Re: Stevan Harnad's misconception 4

From: Arthur Smith <apsmith_at_APS.ORG>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:50:04 -0500

Stevan Harnad wrote:
> [...]
>
> I note that the authors of fee/royalty-based writings are not interested in making
> their writings OA. Researchers, the authors of the give-away writings in question,
> are.
>

Not that I've been keeping up, but I thought the question under
discussion was whether authors should be *forced* to make their writings
OA (through self-archiving). If force is required, it's not clear they
"are interested" at all. And conversely, there are quite a number of
fee/royalty-based writings that have also been posted for free on the
web (many of our RMP review articles, for which we usually pay authors
an honorarium/royalty, are also posted on the arxiv for instance). Some
people want their writings available free on the web, some don't (or
just don't care). The question seems to be quite orthogonal to whether
the authors receive money or not.

I'm not saying that I endorse all that Jan was talking about either...

A worse problem, in my mind, is the large quantity of potentially useful
research that never reaches any public distribution because of the real
barriers - there were half a dozen bits of research I had partially done
that I never got around to "writing up", and I know a number of other
"retired" researchers who have many similar "lost works". I think an
important focus for the future would be finding ways to put even
half-baked partially-done research in a form that could be easily
"published" and taken up by others because it is, fundamentally, useful
stuff, even if it didn't reach what the researcher thought of as a
minimal standard for publication. Make the basics of the research
process easily available to other interested parties without the
barriers of formal publication, and "open access" takes on an entirely
new and really useful perspective, I think.

       Arthur (Smith)
Received on Thu Mar 01 2007 - 01:27:09 GMT