Petitions, Boycotts, and Liberating the Refereed Literature Online

Here is a reply to a query that is pertinent to this list:

> [Do you know] about the petition that asks signers not to participate
> in publishing articles in journals that don't share their archives[?]

I haven't seen that petition yet, but you may be surprised to hear that I would not myself endorse it.

I am a strong advocate of freeing the refereed journal literature online through self-archiving, but I am opposed to making that conditional in any way on FIRST changing either journals or author-submission practises in any way (e.g., through author boycotts).

The reason for my opposition is simple: because such preconditions are unnecessary, ineffectual, and would in fact be counterproductive. So focusing on them and waiting for them to happen is simply delaying us on the road to the optimal and inevitable (the entire refereed journal literature, online and free), which is already within reach now.

Journals need to continue to exist and perform their essential, irreplaceable function, which is implementing peer review and certifying the refereed, revised, final drafts as having been accepted for publication by that journal: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/nature2.html

And there is no reason whatsoever for asking or expecting researchers to choose the journal to which they wish to submit their research findings on any other basis than the one they use already, which is quality, reputation, impact.

Why should researchers base that important choice on whether or not a journal shares its archives (whatever that means)?

For if "sharing its archives" means obliging the journal to give away its own contents, now, for free, in a public online archive, then surely it should be the JOURNAL, not its authorship, that decides whether or when to do that, based on its economics and cost-recovery methods. (But there is something its authorship CAN do, now, that will have exactly the same effect!)

Nor would I endorse a journal boycott by authors even in support of modifying journals' copyright transfer policy so as to formally permit authors to self-archive their final refereed drafts (as the APS policy, for example, already allows them to do
<ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc>) -- but that is because all authors can ALREADY achieve the same outcome, legally, now, even if they sign the most restrictive copyright transfer agreement (by using the Harnad/Oppenheim strategy)!
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/2-Resolving-the-Anomaly/sld007.htm

Hence here too, a boycott would be unnecessary, ineffectual, and counterproductive (merely delaying the optimal and inevitable by needlessly making it conditional on a prior, successful boycott).

The fact is that the option of self-archiving is already there and ready, as a SURE means of freeing the refereed literature without authors' having to boycott or give up anything at all. (That is why the proposal was dubbed "subversive".)

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD
http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

And the physicists have already demonstrated that it can be done, and how. So they will get the undisputed historical credit for having been the fastest off the mark.

But even the physicists are only approaching the optimal and inevitable linearly <http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions> (and at that rate, with 30-40% of the refereed physics literature freed to date, it will take another decade or more to free it all). So something is needed to accelerate the self-archiving rate in physics from the linear to the exponential, and to propagate that momentum into all the other disciplines as well.

(Physicists may be smarter, more serious about research, and faster about doing what needs to be done about freeing it, but they are not infinitely smarter, faster, etc.; there exists no discipline that would fail to benefit hugely from having universal free access to its refereed literature online, and from the enhanced research tempo, productivity and, most important of all, impact that removal of all access-barriers would yield. I am hoping that the imminent release of the eprints.org software so all institutions can immediately set up OAI-compliant Eprint Archives will at last propel that self-archiving momentum into the exponential range in all fields.)

Petitions like the one alluded to above only reinforce the false impression that in order to free the refereed literature there is something authors first have to give up: They don't have to give up (or petition or boycott for) anything.

(Why should I, as an author/researcher, give up my prerogative to submit my findings to, say, Science, because Science currently declines to give away its contents for free, or declines to change its copyright policy, on my say-so? I can publish in Science and liberate my paper through self-archiving anyway! -- Besides, there are signs that Science's policy in this regard may be changing anyway; Nature's already is.)

> [T]he Open Citation Project... looks sensible and straightforward to me.
>
> Have biomedical researchers shown an interest in using OpCit? It
> seems a graceful way of liberating this material, as you say, without
> making threats or demands on publishers.

I think this is conflating two related but distinct projects:

(1) The OpCit Project: http://opcit.eprints.org

and

(2) The Eprints Project: http://www.eprints.org

OpCit is an NSF/JISC-funded project for citation-linking, in the first instance, the Los Alamos Physics Archive, and eventually all distributed, OAI-compliant Eprint Archives (this is still waiting on the OAI's introducing references into the OAI Protocol: http://www.openarchives.org). Citation-linking provides a powerful new means of navigating the digital refereed literature and it also provides new scientometric measures of research impact:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.htm

However, OpCit is not a way of liberating the material: It operates on material that has ALREADY been liberated! The means of liberating the material is institutional self-archiving:

Eprints is the self-archiving project, providing OAI-compliant software to Universities worldwide so that (1) they can immediately create their own OAI-compliant Eprint Archives, so that (2) their researchers can self-archive their papers in them:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD

All the distributed Eprint archives, being interoperable, can then be harvested into one global virtual archive in which everyone, everywhere can search and retrieve the full refereed journal literature self-archived therein for free, thanks to such Open Archive Services as: http://arc.cs.odu.edu/

So what biomedical researchers should show an interest in now is Eprints, rather than OpCit! It is self-archiving in OAI-compliant institutional Eprint archives that provides the graceful way of liberating this material.

The release date for the operational version of the Eprints software is in a few weeks. Stay tuned. Then I'll be able to tell you whether biomedical researchers (and researchers in all other fields) are showing an interest. But I do know that over 100 institutions are already beta-testing Eprints now.

Stevan Harnad                     harnad[_at_]cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science    harnad[_at_]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           

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00):

    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

You may join the list at the site above.

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    september98-forum[_at_]amsci-forum.amsci.org Received on Sun Oct 29 2000 - 14:30:13 GMT