Varmus - Stevan Harnad Stephen D. Clark 08 Oct 1999 07:32 UTC
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Varmus (fwd) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:04:03 +0100 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 22:24:26 +0100 (BST) From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> To: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org Subject: Re: Varmus On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Vincent Kiernan wrote: > Dr. Harnad, > > We're working on a story about the announcement that Harold Varmus is > leaving NIH, and we're gathering comment and reaction. I was wondering if > you have any thoughts about the impact of Varmus' E-biomed proposal and its > prognosis in the wake of his departure? > > Thanks in advance > > Vince Kiernan > Senior writer, The Chronicle of Higher Education > kiernan@nasw.org I of course hope that E-biomed (now PubMed Central) will come into being and have an influence despite Harold's departure, but it is certainly true that his personal initiative was a very important factor. If his successor does not support it with equal conviction, it will be a historic setback for the world scientific community's course toward the optimal and the inevitable: the freeing of the refereed journal literature for one and all, online. There had already been a bit too much of a compromise in the decision to design PubMed Central for organization-based rather than individual self-archiving, but this might evolve toward individual self-archiving if there are enough high-quality participating journals from the outset. PubMed Central opens in January. It should soon become apparent to what extent the commitment behind it was NIH's and to what extent it was Harold's own laudable personal crusade. Either way, the self-archiving initiative will grow. At issue is only the historic question of whether or not NIH's causal role will prove to have been a critical one. Other initiatives are materializing. Perhaps the most important of these currently is the UPS in 2 weeks, spearheaded, characteristically, by Paul Ginsparg, but joined this time by substantial representation from the other disciplines: http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm Physicists are clearly smarter than the rest of us, and way ahead in all this, but the rest of us will catch up, sooner or later. The question here is only whether or not the biomedical sciences will prove to be #2 through the finish gate. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 "Freeing the Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving" is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html