There are at least 20,000 refereed journals. http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/
All their contents need to be freed online, and as soon as possible. However, there are reasons to doubt that the fastest, safest, and most probable way to bring this about is for the 20K editorial boards of the established journals (who do not agree to restructure themselves and give away their full-text contents online for free) to resign and start up new journals! It is for the authors (and their institutions) of all those articles to take matters into their own hands now, freeing their own refereed papers by self-archiving them in their own institutions` OAI-compliant Eprint Archives http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g20#6. This will allow for a gradual, stable transition, with neither the risk of chaotically destabilizing the existing refereed journal literature by suddenly having 20K editorial boards resign and look for someone else to take over remaining journal operations, nor the (much more likely) long-long wait for more journals to give away their contents voluntarily -- or eventually lose their editorial boards if they do not (as Machine Learning has just lost its board). These are radical, risky, slow, and unlikely strategies for freeing the refereed research literature, whereas the self-archiving solution is already proved, within reach, and can bring it about stably, and very quickly. Harnad, S. (2001) Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Ariadne 28 June 2001. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/#1 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/ariadne.htm The motivation for freeing the refereed research literature is to maximize the access to, and the impact/uptake of, refereed research. As researchers (and their institutions) come to realize that self-archiving is an instant way to maximize access/impact/uptake, more and more of them will do it, and the positive feedback from self-archiving`s benefits -- in increased access/impact/uptake for those papers and authors, as demonstrated by Lee Giles's own group: http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ and forthcoming search-engines that display citation and download impact factors for papers and authors http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/help/index.php3 -- will induce still further researchers to self-archive. Nor will journal cancellations be sudden and immediate (and potentially catastrophic) with the author/institution self-archiving option -- in fact, they may never occur at all, if there continues to be a market for publishers' options even after the basic refereed corpus is accessible online for free: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2 So, in my view, these dramatic editorial board resignations are the exceptions rather than the rule, and researchers should not sit around waiting and hoping for more of them to occur. They should self-archive now! What you can do now to free the refereed literature online http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#7 Stevan Harnad -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 14:33:25 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Jordan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: letter of resignation from Machine Learning journal The forty people whose names appear below have resigned from the Editorial Board of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ). We would like to make our resignations public, to explain the rationale for our action... Times have changed. Articles now circulate easily via the Internet, but unfortunately MLJ publications are under restricted access. Universities and research centers can pay a yearly fee of $1050 US to obtain unrestricted access to MLJ articles (and individuals can pay $120 US). While these fees provide access for institutions and individuals who can afford them, we feel that they also have the effect of limiting contact between the current machine learning community and the potentially much larger community of researchers worldwide whose participation in our field should be the fruit of the modern Internet. In the spring of 2000, a new journal, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), was created... Articles published in JMLR are available freely, without limits and without conditions, at the journal's website, http://www.jmlr.org. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Cognitive Science [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --- --- --- --- --- Useless hypotheses, etc.: consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia, analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment We move into a better future in proportion as science displaces superstition.
