Re: The Special Case of Law Reviews

I have to agree 100% with Dan Hunter here, rather than with my institutional colleague and friend, Steve Hitchcock: Open access is *not* about individual authors somehow having to "fix" their copyright agreements with their publishers. If that were the only road, or the main road to open access, I think open access would be doomed.

Many well-wishers have been voicing this thoroughly incorrect and unrealistic sentiment for years now: "The key to open access is copyright retention or renegotiation by authors."

Easier said than done. And it's the individual authors at risk who would have to do it, not the well-wishers!

The key to open access is not waiting for open-access journals, either. The key to open access is self-archiving. And the key to self-archiving is institutional and funding-agency publish-or-perish policy: They must mandate open-access-provision (via either open-access publishing or toll-access publishing plus self-archiving). That's all that's needed. Nature (and human nature, and resourcefulness) will take care of the rest.

Dan Hunter wrote:

> The (untenured) law professor just doesn't have the bargaining position
> to negotiate a change in the contract when the elite journals (that I
> rely on to get tenure) have explicitly said that they won't negotiate
> contract terms and that if I don't like it I can piss elsewhere.
>
> And, seriously, if you think that the solution to this problem is
> individual contractual responsibility then I would, with the greatest
> of respect to you, suggest that you're part of the problem.

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 & 03):

    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html     http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html     Post discussion to: september98-forum[_at_]amsci-forum.amsci.org

Dual Open-Access Strategy:

    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access

            journal whenever one exists.     BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable

            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.

    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm
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