Subversive Proposal (Stevan Harnad) Marcia Tuttle 27 Jun 1994 20:39 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 13:51:38 EDT From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@PRINCETON.EDU> Subject: Subversive Proposal Proposal for Presentation The Network Services Conference (NSC) London, England, 28-30 November 1994 Name(s): Stevan Harnad Affiliation(s): University of Southampton E-mail address(es): harnad@mail.soton.ac.uk Postal address(es): Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Centre Title of presentation: PUBLICLY RETRIEVABLE FTP ARCHIVES FOR ESOTERIC SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP: A SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL Abstract: We have heard many predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade, no-market) scientific and scholarly publication (but that is the lion's share of the academic corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for which the author does not and never has expected to SELL his words. He wants only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes of his peers, his fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's work in that collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry. For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications made the Faustian bargain to allow a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership because that was the only way to make their work public in the era when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) were the only way to do so. But today there is another way, and that is PUBLIC FTP: If every esoteric author in the world this very day established a globally accessible local ftp archive for every piece of esoteric writing he did from this day forward, the long-heralded transition from paper publication to purely electronic publication (of esoteric research) would follow suit almost immediately. The only two factors blocking it at the moment are (1) quality control (i.e., peer review and editing), which happen to be implemented today almost exclusively by paper publishers and (2) the patina of paper publishing, which results from this monopoly on quality control. If all scholars' preprints were universally available to all scholars by anonymous ftp (and gopher, and World-wide web, and the search/retrieval wonders of the future), NO scholar would ever consent to WITHDRAW that preprint from the public eye after the refereed version was accepted for paper "PUBLICation." Instead, everyone would, quite naturally, substitute the refereed, published reprint for the unrefereed preprint. Paper publishers will then either restructure themselves (with the cooperation of the scholarly community) so as to arrange for the minimal true costs and a fair return on electronic-only page costs (which I estimate to be less than 25% of paper-page costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears in most current publishers' estimates) to be paid out of advance subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies) or they will have to watch as the peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic-only publishers who will. The subversion will be complete, because the (esoteric -- no-market) literature will have taken to the airwaves, where it always belonged, and those airwaves will be free (to the benefit of us all) because their true minimal expenses will be covered the optimal way for the unimpeded flow of esoteric knowledge to all: In advance.