In the Gutenberg Galaxy of print-on-paper, right up to the present day,
researchers have had a quasi-universal "mandate" to make their findings
known: "Publish or Perish".
The reason was that findings buried in a file drawer may as well not
have been found at all. Publishing the findings makes it possible for
other researchers to use, apply, and build upon them.
In today's PostGutenberg Galaxy of globalised bits-on-line, we need
to generalize and universalise the old Gutenberg mandate in a simple
and natural way:
Researchers need to maximise access and usage by making their research
freely accessible to all users online: instead of mailing paper reprints
of their articles to would-be users who request them, an inexhaustible
supply of online eprints needs to be provided by self-archiving all
published articles, free for all, in each researcher's Open Access
Institutional Repository.
Prompted by a proposal by Alma Swan to find a catchy French PostGutenberg
gloss of "Publish or Perish," a number of candidates immediately come
to mind, both in English and in French. So let's have an (informal,
unofficial) contest. (No prize, but the winner is likely to become the
OA movement's slogan for the PostGutenberg extension of the Publish or
Perish mandate.)
Please email candidates to me (harnad AT uqam dot ca), not to the
Forum. I will then post them collectively (with the names of proponents,
or anonymously: please indicate your preference) for a vote.
Here are a few to get you started
Publish or Perish ---> Disseminate or Decease
OR Broadcast or Bury
OR Air or Expire
OR OA or Decay
OR Archive to Survive
OR Post or Ghost ...
French:
Publier ou périr ---> Diffuser ou Décéder...
Multilingual entries are welcome! Alma Swan wrote:
"The challenge is - in all languages - to get the [new] wide meaning
*and* the alliteration!" [fore or aft]
(There is already a Hungarian gloss "Kiadsz vagy Kimaradsz" (roughly
"give out [= publish] or get left out"] by Tamas Somogyi of the Hungarian
National Digital Archive
http://oai.nda.hu/somogyit/ and soon, I hope,
in Portuguese...)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Nov 09 2006 - 14:49:19 GMT