Re: Brisbane declaration on Open Access (fwd)

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 08:54:40 -0400

On 9-Oct-08, at 7:37 AM, Peter D. Mosses wrote:

> Could you clarify the following point:
>
>> 5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs
>> ("Versions of Record") were not the preferred version of an article to
>> hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept
>> which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but
>> also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which
>> should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration
>> explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft ("Accepted
>> Manuscript") which is preferred. The "Version of Record" remains the
>> citable object.
>
> What exactly is the Brisbane preferred format for the "Accepted Manuscript", if not pdf? Is it Word or LaTeX source files (I sincerely hope not!) or something completely different from pdf?
>
> Moreover, although pdfs are indeed good for printing, they are also extremely useful for browsing online. Thanks to support for searching, annotation, bookmarks and active hyperlinks, a pdf can be much more useful than the printed version - and much less expensive on trees than glossy journals!
>
> I guess we all agree that open access to the "Accepted Manuscript" is better than nothing while an article is still in press. But as soon as the publisher provides the pdf of the final version online, wouldn't we prefer to find that in the open (or restricted) access repository, instead of the final draft? - especially since we may indeed expect the publisher's pdf to be better formatted...

Dear Peter:

There are two important, independent factors here:

(1) Yes, PDF is preferable to print on paper, but XML is optimal online.

(2) There are far more publisher restrictions and embargoes on the
publisher's PDF than on the author's final, peer-reviewed draft. Hence
the latter is the one that should be deposited, to maximise OA. (This
is independent of the question of the format of the author's draft.
The author can generate his own PDF if he wishes; HTML or XML is even
better. It is the *publisher's* proprietary PDF that should on no
account be the default option.)

Stevan

>
>
> -- Peter
>
> Prof Peter D Mosses <p.d.mosses_at_swan.ac.uk>
> Dept of Computer Science, Swansea University
> Personal web page: www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~cspdm/
>
Received on Thu Oct 09 2008 - 14:13:32 BST