On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Alan Story wrote:
> Perhaps I don't know who the moderator of Sept.98 is. It
> was the comment I got from a person named "Marvin" that I
> did not find collegial.
Marvin Margoshes is not the moderator; in fact, he is the one who
recently recommended that I step down as moderator...
> Until every desk in every university classroom has its own
> web-accessible computer (still some way off...), there will
> be an interest in paper copies by university teachers.
> Paper copies are indispensable in the form student course
> packs for study and discussion and debate in class by
> reference to words in a text that everyone see in front of
> them. Hard copy is not dead yet for instructional
> purposes.
That may well be, but securing paper copies for teachers and students
is not the focus of this Forum. The focus is freeing the research
literature online for researchers. Of course a spin-off of this will be
free online access for teachers and students too; but this is not the
place to fight the photo-copying war: Paper publishing has genuine
costs that must be covered. It could conceivably be true that
photo-copying threatened the coverage of those costs in the on-paper
era. But we are talking here about another medium and another era. The
online-only medium will free papers of paper costs; let us not obscure
this straighforward fact by advocating a hybrid agenda that would not
be fully justifiable in and of itself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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 providing free
access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American
Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
You may join the list at the site above.
Discussion can be posted to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT