> Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:17:52 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Clifford B. Saper <csaper_at_caregroup.harvard.edu>
>
> Clifford B. Saper, MD, PhD
> James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience
> Harvard Medical School
> Chairman, Department of Neurology
> Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
> 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215 USA
> Phone: 617-667-2622 Fax: 617-975-5161
>
> I hope you will also make clear to those on your mailing list that the
> Journal of Comparative Neurology (and most currently published
> journals) will not consider papers for publication that have already
> been published (which posting on a website is).
Dear Professor Saper,
The CogPrints copyright FAQ <
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/help/copyright.html>
does point out that journals differ in their copyright policies; and in
an excerpt below, differences in journal embargo policies ("The
Ingelfinger Rule") are discussed.
But I must also point out that these policies never had any scientific
justification, and now (in the PostGutenberg era) they no longer have
any economic justification either. And that although Journals like
Science, New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American
Medical Association, still have such policies, they have counterparts,
like Nature, Lancet, and British Medical Journal, that do not. And it
is only a matter of time before good sense -- and good science --
prevails, and these arbitrary access barriers, which exist only to
protect current journal revenue streams (once justified, but now no
longer necessary) will all fade away.
I have written critiques of Floyd Bloom's position (on behalf of
Science) in Science:
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
As well as in the American Scientist Forum:
Harnad, S. (1998) For whom the gate tolls?
Free the on-line-only refereed journal literature
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
In D-Lib I describe an interim alternative strategy for authors:
Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed
Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
"So authors should transfer to their publishers all the rights
to sell their papers, in paper or online, but they should
retain the right to self-archive them online for free for all.
Many publishers will agree (the American Physical Society
<
ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc> being a model in
this respect) because their scholarly/scientific goals are in
harmony with those of their authors and readers. But with
those publishers whose copyright agreement explicitly forbids
the public self-archiving of the peer-reviewed final draft,
the solution is to self-archive the preprint at the time it is
first submitted for publication, and then once it is accepted,
simply to archive a list of the changes that went into the
revised final draft; alternatively, a further revised,
enhanced draft, going substantively beyond the accepted, final
draft, with a fuller reference list, Hyperlinks, more data and
figures added, etc., can be self-archived, together with a
list of what in this new edition was not in the final accepted
draft. Either way, the handwriting (or rather the skywriting)
is on the wall.
"This gets around copyright restrictions (note that analogies with
online piracy of text, music and software are irrelevant because
we are speaking of "self-piracy" here). A further potential
obstacle is an embargo policy like the one the New England Journal
of Medicine (see <
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0019.html>) practises under the
name of the "Ingelfinger Rule" (see
<
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/
Author.Eprint.Archives/0020.html>)
and that journals like Science,
<
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12>,
likewise practise. I don't think I need to spell out for Web-savvy
authors how easily arbitrary and self-serving policies like this
can be gotten around by suitable cosmetic measures on one's
self-archived preprint. In any case, I doubt that journal editors
and referees (who, after all, are us), will long collaborate with
policies that are no longer either justified or necessary, being
now so clearly designed solely in the interest of protecting
current S/L/P revenue streams rather than in the interest of
disseminating research. Besides, journal embargo policies, unlike
copyright agreements, are not even legal matters."
Regarding alternative economic models for refereed journal publishing,
see, in Nature:
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. (1998g) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
[online] ( 5 Nov. 1998)
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
Longer version:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
The New England Journal of Medicine declined to publish my reply to
Arnold Relman (URL in exceerpt above) but it will shortly appear in a
Law journal.
I invite you to consider the question of embargo policy and exclusive
copyright policy, and if you can think of any non-economic
justification for them, I would be very grateful to hear it.
Sincerely,
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of "Freeing the
Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving" is
available
at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT