---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 15:05:36 -0400
From: David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: Preaching the gospel of self-archiving (Stevan Harnad)

Electronic theses: Some of the existing implementations of electronic theses
in order to deal with the real or fancied copyright concerns of some of the
authors, have made the thesis totally inaccessible except from the campus of
the university where the thesis was awarded. Totally: not only is the
electronic version not available except from that actual campus, but
reproductions of the thesis from UMI are not available at all. The result is a
step backwards, and exactly the opposite of what open archiving is all about.
Personally, I do not regard such theses as "published" and do not think they
can appropriately be considered part of the scholarly literature.

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 17:19:47 +0000
> From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
> Subject: Preaching the gospel of self-archiving (fwd)
>
> On Sat, 11 Mar 2000, Garfield, Eugene wrote:
>
> >  Hi Steve:
>
> > Do you have a list or inventory of journal publishers who now have adopted a
> > policy similar to Academic Press. I believe Wiley's is about the same. I'm
> > on a panel next week in St. Petersburg, Fla concerning electronic
> > theses,etc. and I want to preach this gospel of self-archiving and it would
> > be good to be able to report as many of these publishers as possible. Gene
>
> Hi Gene,
>
> To have the father of Science Citation Indexing preaching the gospel of
> self-archiving will certainly help to hasten the day!
>
> I deliberately don't keep lists because I don't think it is reasonable
> or realistic to try to encourage authors to submit their papers only to the
> journals with optimal self-archiving policies now. They should continue
> to submit to their preferred journals (based on quality, prestige,
> impact factor) and get around restrictive copyright transfer policies
> that try to forbid online self-archiving in the legal way that Charles
> Oppenheim and I have devised (archive unrefereed preprint, submit for
> refereeing, revise, then when accepted, archive a separate "corrigenda file"
> and let users put the two together: it is legal, it has the same effect
> -- freeing the refereed literature -- though a bit less conveniently for
> now, and it will be temporary, for soon the rest of the dominos will fall
> and everyone will be able to archive the convenient final draft).
>
> There seem to be 3 classes of publishers now, and I can only give
> examples rather than an exhaustive list:
>
> (1) The worst guys (e.g., Science, New England Journal of Medicine, all
> the American Psychological Association journals), who forbid public
> online self-archiving in any form. (These are the ones with whom we
> must use the above strategy.) (Some of these journals even have
> "embargo" policies -- not legally binding, merely arbitrary policies --
> announcing that they will not even REFEREE (let alone publish) a paper
> that has been publicly archived online. These embargo policies are absurd and
> unenforceable -- authors need merely self-archive with a different
> title and some trivial cosmetic differences, and besides, editors of
> journals -- who are us, after all -- have no interest in enforcing
> such policies, o learly designed to protect revenue-streams rather than
> to promote science.)
>
> Of these "worst guys," the ones published by Learned Societies (e.g., APA)
> will definitely come round, because they are answerable to their
> constituencies and to science. The rest will come round too, but only
> once forced by de facto [subversive] practise by researchers; till then
> they will try to do whatever they can to preserve the status quo.
>
> See:
>
>     Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals.
>     D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
>
>     Harnad, S. (2000) E-Knowledge: Freeing the Refereed Journal Corpus
>     Online. Computer Law & Security Report 16(2) 78-87. [Rebuttal to Bloom
>     Editorial in Science and Relman Editorial in New England Journal
>     of Medicine]
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12
> http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0021.html
> http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0801.htm
> http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind99&L=september98-forum&F=l&S=&P=21208
> http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0019.html http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0725.htm
> http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind99&L=september98-forum&F=l&S=&P=20403
>
> (2) Journals with incoherent policies, permitting "personal"
> self-archiving and not "public" (not realizing that on the Web there is
> no difference WHATSOEVER), e.g., Nature, the Academic Press journals,
> etc. Their wishful-thinking-based distinctions can safely be ignored;
> they could never be made sense of in a court of law.
>
> (3) The progressive journals, led by the American Physical Society,
> which permit online self-archiving (though not necessarily of their
> copyrighted page-images, which is perfectly fine, since a reformatted
> HTML or XML version is much better and more useful than PDF page
> images).
>
> So if you want to preach the gospel of self-archiving, preach the
> gospel of open archiving <http://www.openarchives.org>. That will be
> the way my own subversive proposal
> <http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html> actually gets
> implemented: The Santa Fe interoperability protocol will allow
> universities and learned societies to set up interoperable open
> archives, all meta-data-tagged according to a simple shared convention;
> the result is that all the open archives are automatically drawn
> together into one, global, virtual archive. Anyone searching for a paper
> in any refereed journal in any discipline, anywhere, will be able to
> find and retrieve it without having to worry about which open archive
> it's located in.
>
> To accelerate this, Rob Tansley has just about finished converting the
> CogPrints archiving software <http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/> into
> Santa-Fe-compliant, generic Eprint software
> <http://www.eprints.org/software.html> which will be given to all
> institutions for free so they can instantly and effortlessly set up their
> own local Open Archive for all of their authors, in all of their
> disciplines.
>
> If librarians ask you what they can do to solve the serials budget
> crisis; if university administrators ask you what they can do to
> facilitate the freeing of the journal literature online, if researchers
> ask what they can do to hasten the day, tell them to set up local open
> archives and put all their papers in them! (Eprints should be available
> in a few more weeks.)
>
> And if anyone wants a taste of what it will be like navigating the
> global virtual library Garfield-style (i.e., via citations) let them
> have a look at the demo of the Open Citation project:
> <http://opcit.eprints.org/website/>
>
> > I have been faithfully storing all the various communications
> > that you have generated. It is a major task to keep up with your listserv.
> >
> > Is there really any reason I should maintain this folder or would it be more
> > efficient to just refer to your archive.
>
> I think most of what I send you is archived by American Scientist, so
> don't bother archiving it. To find it, just go to:
>
>     http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
> Cheers, Stevan
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Stevan Harnad                     harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
> Professor of Cognitive Science    harnad@princeton.edu
> Department of Electronics and     phone: +44 23-80 592-582
>              Computer Science     fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
> University of Southampton         http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
> Highfield, Southampton            http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
> SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

--
David Goodman
Biology Librarian, and
Co-Chair, Electronic Journals Task Force
Princeton University Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu         http://www.princeton.edu/~biolib/
phone: 609-258-3235            fax: 609-258-2627