Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 12:32:31 +0100

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------
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

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