Re: From Father Christmas to all the little boys and girls wishing for Open Access

From: Bernard Rentier <brentier_at_ULG.AC.BE>
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 07:39:26 +0100

    [ The following text is in the "UTF-8" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Congratulations, Father Christmas, for this perfect and definitive
lesson. It could not be clearer!

Bernard

Le 23-déc.-07 à 02:43, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> a
écrit :

      On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, [anonymous] wrote:

Dear Father Christmas,
   My wish goes towards allowing any researcher free access to
current scientific information -- and when I say free, I mean
without any constraint of fees, subscription, copyright. And
what would be better than having open archives/repositories?
   But I know this is pure utopia.
   Even you, Father Xmas, are you on Open Access?
   Since you are a creation of human intellect, someone must
have an exclusive copyright on you, so is it even allowed to
quote you without permission?
   How to get out of this dilemma? Recently, in France and
Germany, lawmakers wrote a new law, punishing anybody intending
to infringe copyright with enormous fines...
   My fellow European scientists are afraid and no longer dare
to express their ideas. Father Xmas, give us some suggestions
to be discussed in our Forum, but do not tell anybody else: we
don't want to be prosecuted...

REPLY FROM FATHER XMAS, NORTH POLE:

Dear little boys and girls everywhere who yearn for Open
Access:

Yes, there is a way that you can have the Open Access you say
you so fervently desire. But Father Christmas cannot give it to
you, any more than Father Christmas can give you big muscles,
if that is what you yearn for. All Father Christmas can do is
tell you how you yourselves can build the big muscles you
desire (by exercising daily with increasing weights). And for
Open Access it is exactly the same: It depends entirely on you,
dear children, each and every one of you.

Nor can you build big muscles from one day to the other. If you
try to lift too heavy a weight, too early, you only cause
yourself muscle strain. So don't insist on too much overnight.
Start with one simple fact that is easy to assimilate:

There is nothing, either physical or legal that prevents you
from depositing your own final, peer-reviewed drafts
(postprints) of all your own current research journal articles
in an OAI-compliant repository: Nothing. Not copyright. Not
technology. Not cost. Not expertise. No point in writing to
Father Christmas to wish that, because it it is already
entirely in your own hands:

Your institution has no Institutional Repository yet? Then
deposit your postprint in a central repository, like CogPrints
or Depot or Arxiv or HAL or PubMed Central for the time being.

The journal in which it is published does not yet endorse
immediate OA self-archiving? Then set access to the deposit as
Closed Access rather than OA for the time being, for as long as
the journal embargoes access. But do the deposit now.

That's all. If all the little boys and girls did that before
Christmas this year, on Christmas day all the current research
worldwide would be visible worldwide, 62% of it already Open
Access (because 62% of journals already endorse immediate OA
self-archiving).

For the remaining 38% deposited in Closed Access, the metadata
(author, title, journalname, date etc.) would be immediately
visible worldwide, so any user who wanted to access the
full-text could immediately email the author to request an
eprint by email. That is not immediate 100% OA, but it is
almost-immediate, almost-OA. Many Repositories already have a
button whereby eprints can be requested and sent
semi-automatically: one keystroke from the requester, one
keystroke from the author.

If all of you deposited all your current postprints before
Christmas, boys and girls, all Repositories would soon have
that button. And the growth of the OA muscles in this way,
worldwide, keystroke by keystroke, would soon hasten the
natural and well-deserved death of the remaining
publisher-embargoes. (Yes, dear children, it is within the
spirit of Christmas to speak about the "death" of evil things,
such as plagues, hunger, war, injustice, and research access
embargoes!)

So, dear little boys and girls, there are some things for which
wishing or writing a letter to Santa Claus is not quite enough.
Time to start exercising your little fingers. And if you find
doing the keystrokes for depositing all your current articles
before Christmas too low an ergonomic priority -- first,
congratulations for having published so much at such a young
age!

And second, instead of just writing to St. Nick, I suggest
writing to the Principal, Rector, Vice-Chancellor or Provost of
your school, to make known to them your fervent desire for OA,
pointing out also your faintness of will about doing the
keystrokes as long as you feel you would be doing those
dactylographics alone. Father Christmas understands that as
little researchers, you are already so busy and overloaded that
you cannot take the time to exercise your fingers in this way
while your school gives you so much other homework to do.

So if you all write to your Principal asking that the school
itself should make this digital muscle-building part of its
standard athletic curriculum for all its pupils -- making the
keystrokes mandatory for all of you -- then that mandate will
ensure OA self-archiving its proper place in your hierarchy of
priorities. The rewards will be felt in your year-end marks (if
you don't mind Father Christmas talking about such unpleasant
matters at a time we should be thinking of toys rather than
toil!), because self-archiving builds the citations as surely
as it builds muscles.

So don't worry about reforming copyright law. Copyright law is
the Cheshire Cat's smile, suspended in thin air, without you.
It will reform itself in due course, if you just do what is
already within your own hands (and always has been, ever since
the dawn of the online era), now, on the night before Xmas.
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of
the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. 

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why?
How?"

Your faithful old

Kris Kringle
Received on Sun Dec 23 2007 - 12:39:05 GMT