Stevan-
I don't want to reopen the argument about your 5%/95% division, but I don't
think its appropriate or necessary to use these figures here. How about
just:
(8) New "open-access" journals recover their costs by charging the
author-institution for each outgoing article they publish and making
all published works freely and openly accessible from the moment
of publication, instead of restricting access to subscribers
(9) For articles for which no suitable open access journal exists, an
alternative immediate solution to put an end to access denial and
impact loss is for their authors to self-archive their full-texts online on
their own institutional open-access websites for all would-be users
worldwide.
-Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2003 12:13 PM
Subject: Draft letter for institutions to sign to implement Berlin
Declaration
> This is the draft of a statement for universities and research
> institutions worldwide to sign to commit themselves to implementing
> the Berlin Declaration by providing open access to their peer-reviewed
> research output. Note that it is not meant to be merely a declaration of
> solidarity and support for the principle of open access, but an
> institutional commitment to open-access provision.
>
> Comments are welcome. The draft can be revised to incorporate recommended
> corrections, clarifications or other improvements.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Declaration of institutional commitment to implementing the
> Berlin Declaration on open-access provision
> http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
> and the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action
> http://www.itu.int/wsis/
>
> (1) Our researchers are paid (and their research projects are funded,
> often with tax-payers' money) to conduct research and to publish their
> findings ("publish or perish") so that other reseachers, at other
> universities and institutions worldwide, can access, use, build-upon,
> cite and apply those findings. This is called "research impact". The
> productivity and progress of research depend on its impact.
>
> (2) Research is published in peer-reviewed journals (24,000 worldwide,
> across all disciplines and languages, publishing about 2,500,000
> articles per year).
>
> (3) Unlike book-authors or journalists, research article-authors do not
> seek royalties or fees for these writings: They write them only for the
> sake of research impact. (This is why they and their institutions were
> always willing, in the paper era, to undertake the effort and expense
> of mailing out hard-copies of their articles to any would-be users
> who requested a reprint, and sometimes even to pay page-charges to the
> journal for publishing the article. Greater research impact means both
> (i) career advancement, higher salary, more research income, prizes and
> prestige for the researchers and their institutions and, more important,
> (ii) greater research productivity and progress, hence greater benefits
> to the tax-payers who fund the research.)
>
> (4) In the paper era, the only way for journals to cover the costs
> of peer-review and publication was to charge subscription tolls for
> access: Universities and research institutions paid the tolls so their
> own researchers could access and use the peer-reviewed research output
> of other universities and research institutions.
>
> (5) No institution could ever afford toll-access to anywhere near all
> 24,000 journals; and most could only afford a small fraction of them --
> a fraction that keeps shrinking with rising journal prices, even in
> the Web era.
>
> (6) As a result, it was true in the paper era -- and is still true
> today, in the Web era -- that for each one of the 2,500,000 articles
> published yearly, most of its would-be users cannot access it. That
> means much of its potential research impact is being lost.
>
> (7) In the paper era, this impact loss was unavoidable, but in the Web
> era it is no longer necessary. There are two complementary ways in which
> all access-denial -- and hence all impact-denial -- can now be eradicated:
>
> (8) New "open-access" journals can recover their costs by charging the
> author-institution for each outgoing article they publish, instead of
> charging the user-institution for each journal or article they access.
> (But fewer than 1000 open-access journals exist so far, publishing only
> about 5% out of the 2,500,000 articles that are published every year.)
>
> (9) For the remaining 95%, the articles published yearly in the 23,400
> toll-access journals, the immediate solution to put an end to access
> denial and impact loss is for their authors to self-archive their
> full-texts online on their own institutional open-access websites for
> all would-be users worldwide.
>
> (10) As soon as universities, research institutions and research funders
> extend their existing "publish or perish" policies from just publishing
> their research output to also providing open access to it -- via (8), by
> publishing it in an open-access journal whenever a suitable one exists,
> and otherwise via (9), by self-archiving all their toll-access journal
> publications -- the open-access era will be upon us, and research progress
> and productivity will at last be maximised, instead of needlessly
minimised,
> as it is now.
>
> Our institution commits its support to open
> access provision by signing the Berlin Declaration
> http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/signatories.html and implementing
> an institutional open-access provision policy such as:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html
>
Received on Thu Dec 25 2003 - 20:24:55 GMT