Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 19:04:38 +0100

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Rick Anderson wrote:

> If authors could be counted on consistently to self-archive when given the
> option of doing so, and if it were easier to find self-archived articles
> on the Web, then I would be much more optimistic about self-archiving
> as a viable alternative to traditional journal publishing. For now,
> though, it looks to me like traditional publishers still add quite a
> bit of value to the content they publish.
>
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries

If ever evidence was needed of the near-total disconnect between the library
community's and the research community's interest in OA, surely this is it!

Self-archiving is not intended as "a viable alternative to traditional journal
publishing." It is intended as a *supplement* to it, for those would-be users who
have no "viable alternative" for accessing content they cannot afford. Necessity is
the mother of invention.

Moreover, the purpose of the RCUK policy -- being rapidly lost in this
welter of increasingly irrelevant posting on everything but the issue
at hand -- is to ensure that "authors could be counted on consistently
to self-archive".

Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Aug 23 2005 - 19:33:56 BST