OA: NOT OK, BUT NOT DOA EITHER
Stevan Harnad
Full Hyperlinked version (with reference links):
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/322-guid.html
Richard Gallagher (2007) is quite right to say "we're still waiting"
for the "optimal and inevitable" [Open Access]. I was already in full
agreement in the previous millennium (Harnad 1999):
"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of
the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our
planet, it may chuckle at us. It is not the pace of our scholarly
and scientific research that will look risible, nor the tempo of
technological change. On the contrary, the astonishing speed and
scale of both will make the real anomaly look all the more striking.
"For staring us in the face in this last decade has been an obvious
new way to augment that already impressive speed and scale by perhaps
an order of magnitude, yet we simply haven't twigged on it...
"I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the
optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away
literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked
virtual library... and its [peer-review] expenses will be paid
for up-front, out of the [subscription cancellation] savings. The
only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping
the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic
cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving,
that they should just go ahead and drink!" -- (Harnad 1999)
But Gallagher is not quite right that "most scientists became
indifferent about Open Access." The syndrome is not quite indifference
but a combination of ignorance and indolence concerning what is already
demonstrably in their own best interests and fully within their reach. I
have dubbed the condition "Zeno's Paralysis" (Harnad 2006) and it is,
fortunately, curable. The medicine is OA self-archiving mandates (Harnad
2001, Harnad et al. 2003; Harnad 2007) by researchers' institutions and
funders.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
And those mandates are on the way. The inertia is and always was merely
a matter of keystrokes: getting those digits to deposit those digits.
"Publish or perish" mandates managed to get otherwise busy,
curiosity-driven researchers to find the time to set their
(peer-reviewed) findings to paper, and self-archiving mandates will now
ensure the few more minutes if takes to make them immediately and
permanently accessible free for all would-be users online, rather than
just for those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the
journal in which they happen to be published (Carr & Harnad 2005).
To close, a few loose ends:
(1) OA is not about journal affordability but about research
accessibility.
(2) Harnad (1998) is available not because of "an online forum" but
because it was self-archived in my institutional repository (without
waiting for a mandate).
(3) The optimal/inevitable is not just overdue since 1998, but at
least since 1994 (Harnad 1995, 2004; Poynder 2004), and actually at
least a decade longer.
(4) OA self-archiving mandates have been mooted since at least 2001
(Harnad 2001, Harnad et al 2003).
(5) A more optimistic version of Esposito's (2007) "nautilus" was
already mooted seventeen years ago, as "scholarly skywriting" (Harnad
1990).
References
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time
and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. Technical Report, ECS, University
of Southampton.
Esposito, J. (2007) Open Access 2.0. The Scientist 21(11) 52
Gallagher, R. (2007) OA: OK? The Scientist 21(11) 13
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum
of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in
Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).
Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and
Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell
(Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for
Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research
Libraries, June 1995.
Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature 395
(6698): 127-128
Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals.
D-Lib Magazine 5(12).
Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as:
(2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution
Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access.
In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning
and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S.
(2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004)
Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French versions: Harnad, S.
(2003) Cielographie et cielexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment
la resoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à'heure de
l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: Pp. 77-103. ]
Harnad, S. (2004) June 27 2004: The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" at 10.
American Scientist Open Access Forum. June 27 2004.
Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in
Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic
Aspects. Chandos.
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition.
In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the
Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.
Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online
RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.
Poynder, R. (2004) Ten Years After. Information Today. October 2004
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
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OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
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Received on Wed Nov 07 2007 - 15:36:51 GMT