On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 02:58:40PM +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Bernard Lang wrote:
>
> > I noticed that many people on this list seem genuinely afraid of
> > hurting the feelings of publishers. Stevan gave me that impression in
> > our latest exchange, to which I stopped replying because I had the
> > impression that his eagerness to defend publishers (in the classical
> > sense) was hiding facts I did not know about.
>
> No hidden facts. Just one very open one. It is possible to free the
> entire refereed journal corpus online (all 20,000+ journals, all
> 2,000,000+ articles annually), NOW, without asking or waiting for
> publishers to do anything at all.
>
> http://cogsci.sootn.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
> Hence I think it is unnecessary and a waste of time and breath to
> fulminate against publishers, when there is something much more useful
> and effective that we could all be doing instead.
So, you probably should spare your own breath, trying to talk down
people who speculate about how things could be.
You may say that things are irrelevant to this forum ... not that
they are wrong or that existing publishers do a good job, or that the
current system is adequate. If you defend the current system, you
entitle everyone to attack it.
> Moreover, peer review is essential; it is what makes the refereed
> corpus a REFEREED corpus. Publishers currently implement peer review;
> it is an essential service; and there is no reason they should nto
> continue doing it, come what may.
there you go again
I am not against peer review... only saying that
1- commercial publishers are not needed for it.
2- it could be organized differently on the internet as I suggested in my
HTML pictures.
> So I see absolutely no value in publisher-baiting. It is neither
> fair nor useful.
When publishers tell me they protect my copyrights, as Springer did,
I just think they are morons and want to laugh in their face (which I did).
Furthermore, there is no such thing as being unfair to a corporation
I do not have as many gripes with academic publishing.
> So, no hidden facts. Complete disclosure.
acknowledged
Bernard Lang
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Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT