To call John Smith's thought experiment 'untested' is fair and factual. To
call it 'incoherent' is totally unfair. John has developed his ideas, and
published them, over a number of years, and in my opinion they are well
thought out. The question 'How do we get there from here?' does of course
remain, but his ideas are an interesting contribution to the debate.
Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 1:14 AM
Subject: "Disaggregated Journals"
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Anthony Watkinson wrote (in liblicense):
>
>> The quotation from Raym Crow (whose work incidentally I admire) needs to
>> be taken in the context of his model in the same piece. To repeat - this
>> disaggregated model leaves almost no role for publishers...
>
> Raym Crow's 2002 SPARC Position paper "The Case for Institutional
> Repositories":
>
> http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2194.html
>
> lost a lot of its potential usefulness because it made far too much of a
> completely untested (and, I suspect, ultimately incoherent) speculation
> (from J.W.T. Smith) about "Disaggregated Journals."
>
> It is a great pity that a concrete, tested, and proven practical means
> of maximizing research usage and impact -- namely, authors self-archiving
> their published (traditional) journal articles in their own institutional
> repositories (aka archives) -- was conflated with a mere piece of
> speculation in what should have been an authoritative SPARC document.
>
> Here is my original critique of Crow's paper (which I was, alas, persuaded
> not to post publicly in the American Scientist Open Access Forum at the
> time (2002), ostensibly on the grounds of maintaining solidarity among
> OA advocates; but that was a mistake -- it's always a mistake to remain
> mute about a flawed idea, even among allies). I posted it only 2 years
> later, in 2004, too late:
>
> "Comments on the SPARC position paper" (4 August 2002)
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/crow.html
> Posted in March 6 2004 :
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3303.html
>
> J.W.T. Smith's "Disaggregated Journal" idea had already been discussed
> extensively much earlier in the American Scientist OA Forum (then called
> the
> September-Forum) in 1999. The idea has been neither tested nor patched
> up since:
>
> "Re: Alternative publishing models - was:
> Scholar's Forum: A New Model..." (1999)
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0216.html
>
> (So much of the slow history of OA seems to consist in recycling
> speculations and fallacies instead of moving ahead and doing what has
> already been demonstrated to be doable, and effective. Here we are
> in 2005, rediscovering the "Disaggregated Journal" -- and *still* not
> providing the OA that has been within reach for at least a decade and
> a half. -- I'm sure the pundits will now chime in with their wise saws
> about why it had be so...)
>
> Your humble but impatient archivangelist,
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
Received on Fri Jul 15 2005 - 14:39:34 BST