Friends: Stevan Harnad has won an award for the best poem in English in a competition (for poems on science and technology) held at the recently held Euroscience Oen Forum, Munich. Here is the poem. Publish or Perish As Science is mere structured common sense (http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAA38.htm), her means but trial-and-error made intense, the only virtue setting her apart, and raising her above (some think) mere Art, Is her convergence ever on consensus: collective, self-corrective her defenses. A flagellant, she boldly does defy Reality her schemes to falsify. And yet this noble jousting were in vain, and all this pain would yield no grain of gain if Science were content, a shrinking violet, her works from all the world 'ere to keep private. Instead, performance public and artistic, restraining all propensities autistic, perhaps less out of error-making dread, than banal need to earn her daily bread. For showbiz being what it is today, work's not enough, you've got to make it pay. What ratings, sweeps and polls count for our actors, no less than our elected benefactors, for Science the commensurate equation is not just publication but citation. The more your work is accessed, read and used, the higher then is reckoned its just dues. Sounds crass, but there may be some consolation, where there's still some residual motivation to make a difference, not just make a fee (http://openaccess.eprints.org/): the World Wide Web at last can make Science free. Stevan donated the 300 Euro he won to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access in the US so that, in his words "in a small way Euroscience (thanks to the Andrea von Braun Foundation) can lend a hand to promoting the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in the United States. Subbiah Arunachalam Friends: Stevan Harnad has won an award for the best poem in English in a competition (for poems on science and technology) held at the recently held Euroscience Oen Forum, Munich. Here is the poem. Publish or Perish As Science is mere structured common sense ( http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAA38.htm http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAA38.htm ), her means but trial-and-error made intense, the only virtue setting her apart, and raising her above (some think) mere Art, Is her convergence ever on consensus: collective, self-corrective her defenses. A flagellant, she boldly does defy Reality her schemes to falsify. And yet this noble jousting were in vain, and all this pain would yield no grain of gain if Science were content, a shrinking violet, her works from all the world 'ere to keep private. Instead, performance public and artistic, restraining all propensities autistic, perhaps less out of error-making dread, than banal need to earn her daily bread. For showbiz being what it is today, work's not enough, you've got to make it pay. What ratings, sweeps and polls count for our actors, no less than our elected benefactors, for Science the commensurate equation is not just publication but citation. The more your work is accessed, read and used, the higher then is reckoned its just dues. Sounds crass, but there may be some consolation, where there's still some residual motivation to make a difference, not just make a fee ( http://openaccess.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/ ): the World Wide Web at last can make Science free. Stevan donated the 300 Euro he won to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access in the US so that, in his words "in a small way Euroscience (thanks to the Andrea von Braun Foundation) can lend a hand to promoting the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in the United States. Subbiah Arunachalam