STM Talk: Open Access by Peaceful Evolution -- Stevan Harnad Stephen Clark 17 Feb 2003 14:28 UTC
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 14:16:16 +0000 (GMT) From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Subject: STM Talk: Open Access by Peaceful Evolution Abstract of invited talk to be given on Thursday May 15 in Amsterdam at the STM Conference "Universal Access: By Evolution or Revolution?". http://www.stm-assoc.org/aboutstm/calendar.html Open Access by Peaceful Evolution Stevan Harnad The open access movement was originally inspired by research-author and research-user frustration with the continuing loss of research impact because of access-blockage by unaffordable tolls in a new era when all peer-reviewed research output is so clearly within universal reach thanks to the Internet. The movement's efforts and motivation were at first led by the library community and directed against the publisher community. The motivation was right, but the target was wrong, and indeed unfair, and little progress was made. (Prices would probably have come down anyway, with global licensing developments.) The research community has since realized that its real target should have been *itself* all along: Only now are researchers and their institutions grasping that the way to maximize their research impact is to self-archive their own peer-reviewed research output in their own institutional open-access Eprint Archives. The toll-access and open-access versions will co-exist and co-evolve, possibly indefinitely, or they may converge on a new system, whereby the publisher is paid for the peer review and any other essential added value as a service-cost on each institution's own *outgoing* research, instead of an access-cost on the *incoming* research from all other institutions. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is promoting both self-archiving (BOAI-1) and open-access journal publishing (BOAI-2), and SPARC is promoting business models for both. The only thing publishers must avoid at all costs is to appear to be trying to deliberately block the evolution of self-archiving through restrictive copyright policies! That would would be very bad public relations with the research community, creating and highlighting a dramatic conflict between what is obviously in the best interests of research and researchers, their institutions and funders, and the society benefitting from the research, on the one hand, versus what is in the best interests of journal publishers' current revenue streams and business models on the other -- a conflict of interest that could indeed precipitate a revolution, now that necessity is so obviously no longer a justification, as it was in paper days! Far better to allow evolution to take its natural course peacefully, and adapt to it accordingly. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm Stevan Harnad