-archiving the preprint? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids Is self-archiving legal? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal Texts that an author has himself written are his own intellectual property. The author holds the copyright and is free to give away or sell copies, on-paper or on-line (e.g., by self-archiving), as he sees fit. For example, the pre-refereeing preprint can always be legally self-archived . http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0541.html Self-archiving of one's own, non-plagiarized texts is in general legal in all cases but two. The first of these two exceptions is irrelevant to the kind of self-archiving BOAI is concerned with, and for the second there is a legal alternative. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Exception 1: Where exclusive copyright in a work for hire has been assigned by the author to a publisher -- i.e., the author has been paid (or will be paid royalties) in exchange for the text -- the author may not self-archive it. The text is still the author's intellectual property, in the sense that authorship is retained by the author, and the text may not be plagiarized by anyone, but the exclusive right to sell or give away copies of it has been transfered to the publisher. Exception 1 is irrelevant to BOAI , because BOAI is concerned only with peer-reviewed research, for which the author is paid nothing, and no royalty revenue is expected, sought, or paid. Exception 2: Where exclusive copyright has been assigned by the author to a journal publisher for a peer-reviewed draft, refereed and accepted for publication by that journal, then that draft may not be self-archived by the author (without the publisher's permission). The pre-refereeing preprint, however, has already been (legally) self-archived. (No copyright transfer agreement existed at that time.) So in those cases where the publisher does not agree to modify the copyright transfer agreement so as to allow the self-archiving of the refereed final draft (postprint), a corrigenda file can instead be self-archived, alongside the already archived preprint, listing the changes that need to be made to make the pre-refereeing preprint conform to the refereed postprint. What if the publisher forbids preprint self-archiving? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter, because the copyright transfer agreement pertains to that text. But the pre-refereeing preprint is self-archived at a time when no copyright transfer agreement exists and the author holds exclusive and full copyright. So publisher policy forbidding prior self-archiving of preprints is never a legal matter, but merely a journal policy matter (as it would be if the journal were to forbid the submission of papers by authors with blue-eyed uncles!). http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/01/index.html This policy goes by the name of the Ingelfinger Rule , originally invoked by the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Franz Ingelfinger, in order to protect public health (and the NEJM's priority) from any publicity about unrefereed findings prior to publication. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/03/index.html The Ingelfinger Rule (sometimes also referred to as a prepublication embargo ) is accordingly not a copyright matter, but a journal
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
...it is a waste of time ranting and raving against toll-access publishers, overpriced or not: They (including Ingenta) are simply doing what they can and should be doing: Providing toll-access as long as there is a demand for it. On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, [identity removed] wrote: I don't think this is what they should be doing. Someone is actively blocking free access to these journals. No. Someone is (passively) failing to provide free access to their own contributions to those journals, and that someone is the author of each and every article appearing therein (with the exception of a growing number of physicists and a few other disciplines at last beginning to do the right thing!). It is very important to understand this causal and strategic point. It is a disanalogy with the free-software case, because the authors of these gibe-away texts ARE in a position to provide users with free access to them without ceasing to publish them also in whatever journal they like. They are just not doing it yet (in sufficient numbers). We're trying to encourage them, by showing why, and how. Don't blame the publishers! It's not their fault. It is the authors who are in the give-away business, not the publishers. Perhaps the publisher does that and Ingenta does not itself have any say. But it seems likely that the awareness that Ingenta and similar companies exist encourages the journal publisher to block free access. Nothing of the sort. Publishers are not blocking free access, they are simply not providing it. That is not their business. Their business is to sell books and journals, on-paper and on-line. For books, most of their content-providers (the authors) do not want to allow free access to their texts; they want to sell them, and they want a cut in the royalties. We've discussed this before, but this is not the authorship nor the texts we are concerned with here. We are concerned with the authors of the 2 million annual articles published in the planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals. Every single one of those authors writes for impact alone (i.e., for having their research read, used, cited, built upon), and not for royalty income from sales. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.2 It is the failure of those authors (to date) to provide free access to their own give-away work that we are trying to remedy. That is not the fault of the publishers; nor is it in publishers' hands to remedy it. (Eventually, under pressure of competition from the free self-archived versions, publishers may be constrained to downsize and convert to open-access publishing, but right now, when their authors are not bothering to do it, why should publishers?) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm It is also possible that the contracts journal publishers sign with Ingenta commit the journal publisher not to allow free access. If it is so, Ingenta might be directly responsible for the continuing absence of free access. Ingenta may well have access-restricting contracts for the contents it gets directly from publishers, but that is not our concern. Our concern is the content provided by authors themselves, self-archived in their own institutional Eprint Archives (which some institutions may wish to pay Ingenta to install and maintain for them). But this is all still barking up the wrong tree (and I'll bet it will unleash another tedious round of copyright worries and warnings, all irrelevant, all rehearsed endlessly, along with publisher-baiting, while the real and eminently doable work -- self-archiving -- remains to be done!) You might find it interesting to investigate and see if this is so. Your opinion of Ingenta might change. For me, the only relevant aspect of Ingenta is their role as a service-provider for those universities who wish to self-archive their research output in Open Access Eprint Archives but would like to outsource the installation and maintenance of their Archives. Nothing else Ingenta is doing is relevant to this. The service may fill a niche whose emptiness until now might have been one of the reasons keeping the Archives near-empty. The only relevant consideration is whether it will now help to fill them. Stevan Harnad
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
This is a reply to another commentator's expression of concern (excerpt will be quoted shortly) about the license that Southampton University has given to Ingenta to develop a commercial service to install, customize and maintain Eprints Archives for Universities who wish to purchase such a service. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2108.html The commentator's concern is that the Ingenta version of the software might become better than the free version, and that this would increase rather than decrease the digital divide for poorer countries. The gist of the reply has already made in this Forum: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2111.html The GNU license for the free version not only requires that the free version remain freely available, but it also requires that all alterations in the software be freely available, both to all users and to all programmers who are doing further modifications of the code. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2118.html Moreover, any revenues received from Ingenta by Southampton University will be used to continue to develop and support the free version. This has already been stated in this Forum. The point to be addressed here is the specific one, about developing countries and the digital divide: The commentator who is quoted (anonymously) below expresses some entirely understandable yet entirely groundless worries. I would have preferred to reply to the entire message in full openly, but as it was not posted, I reply only to the anonymized excerpt. I think we have come to a point where it is very important to express explicit commitment to the support of the free version of Eprints, by way of reassurance to the developing world. http://software.eprints.org/ This is not because there is any danger at all that Southampton University would betray the project, nor because there is any immediate danger that underfunding of the free Southampton version could make it inferior to the fee-based Ingenta version (the GNU license already protects against that). It is merely because of perceptions. It is important to reassure both the developing world and the many first-world institutions suffering from the serials budget crisis that the rug will not be pulled out from under them insofar as the Eprints software is concerned. The fact is that so much about open-access is about perception: It is (wrong-headed) perceptions that are making us demonize publishers, and believe that the open-access problem, or its solution, somehow lies with them. It is (wrong-headed) perceptions that make as believe that copyright (or peer review, or preservation, or plagiarism, or something else) makes it illegal (or imprudent or unnecessary) to take matters into our own hands and create open access overnight by self-archiving our peer-reviewed research in our institutional Eprint Archives. http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ By the same token, it is perception (and in this case misperception) that sees Ingenta's commercial version of Eprints as an obstacle to open access and as widening the digital divide. At the heart of the commentator's worry is a profound and persistent misunderstanding of the actual causal role that the software is meant to play in the Open Access movement -- and from the specific vantage point of the developing countries in particular. The misunderstanding is this: The Eprints software and the Eprints Archives themselves cannot give the developing world (or anyone) access to the research literature. Only researchers and their institutions can do that. It is wrong to think of either the software or the (empty) archives as any sort of a boon to the developing world. It is the FILLING of those archives that will constitute the boon to the developing world (and to everyone else too). Hence what the commentator and everyone else should really be worrying about is: How can we get those archives filled as soon as possible? Offering the commercial Ingenta option for those universities who prefer to pay to have their Eprint Archives installed and maintained for them, rather than to use the free version and do it for themselves, is one of the (many) things that can be done to help get those archives filled as soon as possible! For, whether Ingenta-maintained or university-maintained, we are talking about Open Access Archives, containing each university's own peer-reviewed research output, freely accessible to everyone. It should not worry anyone that some universities (who can afford it, and have only been held back from self-archiving by the fact that they did not wish to install and maintain their archives themselves, preferring instead to pay a commercial service to do it) will now have available to them the very service whose absence has so far held them back from self-archiving. And a second, perhaps deeper misperception inherent in the commentator's worry is this: The real boon to the developing world that the eprints
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
Dear Stevan: I hear that Eprints has entered into an agreement with Ingenta and that future versions of Eprints software may not be free. Is it true? Is this an admission that the Open access movement is losing momentum and even the greatest of its champions is entering into an agreement with a commercial firm to ensure the survival of the movement? Please enlighten me. A few weeks ago I saw a news item which stated that several leaders of the Open access movement were inducted into the Advisory Board of Ingenta. The list included Odlyzko! Regards. Arun
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
I think that much of this debate comes from a confusion about the meaning of the term free. When we talk about Eprints software being free, the term free should take the meaning as implied by the GNU public license. In this particular meaning, one should think of it as freedom, rather then zero euro. More precisely, Richard Stallman, who is the main father figure of the free software movement, will tell you that free software is any software that has four freedoms attached. freedom 0: You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. freedom 1: You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. freedom 2: You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. freedom 3: You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Since Eprints is under the GNU public license, it is has a license attached to it that aims to protect these freedoms. Under the license, the producers of Eprints are free to charge per download, but they could not prevent another organization allowing zero-charge downloads. Free software is sometimes opposed to commercial software. That is a false opposition. Commercial software is written for a profit. Free software can also be written for a profit. For example mySQL a leading free relational database software. It is produced by a commercial company. I assume they make their money consulting others on how to costumize and use it, rather than on the software itself. I have no affiliation with the company so I am not entirely sure. I presume that Ingenta have similar things in mind. Plus, they will be running services to run archives on behalf of other organizations. The clients would choose to let Ingenta run Eprints for them, rather than doing it themselves. I have been a champion of free access since 1993, when I put the world's first free economics paper online, and I am the the founder of RePEc, a very large FOS initative for economics. I have had my fair share of arguments with Stevan in the past, but on this occasion :-), he is spot on right, there is nothing to worry about. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Peter Suber wrote: I'm puzzled by Ingenta and want to explain why... Ingenta no doubt has its own agenda, but I think there is nothing at all there for advocates of open access to worry about. ...Ingenta does not offer open-access. Publishers pay Ingenta to produce electronic versions of their print journals, which both parties want to keep behind a toll gate. Readers pay Ingenta to download articles Correct, and in this respect Ingenta is rather like HighWire Press (and possibly also Berkeley Electronic Press, and MIT's DSpace): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0573.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1561.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1896.html http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/our_team/project_team.html ...On April 5, Ingenta named the U.S. contingent to its Advisory Board. The new members are Mary Case (Association of Research Libraries), Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information), Andrew Odlyzko (University of Minnesota), Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee), and Mary Waltham (Nature) I asked Andrew Odlyzko... He can't speak for Ingenta, but he can explain why he accepted its invitation to join the board. He's given me permission to quote this reply. My main interest is in the general improvement of scholarly communication, not just in promoting free online scholarship (FOS). I am a strong supporter of FOS, but do not expect that this will fill all the needs of the scholarly community and the wider world this community has to engage with. All the historical precedents suggest that total spending on scholarly communication will continue to increase, as intermediaries (whether libraries, professional societies, or commercial entities) develop services that scholars are not able or willing to provide for free. Therefore I am willing to provide my advice to all such intermediaries as they adjust to the new environment of electronic communication in which FOS will play a major role, but will not be everything. Let me just add two points. One is a variant of what Andrew has already pointed out: Not all scholarly writing (online or off) has been, is, or will be free. Books, for example, have very rarely been author give-aways. Hence those, like Andrew, who are interested in the general improvement of scholarly communication, will continue to be interested in improving it for both give-away and non-give-away scholarship. The peer-reviewed journal literature, however (at least 20,000 journals), is NOT non-give-away scholarship! I am not part of the Ingenta Advisory Board; however, I have recently agreed to allow Ingenta to fund and market a commercially supported version of the Eprints OAI-compliant software. I have nothing to do with this commercial venture, and certainly don't ask or expect any kind of revenue from it, but I would like to explain why I did not oppose it. The explanation will also clarify why I see no incompatibility at all between the Open Access Initiative and the work of Ingenta (or Elsevier, for that matter!). I am entirely convinced that open access (i.e., free online full-text access) to the entire peer-reviewed journal corpus is not only optimal for research and researchers, but inevitable. I have even taken the risk, and the flack, of repeating this optimal/inevitable refrain for nearly a decade in the face of the undeniable sluggishness with which this alleged optimum is being approached! I have done so because I am certain that it is indeed optimal and inevitable, and that the embarrassment of continuing to say it is so (and how, and why), despite the inertia of the status quo, is well worth it, if it is helping to speed the day. I am also arriving at a theory of why we are not yet at this inevitable optimum: It is because it is a PRACTICAL optimum, and researchers and their institutions will only find their way there under the guidance of direct practical experience, not from preaching or teaching or theorizing (just as in the case of the Monty Hall paradox). Researchers must taste for themselves, directly, the benefits of open access, along with the frustrations, costs and losses of access-denial: That is what services like Ingenta and Ideal and ScienceDirect demonstrate (inadvertently!), as users sample directly the contrast between what they can access online for free and what they cannot. But this practical learning experience does not stop with access and access-denial: Researchers must also taste for themselves the practical effects of access and access-denial on research impact: the impact of their own work! Theorizing about the connection is not enough: They must taste what it is like to be a user of open-access and toll-access articles (and, increasingly, open-access and toll-access versions of exactly the SAME articles) in order to see and taste the causal connection between access, usage and impact. And impact-ranking
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
My friend and ally Chris Green's alarm is understandable, in view of several notable instances in which open-access has been betrayed by erstwhile advocates' defecting to the toll-access camp! But that hasn't happened here, with Eprints and Ingenta: On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Christopher D. Green wrote: Are we to understand, then, that ePrints is to become a commercial product that is sold to institutions for profit rather than continuing as an important tool in the (authentic) open access movement? No. Eprints continues to be available free to any and every institutions: http://www.eprints.org/download.php In addition, over and above that, it has now been licensed to Ingenta so they can develop a commercial version for a fee that will provide universities with additional services, including installation and maintenance. This is only for those institutions who have so far been held back from adopting the free version because they felt they could not install and maintain the archives by themselves. Now that obstacle is gone. Any proceeds Southampton Univerfsity receives from Ingenta's commercial version will be used to continue developing and supporting the free version. In my opinion, the free version is enough. It's not my opinion that counts, however, but the opinion of universities who are prosepctive adopters. If some of those feel that the commercial version fulfills a need, so be it. Our objective was not to go into the software business but to help hasten the freeing of the refereed literature through author/institution self-archiving! We're happy to facilitate whatever it takes to get that happening. Ingenta's announcement would have us believe that their latest move is an extension of the open access movement It is: They are providing software and support (for a fee) so that universities can have Eprint Archives in which to self-archive their research output. Many universities are using the free software to do this for themselves; yet some would apparently feel more confortable if a commercial company set up and maintained their Eprint Archives for them. Either way, the CONTENTS of the archives are open-access. Don't confuse access-tolls with archive-installation/maintenance costs! but if their licensing arrangements turn out to be such that many adacemic institutions find it difficult or impossible to purchase and use the software, they've simply moved the tollgates to another location on the same road, and the desire for truly open access has been subverted again. No, the free option is still there, as it always was. This is for the universities that not only can afford to have someone else install their open-access archives for them, but prefer to. I think it is a very welcome complement to the do-it-yourself option. Stevan Harnad
