On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Brian Lynch wrote:
> Until self-archiving and/or institutional repositories become
> universal, require all granting agencies and/or publishing
> organizations to mandate that all abstracts of published papers of
> electronic or paper issues [to be freely accessible through the
> Internet] must include either an e-mail address for the principal
> author, or an institutional web site providing author access through a
> directory of e-mail addresses.
> If this practice existed, anyone interested in a specific paper could
> ask the author to provide them with a preprint or postprint file.
I quite agree that this would be useful, and indeed it is part of the
"Keystroke Strategy": mandate self-archiving the metadata and full-text
immediately upon acceptance, but leave it up to the author whether they
wish to set full-text access as "OA" or just as "IA" (institution-internal
access), in which case eprints can be emailed to all who email to request
them based on the visible metadata and email address (which are always OA):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.ppt
> It may be that toll-access journals would claim that an author obliging
> such a request infringes copyright, but surely no
> responsible justice system would or could secure a guilty verdict for
> the supposed "offence".
Neither self-archiving one's own draft nor emailing it is an offence,
but the Keystroke Strategy is a suitable sop for the timid and
unimaginative. They will soon tire of sending emails and hit the "OA" key.
It is only a few keystrokes per paper that have been standing between
us and 100% OA
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the
Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
The Eprints software is being designed to make either option easy and natural.
> The proposed action is the modern-day equivalent of providing a
> reproduced copy of a reprint of one's own article
> after you have exhausted your supply of publisher-supplied reprints.
(as has been noted, many, many times: but one can never say it often enough --
until we reach 100% OA)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Sep 19 2005 - 22:53:31 BST