Berkeley Electronic Press's Self-Archiving Policy (Stevan Harnad) Marcia Tuttle 01 Mar 2002 15:41 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 12:14:34 +0000 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGPRINTS.SOTON.AC.UK> Subject: Berkeley Electronic Press's Self-Archiving Policy The Berkeley Electronic Press http://www.bepress.com/ is making an admirable effort to be progressive and responsible, by providing electronic-only journals with rapid peer review, low price, and author retention of copyright. However, bepress's formal self-archiving policy is incoherent, reflecting the obsolete exclusive-rights Gutenberg-era thinking it apparently hopes will carry over into the PostGutenberg era. In brief, the restriction below is meaningless as long as the authors's institutional website is an OAI-compliant Eprint Archive http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g20#6. The OAI-interoperability will ensure that through free cross-archive search engines like http://citebase.eprints.org/ and http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ (and even google, if the google search is restricted to OAI-compliant Eprint Archives) the self-archived texts can be searched and ahrvested by anyone, anywhere, any time, without having to know or specify the locus where they happen to be archived. That is the nature of the PostGutenberg phenomenon known as a public, interconnected, digital network, as opposed to the obsolete concept of an exclusive "locus of publication." http://www.bepress.com/faq.html#ERights 2. When you say "exclusive world-wide rights to distribute electronically" what about an author posting his paper on other electronic web sites, including his own? Authors are not permitted to post a paper published by The Berkeley Electronic Press to any web site except their personal sites or sites associated with their institutions, provided these sites are non-commercial. For example, an author could post her article on her personal site and on her department's web site. She would not be permitted, however, to post it to ssrn.com or fatbrain.com. Authors are also prohibited from posting their articles to usenet news groups or other electronic bulletin boards. A condition of publication is that authors have copies of their papers removed from any web sites other than those on which they are permitted to reside. Authors are permitted to post the title and abstract of their articles on any web site. They are also permitted to post links on any web site that direct readers to the paper on the bepress web site. It is not exclusive electronic sales rights for the first year that will provide a stable cost-recovery model for bepress journals. The only coherent way to do that is by recognizing that peer-reviewed journal publication in the PostGutenberg era has reduced to a service-provision (peer review) role in place of the product-provision (the text, whether on-line or on-paper) of the Gutenberg era. And (most important) the service is to the author-institution and not to the reader-institution. No reader-institution-based access-blocking toll will be viable, because open access can always be provided by the author through self-archiving. Hence submission/acceptance charges to the author-institution are the only viable way to recover costs (although it may be premature, first requiring self-archiving to adapt the research community to open access as well as to release thereby the reader-institution subscription-cancellation savings that will pay for the author-institution submission/acceptance costs). Let us hope that bepress's other good features make it possible for them to launch and stay afloat, even with their incoherent self-archiving policy, long enough to eventually benefit from the sea-change that will result from open access. For with their suitably streamlined, online-only operations, they will be well-placed to take over migrating titles, should the established publishers elect to get out of open-access publishing rather than downsizing to become peer-review service-providers. Note that I could be wrong about this: Not about the incoherence of the home website restriction, but about the absence of a toll-based product market for texts that are also openly accessible elsewhere. It is quite possible that longstanding Gutenberg habits (or benefits I have not had the imagination to think of) will ensure that there continues to be a viable subscription/licence market for online-only journals for years to come, even when their contents are also accessible online for free, via OAI-interoperable institutional Eprint Archives. (All the evidence so far is that this will be the case -- but it is still based on minimal open access, mostly in physics; but the trend can continue even as open access grows and spreads across disciplines -- assuming that it does grow, that is!) It just seems risky not have a Plan B. Stevan Harnad