As I suspected, Peter and I are in almost 100% agreement. My cautionary
suggestion (to prominently tag consumer-ripoff-facilitators so as to
distinguish them unequivocally from producer-giveaway-facilitators) was only
made in the hope of preventing misunderstandings on the part of others
who, unlike Peter, have not yet given this crucial distinction enough
thought.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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
On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Peter Suber wrote:
> Thanks for writing. I accept the distinction between
> give-away literature and non-give-away literature, and made a similar point
> myself in my June 8 issue (fifth story):
>
> http://www.topica.com/lists/suber-fos/read/message.html?mid=1603288833&sort=d&start=0
> Let me put my position positively, not negatively. The scholarship
> that should be free and online is that which its authors want to be free
> and online. Since scholarly authors are not paid for journal articles
> anyway, they lose nothing by making their work available for free, and they
> gain readers (and impact, as you've argued). Book authors, and certainly
> musicians, can hope for royalties from their work. More power to them. I
> hope that authors of scholarly books will prefer wide readership and impact
> to royalties (which are improbable for most anyway); but this is their
> choice. Scholarship is more useful online than in print; and if online,
> then free is better than priced, and affordable is better than
> expensive. When authors and publishers of online scholarship choose to
> limit readership in exchange for revenue, I hope they can find a way to
> respect readers' fair-use, back-up, and migration rights, and I hope their
> price is affordable; but so far, this combination is very rare. Note that
> my list of readers' rights is limited; I don't say they have a right to
> read or possess priced works without paying. By the same token, the
> legitimate functions of copy protection are also limited, and I wish
> publishers would back off from absolute copy protection to forms that only
> protect their legitimate interests and are otherwise compatible with
> readers' rights. This is complicated and controversial, but the good news
> is that free online scholarship makes it all unnecessary. For works that
> are fully free and online, we don't have to worry about fair use or copy
> protection.
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT