Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright (Albert Henderson) Marcia Tuttle 08 Feb 2002 16:36 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 19:39:57 -0500 From: Albert Henderson <chessNIC@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright (Stevan Harnad) > RE: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright (Stevan Harnad) > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 03:55:55 +0000 > From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGPRINTS.SOTON.AC.UK> > Subject: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright [snip] > Finally, the reason I now favor institutional self-archiving over > central self-archiving is that the university is the natural entity to > drive, mediate, reward, and benefit from the transition: It is the > university and its researchers and research output that benefit from > maximising their research impact by making it freely accessible to all > would-be users by self-archiving it. It is the university and its > researchers and research that benefit from having all refereed research > from other universities freely accessible to its researchers (something > its library serials budget could never have afforded) and it is the > university that stands to gain from the annual windfall savings from > serials cancellations, only a portion of which (~10-30%, or $200-$500 > per paper) will need to be re-directed to cover peer review costs per > outgoing paper, once the journals have downsized to the essentials. What Stevan will never admit is that university managers have plundered library budgets since the 1970s in anticipation of windfall savings from interlibrary photocopying. Any windfalls go right to the bottom line. University profitability has never been greater. Doubling library spending would not harm any academic program. In spite of strong opposition from faculty senates and individual researchers, the cancellation projects proceeded. Libraries now have half the share of academic spending that they enjoyed in the 1960s. Impoverishment impacts not only collections but staff. The profession of academic librarianship is at risk. Stevan's proposals would replace libraries and librarians with computers -- many off campus. Moreover, researchers have never faced such an impossible challenge to acquire and digest new knowledge as they do today. Because of poor library collections, many research projects have their own subscriptions, paid by grants and unavailable to library patrons. Preprints are not considered "archival," as journals are. They have the aroma of conference papers and abstracts. Steven's solution promises to serve up sewage to researchers now drowning in peer-reviewed information. He fails to admit that the oxymoronic "preprint archives" proposed for biomedicine and social sciences will attract trash, quackery, and fraud mixed in with papers of value. NIH's e-Biomed program was soundly rejected by the scientific community largely for this reason. What works in relatively small and mathematically-oriented fields would stumble badle elsewhere. Albert Henderson 70244.1532@compuserve.com past editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000