[LIS-Forum] Fwd: Re: On the Need to Take Both Roads to Open Access

From Stevan Harnad :

There will be an Open Access conference October 20-22 in Berlin. Below is a URL for the conference, followed by the abstract of my own paper (to be given in session 4.3):

OPEN ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE IN THE SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES (organized by the Max Planck Society in association with ECHO)

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin1.htm

http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/index.htm October 20 - 22, 2003, Berlin

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My own paper will be entitled:

On the Need to Support Both Open-Access Strategies: Open-Access Publishing (P) and Open-Access Self-Archiving (S)

Stevan Harnad

ABSTRACT: It has taken a very long time for the research community to at last awaken to the importance of, the need for, and the attainability of toll-free online access to the full text of all peer-reviewed research articles for all researchers ("open access"). There are two roads to open access: (P) Open-Access Publishing and (S) Open-Access Self-Archiving. It would be a great pity, and a great loss for open-access and research impact, if today's long-overdue open-access initiatives were now to be focused exclusively, or even primarily, on Open-Access Publishing (P), which may be the easier concept to understand, but is the slower, more indirect and more uncertain of the two means of attaining open access today. Open-access publishing requires 3 steps:

(P1) creating or converting 23,500 open-access journals (there are only 500 open-access journals today, and 23,500 toll-access journals),

(P2) finding a means of covering open-access publication costs (varying from <$500 to >$1500 per article), and

(P3) persuading the authors of each of the 2,500,000 refereed research articles published annually to publish them in these 23,500 new open-access journals instead of in the 23,500 established toll-access journals.

Open-access self-archiving requires only one step:

(S1) persuading the authors of each of the annual 2,500,000 refereed research articles to self-archive them in addition to publishing them in the established 23,500 toll-access journals.

As 55% of the established journals already support self-archiving (and many more will agree if asked),

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20...

and as at least three times as many articles are open-access today because their authors have self-archived them than because they have been published in an open-access journal,

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/dual-strategy.ppt

it is undeniable that self-archiving is the faster, more direct, and more certain of the two means of attaining open-access today. Moreover, self-archiving is probably also the single most powerful means of hastening us all toward the era of universal open-access publishing! The optimal joint open-access strategy that the Berlin Declaration should accordingly support and promote is that all researchers should:

(P) publish in an open-access journal today wherever a suitable open-access journal is available today;

and

(S) wherever a suitable open-access journal is not available today, publish in a toll-access journal but also self-archive the article in your institutional open-access archive today.

Fully support both open-access publishing (P) and open-access self-archiving (S).

Harnad, S. (2003) Electronic Preprints and Postprints. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science Marcel Dekker, Inc. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/eprints.htm

Harnad, S. (2003) Online Archives for Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications. International Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. John Feather & Paul Sturges (eds). Routledge. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archives.htm

Harnad, S. (2003) Self-Archive Unto Others as Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You. The Australian Higher Education Supplement.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm

Harnad, S. (2003) Maximising Research Impact Through Self-Archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm

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Stevan Harnad Chaire de Recherche du Canada Centre de Neuroscience de la Cognition (CNC) Universite du Quebec a Montreal Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3P8 tel: 1-514-987-3000 2461# fax: 1-514-987-8952 harnad@uqam.ca http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/

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