One point that seems to be missing is the necessity of one researcher to
read about what others have done.. It is time saving, goal directing, and
a basic part of the reason to publish and the reason to read what has been
published.  (90% of nearly all published work, is reading, organizing and
digesting the prior literature).  To deny access to one single researcher
for any reason including a fee is to deny the world a benefit of science.

sterling
sterling stoudenmire <sstouden@THELINKS.COM>

At 01:05 PM 5/16/00 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>On Mon, 15 May 2000, Albert Henderson wrote:
>
>>ah> on Fri, 12 May 2000 Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote:
>
>> sh> It is important for sophisticates of this Forum to note that there
is no
>> sh> irony whatsoever in the fact that The Economist does not give away its
>> sh> contents for free on the Web.
>> sh>
>> sh> Why should it? Its journalists write the articles for a fee; their
>> sh> entirely valid objective is to sell, not to give away, their work.
>> sh>
>> sh> The WHOLE POINT of the initiative of freeing the refereed journal
>> sh> literature is that this (trade) model does not fit that anomalous
>> sh> literature, so fundamentally unlike everything else.
>> sh>
>> sh> Researchers are not journalists selling their words, they are
scientists
>> sh> and scholars reporting their findings. Their rewards do not come from
>> sh> tolls charged for access to their texts; they come from accessing
>> sh> and making an impact on the minds and the research of other
researchers.
>>
>>ah> Not so. Researchers make an economic exchange valued
>>ah> more than cash, for recognition and dissemination
>>ah> services that will reach their intended audiences,
>>ah> present and future.
>
>This often-repeated positive correlation has NOTHING to do with
>causation, indeed, if anything, the real causal relationship is
>NEGATIVE:
>
>Researchers report their research findings in refereed journals in
>order to make an "impact" (let us call it) on research and researchers,
>not (like all other authors) to sell their texts. It is that impact (if
>any) that then brings them promotion, grants, prizes, renown.
>
>It follows that anything that increases that impact is positive for
>researchers, and anything that decreases that impact hinders is
>negative.
>
>Access-barriers (Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View, S/L/P] decrease
>impact; let us not debate that. It is incontestable that you can't have
>an impact on anyone who can't get to your work.
>
>That is the real causal picture. The reason there is nevertheless a
>positive correlation between (1) appearing in a refereed journal and
>(2) impact is also quite obvious:
>
>In the Gutenberg (paper) Era, the only way (and hence, a fortiori, the
>best way) to make an impact on research and researchers apart from
>what a researcher could convey by word-of-mouth and writ-of-hand (1-on-1
>letters) was through print-on-paper. And producing and disseminating
>print-on-paper was expensive.
>
>Hence if those inescapable expenses were to be met (so that the
>research could be disseminated at all), researchers had to reluctantly
>acquiesce to S/L/P access-barriers to meet them -- because (in the
>Gutenberg Era) the negative effects of S/L/P access-barriers on impact
>were out-weighed by the positive effects of paper dissemination itself
>(compared to word-of-mouth or writ-of-hand).
>
>Albert Henderson writes as if nothing had changed since those days. But
>we are now in the PostGutenberg Era of Scholarly Skywriting. Research
>reports can now be publicly disseminated much more widely than by
>print-on-paper, and at virtually no cost at all, via online
>open-archiving: http://www.openarchives.org/
>
>In this new Era, anything that attempts to constrain this new form of
>open access is in headlong conflict with impact, and hence with the
>interests of research and researchers.
>
>There is still an essential function that journal publishers perform for
>researchers, and that is quality-control/certification QC/C (implementing
>peer review). For it is not the dissemination of their raw findings that
>researchers seek, and need for impact, but the dissemination of findings
>that have been certified by the pertinent experts.
>
>The dissemination can now be handled by the researchers, but the QC/C
>cannot; individual researchers cannot police themselves. Hence the real
>costs of implementing QC/C (implementing only, because referees referee
>for free) still need to be covered. But the good news is that these
>QC/C costs are only a fraction of S/L/P costs, so they can easily be
>covered out of a portion of each institution's annual S/L/P savings.
>
>The crucial difference, then, is that S/L/P costs are
>reader-institution-end costs for a reader-institution-end PRODUCT (the
>text), hence recovering them depends on erecting reader-access-barriers
>(= impact-barriers), whereas QC/C costs are author-institution-end
>costs for an author-institution-end SERVICE (QC/C), hence recovering
>them does not depend on reader-access-barriers, but rather on
>dismantling them.
>
>The funds will be there to cover QC/C costs many times over once S/L/P
>barriers are gone. Institutions will be happy to redirect this small
>portion of their annual windfall savings from S/L/P cancellation to
>cover all QC/C service charges for their publishing researchers,
>because their researchers' impact is also their institutions' impact
>(as reflected in citations, grant-income, prizes, renown: that's why
>institutions reward them through salaries and promotion).
>
>>ah> Publishers bring order out of
>>ah> chaos, setting standards for quality and objectivity.
>
>That is QC/C. No longer any need to hold the paper product hostage to
>this service via S/L/P access barriers.
>
>>ah> They channel information to the readers who may use it.
>
>That is the second "C" in QC/C. Again, no necessary connection between
>it an access barriers in the PostGutenberg Era.
>
>>ah> Research papers are not ads. Nothing is "given away"
>>ah> by either researcher or publisher.
>
>They are most definitely given away by their refereed-researcher/authors (no
>fee, no royalty), unlike all other authors.
>
>They are indeed not given away by their publishers, but that is the
>precise point under discussion here! There is a vast conflict of
>interest in the PostGutenberg Era, for this (author)-give-away
>literature. And the conflict all concerns access-barriers and potential
>impact.
>
>(And I did not say research papers ARE ads, but that they are more
>LIKE ads than they are like the non-giveway literature.)
>
>>ah> Thanks to libraries
>>ah> and librarians, scientific discoveries and theories are
>>ah> preserved and disseminated for the future, often long
>>ah> after the authors and publishers have disappeared.
>
>In the PostGutenberg Era we are now in, Networked Open Archives will do
>all of that, just as long, and much better -- and without the
>access-barriers, thank you very much.
>
>> sh> The access-blocking tolls are hence working AGAINST these rewards, not
>> sh> for them. (Charging for access to their research makes about as much
>> sh> sense for researchers as charging for access to their ads would make
>> sh> sense to the advertisers of commercial products.)
>>ah>
>>ah> Not so. Financial statistics indicate that access was
>>ah> blocked by university managers. They manufactured the
>>ah> "serials crisis" by cutting library spending and an
>>ah> open season on publishers propaganda campaign to shift
>>ah> the blame. Universities have been hoarding money at the
>>ah> expense of knowledge assets for 30 years. The average net
>>ah> profit of private research universities last year climbed
>>ah> to about 25% of revenues.
>
>I will not reply (again) to this oft-repeated conspiracy theory of
>Albert's. (It's the old refrain "Spend More On Libraries" and all will
>be well.)
>
>I will just say that these PostGutenberg possibilities have nothing to
>do with the reality or unreality of the "serials crisis."
>Access-barriers are access-barriers, whether they are high or low. And
>when there is no longer any need for them at all, there is no longer
>any justification for them.
>
>I have described self-archiving as "subversive" precisely because it
>is likely to force journal publishers to scale down to the bare
>essentials (i.e., QC/C service-provision), because readers prefer
>the free-access, self-archived version of refereed final drafts to the
>S/L/P alternatives. But as long there still exists a market for the
>S/L/P version, let it continue to be sold; researchers' needs are
>served by freeing the refereed literature online. How long the two
>incarnations of the same literature (for-free and for-fee) co-exist
>is anyone's guess, and certainly no concern of mind. (But the redirected
>funds for covering QC/C service costs are always latent in the S/L/P
>savings, if and when that market collapses.)
>
>> sh> The access-blocking tolls are hence working AGAINST these rewards, not
>> sh> for them. (Charging for access to their research makes about as much
>> sh> sense for researchers as charging for access to their ads would make
>> sh> sense to the advertisers of commercial products.)
>>ah>
>>ah> Not so. Starting with PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, which
>>ah> was founded as a for-profit venture by Henry Oldenburg,
>>ah> journal publishing has been a win-win arrangement for over
>>ah> 300 years. It is widely supported by researchers and
>>ah> considered an important source of financial support for
>>ah> other activities that might include policy positions and
>>ah> accreditation.
>
>Ah me, back to Gutenberg! Those days are over, Albert. (And once the
>inherent trade-off, and its needlessness in the PostGutenberg Era, is
>made explicit to them, I am ready to bet that researchers are NOT
>willing to have the potential impact of their curtailed in the service
>of subsidizing other "good works" of their Learned Societies.)
>
>> sh> In the papyrocentric era, such give-away authors had no choice but
>> sh> to make the Faustian bargain (with Gutenberg), that in order to defray
>> sh> the substantial expense of typesetting, printing and distribution, they
>> sh> would reluctantly acquiesce to the levying of access tolls to recover
>> sh> those costs -- knowing that if they did not acquiesce then there
would be
>> sh> nothing at all for researchers to access (beyond what they reported
>> sh> orally or by writing one-on-one learned letters).
>>ah>
>>ah> Not so. The Faustian bargain was made when academic
>>ah> senates gave up control of policy to administrators so
>>ah> that faculty could be free to pursue intellectual goals.
>>ah> Unfortunately, the quest for knowledge has been undermined
>>ah> by the financial priorities and petty ambitions of the
>>ah> new bureaucracy...
>
>Ah me. Nolo contendere. I have deleted the rest of this irrelevant
>conspiratorial speculation.
>
>Forget about bureaucrats' petty ambitions for a moment and focus on an
>objective that has face-validity: Researchers do research and they want
>to share their results with other researchers, present and future,
>freely. There is a way for them to do this now. So let's just do it.
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>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
>
>NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free
>access to the refereed journal literature 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.
>
>Discussion can be posted to:
>
>    september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org