Stevan,
Even if the principal advantage this has over other plans were only the
support behind it, that may be sufficient for it to be the key
step we have all been waiting for in this field. I think we should all rejoice
that this subject area is moving at last, after the disappointment caused by
the abrupt halt to Varmus' original proposal.
Although limited to biomedicine, there is nothing to stop other
fields from the use of equivalents, just as there is nothing to stop
other fields from adoping your arrangments.
I suggest that the best thing now is to strongly encourage the immediate
practical use of the plan, since it meets the basic requirements of open
access and archiving. The best way to help now is not by critiquing the details.
We can all argue about how to improve it later--we should not hesitate to
adopt it now. The argument for this is exactly the same as that for the
immediate adoption of your proposal--we need something now.
On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Peter Suber wrote:
>
> > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html ]
> > Bethesda statement on open access publishing
>
> The Bethesda statement is very useful and timely, but
> it would be far more valuable if
> ...
David Goodman
Princeton University
and
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU
dgoodman_at_princeton.edu
Received on Mon Jun 23 2003 - 23:03:48 BST