Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication" -- Stevan Harnad Stephen Clark 13 Sep 2002 12:29 UTC
-------- Original Message -------- Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 23:51:14 +0100 (BST) From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication" A rare opportunity to agree 100% with everything Albert writes! On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Albert Henderson wrote: > [Refereed-journal] Publishers recruit and train editors. True. > Publishers may also support editors' office, meeting, > and travel expenses. True (though in the online age, the office is becoming ever more virtual and the travel supererogatory...). > Editors recruit referees, solicit their > advice and evaluate their reports. True. > No automated server can ever replace editors, > publishers, and their active approach to > critical prepublication review. True. But online processing and archiving can (and does) cut costs substantially. > It is far more likely that the availability > of preprints will become another excuse for > backoffice budget misers to force the > cancellation of more subscriptions. True. But fortunately, there will be plenty of institutional windfall access-toll savings out of which to pay the remaining essential costs -- much reduced, but non-zero -- in the open-online-access era. Instead of being paid by institutional backoffice misers the old way, in the form of access-tolls for buying in INCOMING research from other institutions, as they were in the on-paper era, they will be paid by institutional backoffice misers the new-online-age way, as peer-review and certification costs, per paper, for quality-controlling and certifying OUTGOING institutional research. The peer-review service and certification will continue to be provided by the journal publishers (and paid for), whereas the archiving will be done by the distributed, interoperable institutional archives. The far lower overall cost to everyone in the open-access era will also produce far higher potential visibility, usage, and impact for the research, with commensurate gains in research productivity, progress, prestige and funding for the researchers and their institutions. Albert is quite right about all of this. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm and the SPARC position paper on institutional repositories: http://www.unites.uqam.ca/src/sante.htm