Perhaps there is a possibility, although
admittedly a small one, that the academics in other fields may not be
quite as dumb as some of us may have been saying.
They do, after all, have some experience in writing
and publishing scientific work.
. On Wed, 19 Mar 2003,
Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote:
>
> > >tc> You constantly belittle technical problems, and then you wonder
> > >tc> why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because
> > >tc> these "technical problems" have not been solved. By belittling
> > >tc> them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution.
> >
> >tc> I did not express myself well I wrote, I meant to say
> >tc> that much of what Stevan belittles as "technical" is
> >tc> in fact symptomatic of wider social issues that
> >tc> impact on the academic self-documentation process.
>
> The Big Koan is: "Why aren't all researchers self-archiving yet, given
> its benefits and feasibility?"
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
>
> Many people have hypotheses about what is the answer to the Big Koan.
> 26 Hypotheses are listed in:
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation
> and there are more. You seem to think it may be because of certain
> technical problems. I think not. But we agree that one good bet might be
> that it's because the research communiy is not aware of the existence
> or size of the access-->impact causal connection, and that this needs
> to be decisively demonstrated to them.
> http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html
>
> >tc> You have
> >tc> to give academics the motivation to participate. A
> >tc> reliance on carrot and stick from central administration
> >tc> is not likely to be sufficient.
>
> Demonstrating the size of the access-->impact connection (and
> how to maximize it, through self-archiving) *is* both a carrot
> and a stick: The carrot is the rewards of maximizing research
> impact (salary, promotion, tenure, research funding, prizes, prestige)
> and the stick is the usual publish-or-perish consequences of *not*
> maximizing research impact:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html
> http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi
>
> >tc> it depends
> >tc> on the discipline. Some will get to self-archive slowly
> >tc> some fast, some not at all. I can surly imagine a situation
> >tc> where for legal scholarship you have to pay, but where
> >tc> physics is free.
>
> The only relevant interdisciplinary difference (once the access-->impact
> connection is demonstrated and known) is if there are any disciplines that
> do *not* benefit from maximizing research impact: Is legal scholarship
> an exception, for some reason? (I don't mean all kinds of legal writing,
> of course, but, as always, only papers published in that discipline's
> refereed research journals.)
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU
dgoodman_at_princeton.edu
Received on Thu Mar 20 2003 - 01:03:44 GMT