Pogo: We have seen the enemy, and he is us...

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:30:24 EDT

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 brs4_at_lehigh.edu wrote:

> As someone who takes the maxim, if it looks too good to be true, it
> probably is, I confess to being skeptical about publisher guarantees
> of an author "right" to self-archiving.
>
> Let's see what publishers do when someone does the obvious thing: provide
> an open access software engine that takes an article title and takes one
> directly to the corresponding self-archived article w/o a lot of
> background noise.

Too late: The engine(s) already exist. For starters, see:

http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
    and
http://citebase.eprints.org/

And, for example, a quarter of a million articles have been self-archived
by physicists since 1991, since well before any physics publishers were
green: Far from trying to get those articles taken off-line, most physics
publishers have since given self-archiving their formal green light.
http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html

(APS was, as far as I know, the very first publisher to go green):

    "Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)" (1999)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0471.html

So may I suggest to the research community and its funders that, rather
than listening to the armchair prophets of gloom (who have been
speculating for over a decade now), they should look instead at the
empirical facts and then go ahead and self-archive? The light is green,
and it doesn't get any greener...
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31-worries

In other words (to paraphrase Pogo), we have seen the enemy, and he is
*us* (not our publishers!)!

Swan & Brown's (2004) JISC/OSI survey reported asked authors

    "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required
    them to deposit copies of their published articles in... [OA
    archives]. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly..."

    Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey
    Report. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html

    Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access
    publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224.
    http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/

So 100% OA simply awaits the implementation of the UK Select Committee's
and the US House Appropriations Committee's recommendation to mandate
taking the green road to OA.

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Stevan Harnad


UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
        http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at:
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
        To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
        Post discussion to:
    american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Received on Tue Jul 27 2004 - 00:30:24 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:47:32 GMT