Why all this fuss?
A simple correction fixes the MIT FAQ (which also had some
grammatical gaffes):
http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/faculty-and-researchers/mit-faculty-open-access-policy/oapolicyprocedures/oa-policy-faq/#harmpub
> *Will this policy harm journals, scholarly societies, small
> friendly publishers, or peer review?
>
> *There is no empirical evidence that even when all articles are
> freely available, journals are canceled. The major societies in
> physics have not seen any impact on their publishing programs
> despite the fact that for more than 10 years an open access
> repository (arXiv) has been in existence
> containing nearly all of the physics literature written in
that
> time has been available and successful.
"that made freely available nearly all of the literature written
in certain fields of physics (e.g., High Energy Physics and
astrophysics) during that interval."
(This makes the statement unimpeachably accurate [though still
very badly written[, while making the very same point -- not
about physics as a whole, but about those fields -- which also
happen to have their own journals.)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Jun 23 2009 - 23:02:11 BST