Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication" Stevan Harnad 31 Aug 2002 12:59 UTC
These two papers by Eugene Garfield -- founder of the Insitute for Scientific Information, Current Contents, Science Citation Index, and originator of the Citation Impact Factor -- might be of interest to the Open Access community: "I believe that posting and sharing one's preliminary publications [is] an important part of the peer... review process and does not justify an embargo by publishers on the grounds of 'prior publication'. It was not the case before the Internet, and exceot for unusual clinical situations, has not changed because of the convenience of the Internet." (Garfield, 2000) Garfield, E. (2000) Is Acknowledged Self-Archiving Prior Publication? Presented at Third International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Mar 17 2000 http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/Presentations/Garfield-Web-Publishing.pdf Garfield, E. (1999) Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication. The Scientist 13(12): 12 (June 7, 1999) http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1999/June/comm_990607.html I am of course in complete agreement with Eugene Garfield -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 -- and would demur only on one point -- minor for what Gene is saying, but rather major for what should be motivating researchers to self-archive in the first place -- namely, that self-archiving DOES provide far greater visibility in the on-line age than on-paper publication alone does. This too is documented (but it in no way changes the thrust of Gene's very correct observation, and advice to authors and publishers). Lawrence, S. (2001a) Online or Invisible? Nature 411 (6837): 521. http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ Lawrence, S. (2001b) Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact. Nature Web Debates. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html Odlyzko, A.M. (2002) The rapid evolution of scholarly communication." Learned Publishing 15: 7-19 http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/odlyzko.pdf Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science 79(5): 629-638. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/97/index.html Harnad, S. (2000) E-Knowledge: Freeing the Refereed Journal Corpus Online. Computer Law & Security Report 16(2) 78-87. [Rebuttal to Bloom Editorial in Science and Relman Editorial in New England Journal of Medicine] http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/01/index.html Harnad, S. (2000) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing. Lancet Perspectives 256 (December Supplement): s16. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/03/index.html Harnad, S. (2001) "Research access, impact and assessment." Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/83/index.html 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): 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 and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm