Not to oversimplify, and recognizing the differences in academic and research organization between countries, if the UK does own way and the USanother, we will have what is usually called a natural experiment. I too would have prefered they had left it to individual choice, but if they don't, lets get at least the benfit of the resulting information. Maybe even within the the first year the operational differences will become clear. I at least do not feel able to confidently predict which it will be, and my personal view and preferences do not affect the issue.
--David
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman_at_liu.edu
________________________________
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Fri 11/5/2004 11:48 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Research publishing and Open access - Latest developments
On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, David Goodman wrote:
> The relative merits [of central vs institutional self-archiving]
> are not known... and both models are worthy of experimentation.
>
> a scientist... requires evidence before conclusions.
It would be hard to get evidence to test the relative merits of central
vs institutional self-archiving if the NIH and Wellcome Trust were
to prejudge the outcome and mandate only central, rather than either/or
(as I and others have recommended):
"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4091.html
Stevan Harnad
> ________________________________
>
> Subbiah Arunachalam wrote:
>
> The Wellcome Trust deserves praise for its continuing
> support to the Open Access movement. The Trust would
> do well to accept the recommendation of Prof. Stevan
> Harnad and decide to support authors depositing their
> papers in their own institutional archives rather than
> just a centralised archive. The relative merits are now
> well known.
Received on Sat Nov 06 2004 - 15:41:38 GMT