On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Kathye Long wrote:
> >Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 12:05:58 -0400
> >To: m-daskin_at_nwu.edu
> >From: Kathye Long <kathye.long_at_informs.org>
> >Subject: Re: Self-Archiving the Refereed Journal Literature
> >Cc: candita.gerzevitz_at_informs.org, mark.doherty_at_informs.org
> >
> >Mark,
> >
> >Reading this diatribe I can see that Stevan Harnad clearly does not
> understand that the publisher puts a lot of money in every paper. I doubt
> that he sees any benefit to the publishing process. What he would like to
> see is every author, not the publisher, keep ownership of his research
> paper and place it up on his personal web site. Essentially, he feels that
> the authors are giving away their work, and the publisher is charging
> scientists to buy it back. However, the researcher is sending publishers
> raw data, not finished work. The paper goes through a thorough peer
> review, and revisions are made based on comments and concerns of the peer
> reviewers and/or comments from the editor-in-chief. Once accepted, the
> manuscript is copyedited, and then is produced by professional production
> editors. Clearly, these are important value added services. And as a
> result of all the steps taken, the author's paper is published in a top
> tier journals. In so doing, the author's work is validated and determined
> to be excellent and worthy of dissemination to his peers. Considering that
> there is a, say, 75% rejection rate in a journal, the 25% that were able to
> be published should, somehow, shine brighter and be acknowledged as being
> in that top 25%. If it can't be, then it will appear on an individual's
> web site just like the all of the other papers that did not make the cut.
> But, maybe that's not important anymore.
> >
> >Interestingly, the universities that are so upset over the cost of the
> journals are still not considering papers published in the online format
> only when reviewing an employee for tenure or promotion. An interesting
> dilemma.
> >
> >As a group, INFORMS has a mission to be an educational society. If
> publishers ingored the value of their intellectual material, giving it free
> to anyone, we would be out of business within 6 months. If you have a
> solution to this, I'd love to hear it, because, if the publishers were not
> to charge for the journals, no publisher could publish. I certainly don't
> think that's an option for learned societies.
> >
> >Kathye
Kathye Long does not appear to have read the diatribe carefully
enough.
The value of the service of Quality-Control/Certification
(QC/C) is fully recognized as essential and as needing to be paid for.
But it should be paid for as the SERVICE it is, at the author-end, per
paper refereed/accepted, by the author-institution, out of annual
Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View [S/L/P] cancelation savings,
instead of as a PRODUCT at the reader-end, by the reader-institution,
in the form of S/L/P access tolls.
Coupled with self-archiving, this transformation (simple to
formulate, but requiring planning and coordination to implement)
will free the refereed literature for one and all (and this is without
even getting into the controversial question of how much the overall
cost will change, if at all.)
Harnad, S. (1998) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Free the Online-Only
Refereed Literature. American Scientist Forum.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls.
Nature 395(6698): 127-128.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online]
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
Harnad, S. (1999) Advancing Science By Self-Archiving Refereed Research.
Science dEbates [online] 31 July 1999.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12
http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/comment.htm
http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT