Prior AmSci Thread:
Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4132.html
Listening live to
Debate on the report from the Science and Technology
Committee on Scientific Publications: Free For All?
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/
archive:
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/frames.aspx?d=a
it is apparent that the topic of the debate is neither the
actual concrete recommendation of the Select Committee
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm
nor the proposal of the RCUK to implement it
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp
The actual Committee recommendation and RCUK proposal is to require
OA self-archiving, not to require OA publishing.
But the debate is focussed 100% on OA publishing, so it is simply
irrelevant. The debate has causal impact on the fate of the Committee
recommendation and the RCUK policy proposal only inasmuch as it gives
the wrong impression that it is about them, and that the arguments for
or against OA publishing, are arguments for or against the Committee
recommendation and the RCUK policy proposal.
Is this talking at cross purposes entirely the fault of the publishers
and the publisher lobby? I think not. I think both the Committee
Report and the RCUK proposal are at fault, for diluting their substantive
message (which ever so brief and simple: require self-archiving)
with a lot of unnecessary, bloated, and irrelevant verbiage about
publishing models. If they had not heaped their very useful and valid
concrete message with all this vague and irrelevant philosophising
and ideologising, their useful and valid concrete message would have
got through far more quickly and reliably.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Dec 15 2005 - 16:41:26 GMT