American Psychological Association (APA) and Open Access

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 01:39:17 +0000

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004, [identity deleted] wrote:

> Stevan,
>
> I'm sure you'll have a number of things to say about this:
> http://www.apa.org/science/psa/nov4openaccess.html
> I look forward to hearing them.

You may be surprised to hear that I have nothing much to say about
the American Psychological Association's (APA) Critique of the
NIH Proposal!

    http://www.apa.org/science/psa/nihopenaccess.pdf

The APA is green -- i.e., it has given its official green light to author
self-archiving:

    http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/12.html

It was not always so. In 1996 the APA had a less progressive policy,
but then too I was serenely confident that they would come round, and
become green, and they have (and so will the American Chemical
Society (ACS)!):

    http://trauma-pages.com/harnad96.htm
    http://www.apa.org/journals/posting.html

APA and ACS are learned societies. In the end, they must do what is
best for their constituencies, and their constituencies consist of the
researchers who publish in and use their journals. It is understandable
that publishers do not celebrate developments that could some day
reduce their revenue streams. But it is inevitable that they will
have to acquiesce to what is in the best interests of researchers,
their institutions, their funders, their funders' funders, and research
progress and productivity itself -- and the learned-society publishers
will be the first to acquiesce (though ACS may be the last of them to do
so!). They will make critiques, based on what is in the best interests
of the status quo, but their critiques will be rebutted by what is in
the best interests of the research and researchers that fill their pages
and are their raison d'etre.

    "Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4131.html

    "Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4146.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/acpub.doc

    "Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4174.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/nih.rtf

Stevan Harnad

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 or leave the Forum or change your subscription address:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
        Post discussion to:
    american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org

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
Received on Sat Nov 20 2004 - 01:39:17 GMT

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