I suggest it is time that OA advocates upgrade our standards. The self-archiving of posprints
whose reliability and correctness is unknown is a very poor excuse for the real version.
It adds complexity for students, and in fact makes it necessary for a research to be
either use published articles only, or verify for each article used that the 2 versions do in fact match.
(preprints are another matter: they serve the same function electronically that they did in Xerox:
to make the author's draft available before formal publication.or even before refereeing if so desired)
It was right to use this admittedly less than perfect method as a first step towards publisher acceptance.
I think we can now ask for better, and find our request matched by the more forward-thinking of
publishers.
Poliically, it seems that it seems to be of little value to ask for just a compromise,
as we watch the NIH proposal become weaker and weaker.
I note that (even) the American
Physiological Society now says it makes more sense to deposit the actual article.
To insert from liblicense:
"We already make content available on the Web at 12 months through links
at Medline," said Alice Ra'anan, American Physiological Society
spokesperson. "They'd be better off using the definitive article rather
than the manuscript. "
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman_at_liu.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Mon 1/17/2005 2:25 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving
On the list of publishers at:
http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html
is it the case that any publisher that is green is also pale-green?
Just a fine point.
Thanks
[Reply: Not necessarily, but it does not matter much. Open Access
is about postprints, so if a journal is postprint green, it's
as green as it needs to be, and as green as 100% OA needs it to
be. The unrefereed preprint is an added bonus to OA. All authors
may self-archived their pre-refereeing preprints without needing
the green light from anyone. But it is always more encouraging to
an author if the publisher endorses preprint self-archiving too.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids -- S.H.]
--
Brian Simboli
Science Librarian
Library & Technology Services
E.W. Fairchild Martindale
8A East Packer Avenue
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170
(610) 758-5003
E-mail: brs4_at_lehigh.edu
Received on Tue Jan 18 2005 - 05:35:54 GMT