The six current "(refereed)-literature-liberation" strategies
(are there any others?) are compared in Ariadne's "Minotaur"
section:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/
Comments are welcome in this Forum. Here is an excerpt, part of which
has appeared here before:
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Currently there are six candidate strategies for freeing the refereed
research literature:
1. AUTHORS PAYING JOURNAL PUBLISHERS FOR PUBLISHER-SUPPLIED
ONLINE-OFFPRINTS, FREE FOR ALL READERS [12] is a good solution
where it is available, and where the author can afford to pay for
it, but (i) most journals don't offer it, (ii) there will
always be authors who cannot afford to pay for it, and (iii)
authors self-archiving their own eprints accomplishes the
same outcome, immediately, for everyone, at no expense to authors.
Electronic offprints for-fee require authors to pay
for something that they can already do for-free, now (as the
authors of 150,000 physics papers have already done [13]).
2. BOYCOTTING JOURNALS THAT DO NOT AGREE TO GIVE AWAY THEIR CONTENTS
ONLINE FOR FREE [19] requires authors to give up their
established journals of choice and to switch to unestablished
journals (if they exist), not on the basis of their quality or
impact, but on the basis of their give-away policy. But if authors
simply self-archive their papers, they can keep
publishing in their established journals of choice yet still ensure
free online access for all readers.
3. LIBRARY CONSORTIAL SUPPORT (e.g. SPARC [11]) FOR LOWER-PRICED
JOURNALS may lower some of the access barriers, but it will
not eliminate them (instead merely entrenching unnecessary
fee-based access blockages still more deeply).
4. DELAYED JOURNAL GIVE-AWAYS -- 6-TO-12+ MONTHS AFTER PUBLICATION
[14] -- amount to too little, too late, and further
entrench the unjustifiable blockage of access to new research until
it is not new (Harnad 2001a) [21].
5. GIVING UP ESTABLISHED JOURNALS AND PEER REVIEW ALTOGETHER, IN
FAVOUR OF SELF-ARCHIVED PREPRINTS AND POST-HOC, AD-LIB
COMMENTARY (e.g. [15]) would put both the quality standards and the
navigability of research at risk (Harnad 1998/2000)
[22].
6. SELF-ARCHIVING ALL PREPRINTS AND POSTPRINTS can be done immediately
and will free the refereed literature overnight. The
only things holding authors back are (groundless and easily
answered) worries about peer review and copyright [16].
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See
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/ for full text
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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 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/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 Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT