Sterling Stoudenmire, August 11, 1999

The article of Michael Jacobsom, MD, , Journal Club on the Web, 6.11.99 quote follows with which i take issue:

"As long as the leading medical publishers can dole out career advancement by rewarding authors with publication, they will be able to do so on their own terms and can continue to demand ownership of intellectual property rights. Just as the author of a detective novel will sell her copyright to a publishing house in return for distribution and financial reward, the author of a scientific paper will sell her copyright to the journal, in return for distribution and career advancement. "

Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, August 10, 1999

On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Michael Jacobson wrote:

> Dear Dr. Harnad,
>
> I have been following the discussion on E-biomed with much interest. I
> contributed a comment to the site, which was posted in June.
>
> You have replied in detail to many comments that address your views, but > have not responded to mine. I would be most interested to have your > thoughts on my posting, which is at:
>
>
http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/com0613.htm#jacob158
>
> Michael Jacobson, MD, MPH, FACP
> http://www.journalclub.org/

My apologies to Dr. Jacobson for failing to respond to his apt and thoughtful commentary. There have been so many comments and responses that I missed that one in the first round. I hope the following response will make amends.

Before moving to quote/comment mode, let me only say that I largely agree with Dr. Jacobson's analysis. But there are a few seemingly minor points on which, once the binary flag is re-set, the overall picture looks quite different.

Let me hasten to add, though, that the setting of these binary flags is a matter of probability, not certainty, and it involves an element of trying to second-guess human nature, which is always risky.

I accordingly stand by my own scenario insofar as what is optimal and inevitable is concerned. (I don't think Dr. Jacobson contests the optimality, but perhaps he thinks the inevitability is a longer way off than others of us hope!) Also not contestable, I think, is what is within authors' reach now, practically speaking; whether or not they actually reach for it is of course another question. For my own part, I shall continue to sing the virtues of self-archiving (and to help provide the facilities for it). The rest is all about what, once horses have been led to water, will lead them to drink...

> Dr. Harnad's basic premise is that although biomedical journals are
> well-suited to perform peer-review, they no longer have the legitimacy
> to usurp article authors' right to distribute their work.

I would not have put it quite that way (words like "legitimacy" and "usurp" are fighting words), but Dr. Jacobson has the facts right: I would have said it this:

"Biomedical journals continue to perform an essential service to biomedical science in implementing peer review (quality-control and certification, QC/C), but they are no longer the optimal distributors of the refereed research reports; and if they were to attempt to prevent optimal distribution via public self-archiving, then they would in fact be acting contrary to the interests of biomedical science and scientists."

I would add only that this is a new and unprecedented state of affairs, arising from the revolutionary possibilities opened up by global digital networking, and that it must be looked at afresh, rather than by simply trying to force it into the Procrustean paradigm of a bygone Papyrocentric era.

> The reason authors ceded copyright protection for their work to journal
> publishers in the first place was because they had no other way to
> distribute their research results. According to Harnad, scientific
> authors were forced to strike a Faustian bargain.

This is correct, but it omits two essential points. One is that this literature (the refereed journal literature) is and always has been a GIVE-AWAY literature from the author's point of view; this makes it profoundly unlike any other literature.

The second point is that there is still an essential service that the publisher provides (apart from the now redundant distribution function) and that is QC/C. So no matter how much the author may wish to give away his refereed research reports via self-archiving, a way must be found to continue to fund the QC/C, otherwise there will be no REFEREED research reports to give away!

So the the Faustian (copyright) Bargain certainly has to be resolved in science's favour -- scientists MUST be allowed to give away their research reports -- but QC/C costs must be covered too. (Fortunately, that is easily done, out of institutional Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View [S/L/P] savings.)

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html

> Now, with the widespread availability of the Internet and the ease with
> which one can distribute intellectual content online, authors can
> distribute their work worldwide, without needing to use the mechanism
> of paper-based journals, and should thus no longer be forced to give up
> their property rights.

Not quite correct, for the QC/C, which is still a "mechanism of paper-based journals" must still be performed, and its costs must still be covered. Those costs, however, can eventually be covered up-front, out of a portion of the institutional S/L/P savings, once the distribution mechanism of paper-based (and online) journals becomes redundant in the face of the free, auto-archived (refereed) journal literature.

What is immediately true is that the author no longer needs to cede his give-away rights in exchange for QC/C-cum-distribution. The two are now dissociable, the dissociation IS the resolution of the Faustian Bargain, it is greatly to the benefit of science, and it saves everyone money -- except, alas, publishers, who will have to downsize into the new niche of being the QC/C provider only.

Having to downsize is always regrettable, but if one's former enlarged service is no longer necessary, and it is to everyone else's benefit that one scale down and phase it out, one must do so. I am sure that journal publishers will not try to hold give-away research reports hostage to S/L/P access barriers merely to protect their own revenue streams, now that it is clear that this would be contrary to the interests science and scientists.

The reader will find it instructive to weigh the rationales that Dr. Jacobson mentions below (not on his own account, but as rationales likely to be invoked by journal publishers in defense of holding the literature hostage to S/L/P tolls) in terms of their SUBSTANCE: Is there any SUBSTANTIVE advantage to SCIENCE inherent in these rationales? Or are they merely rationalizations for preserving the status quo at any cost, irrespective of what is optimal for biomedical science and scientists, and even when it is no longer either necessary or justifiable.

> Of course, according to Harnad, journal imprimatur will still be needed
> and useful for vetting the quality of work. But authors should be free
> to publish online copies of their work before it is accepted by
> journals ("preprints") and after it has been accepted ("reprints").
> This online publishing by authors is what Harnad calls
> "auto-archiving", and already is the standard in the world of physics.
> Why should biomedical journals allow this to happen? Because they have
> lost their power over authors, since researchers are no longer
> dependent on journals to distribute their work.

Almost exactly correct, as stated (and although I think I coined both terms, and although I use "self-archiving" more often than "auto-archiving" because it is more self-explanatory, "auto-archiving" is the better descriptor, because it captures the "self" as well as the "automated" and "autonomous" aspects of the initiative).

But journal "vetting" (QC/C) is still essential, otherwise the only thing authors have to auto-archive is unrefereed preprints (and although technically the latter counts as "publishing" too, I think we do better to call it "vanity press," reserving the term "publishing" for the auto-archiving of the refereed reprints that have been accepted and certified by a journal).

Nor have biomedical journals lost their "power" over authors: on the contrary; it is no doubt this perceived/presumed power that is holding biomedical authors back from drinking from the waters of auto-archiving for the moment!

My argument is that there would be no ethical justification for journal publishers' trying to use journal submission policy or restrictive copyright agreements to prevent auto-archiving in the PostGutenberg era; this would simply be contrary to the interests of biomedical research and researchers in every respect. No benefit whatsoever to science would come from it.

Nor would it be practically enforceable (because there is an arbitrary, continuous, and slippery slope from a raw draft, mailed or emailed to a few fellow researchers through a bigger and bigger email list and eventually a web URL given to more and more researchers; and the same is true for successive revisions of the draft [in response to informal peer feedback as well as to formal peer review] all the way done to the auto-archived final refereed draft -- this is, by the way, virtually a recapitulation of the actual ontogeny of the LANL archive, the mother and model of all archives!).

So the only "power" here is a psychological one. But psychological powers have the disadvantage that they can be openly challenged. Let us now do so, examining what SUBSTANTIVE justification there might be to any efforts to deter research authors from doing the optimal and inevitable (and obvious) with their give-away research reports.

> The problem with this analysis is that it attributes the strangle-hold
> of publishers over authors solely to the ability of publishers to
> distribute scientific work. In fact, the reason scientific authors
> desire publication in the most prestigious journals is the same
> motivation that drives authors in other fields of endeavor: recognition
> and career advancement, or just plain fame and fortune. Obtaining the
> widest possible audience for their work is part of this, is both a
> prerequisite for and a consequence of recognition, but is not the
> entire goal in itself; the goal is also recognition and career. Much
> as I would like to believe that researchers want only "to reach the
> eyes and minds of their fellow-researchers with the reports of their
> research findings", I fear that the motivations of most of them are
> somewhat more complex.

They are indeed. But those further fame/fortune goals are perfectly compatible with auto-archiving; indeed, auto-archiving can only ENHANCE the impact of their work (on eyes, minds, and thereby citations, further research, fame, and fortune).

What is REALLY at issue here (attention reader!) is the role of the journal BRAND-NAME in all this. But of course the brand-name is the second "C" in QC/C! Research quality is first evaluated and then raised to the journal's acceptance threshold (if that is possible) via peer review, revision, and if necessary re-refereeing, etc., and then the accepted final draft is certified with the journal's brand name, attesting to the quality level it has attained.

The value of this QC/C service is uncontested. But what is there about it -- logically, practically, ethically -- that implies that it can only be had at the cost of denying the author's right to auto-archive?

A journal's patina, after all, its quality, its impact factor, etc., are all a consequence of its QC/C. And that QC/C must continue to be implemented and paid for, if all the fame/fortune benefits are to continue to be had. But in what respect does the quality, QC/C and fame/fortune vouchsafed by a journal depend on blocking access to what would otherwise be a give-away literature? This is the question to which authors should be seeking an answer from journal publishers. (And no substantive answer will be forthcoming, because there isn't one.)

The only reply possible is that that is how we have done it so far, it works, it brings revenue, and everyone is happy. But one might have said the same of horse-drawn carriages and steam engines: We can now have a lot more (in fact, infinitely more, in terms of the Net's potential spatial and temporal reach), for a lot less.

Nor is the right reply that the journals will soon all be available online too. For "available" does not mean free for all, hence it does not mean available to all. Proprietary online journal archives will still be behind the financial firewalls of S/L/P, and THOSE are precisely the access barriers that are at issue and at stake here, for this peculiar literature, which, one must never tire to repeat, is and always has been a GIVE-AWAY literature from the author's point of view.

We are talking about access (and access-denial) to the research reports of scientists who have no interest in fees or royalties or their accompanying access-barriers; their interest is (to repeat) solely in maximizing the impact of their ideas and findings on the eyes and minds of their fellow researchers, present and future (and of course the RESULTANT effects of that on their own fames and fortunes) -- once they have successfully passed through the dynamic filter of QC/C (peer review).

Dissociating QC/C from distribution does not mean LOSING the magical effects of the brand name; it just means calling a spade a spade!

Let us not accept, as an excuse for preserving the status quo, a mystification of the fame/fortune effects of a journal's imprimatur. Holding the journal literature hostage to S/L/P tolls plays NO essential causal role in these fame/fortune effects. [It plays only one incidental causal role in fortunes (and whose fortunes those are is left as an exercise to the reader), but that role is no longer essential, indeed it now stands squarely contrary to the best interests of science and scientists.

The virtue of auto-archiving is precisely that it is "subversive": It allows the author to have his cake and eat it too: He can continue to submit his give-away paper for QC/C to the refereed journal of his choice, but concurrently he can also give it away publicly through auto-archiving -- right up to and including the refereed final draft.

As long as S/L/P revenues cover the costs, this is a stable situation, but once user preference for the free, auto-archive literature erodes S/L/P revenue streams, dissociation from distribution and downsizing to QC/C alone will have to take place, and up-front revenues to cover QC/C costs will be fully recoverable from institutional S/L/P savings.

The system will accordingly have been subverted precisely in the direction of what is optimal and inevitable for science (and not just for physics, but for all of science, which does not differ one bit from discipline to discipline in this respect, apart from what happen to be the sizes of the current revenue streams of their respective journals).

http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

> As long as the leading medical publishers can dole out career
> advancement by rewarding authors with publication, they will be able to
> do so on their own terms and can continue to demand ownership of
> intellectual property rights.

They are doling out career advancement by implementing QC/C, and those papers that succeed in meeting their quality standards are the ones that are rewarded. This service is essential, and it is essential that the true costs of implementing it continue to be paid. It is NOT, however, essential that they continue to be paid by restricting auto-archiving rights; nor is it essential that they continue to be held hostage to further inessential costs (distribution) recoverable only by sustaining S/L/P barriers.

Here is an interesting question: Will the scientific community continue to comply with demands to transfer all intellectual property rights for this special give-away literature even as it becomes transparent that there is no real basis for demanding compliance other than the preservation of the status quo against what is optimal for science? And all that, with nothing more to prop it up than a known and trusted BRAND-NAME (and one whose quality standards are guaranteed by OURSELVES -- for we, the research community, are not only the authors and the readers, but also the referees [who contribute our services for free] and the editors [although we may sometimes forget that])?

Once it becomes clear that QC/C is a dissociable module, could it be that, as the increasingly tenuous copyright glue strains against the optimal and the inevitable, the QC/C module might actually dissociate, and break free, in the interests of at last freeing this give-away research literature for once and for all, for one and all?

> Just as the author of a detective novel
> will sell her copyright to a publishing house in return for
> distribution and financial reward, the author of a scientific paper
> will sell her copyright to the journal, in return for distribution and
> career advancement.

I think this misses the profound difference between the for-fee and the for-free literature.

Let us see what happens in the auto-archiving era; for even in the PostGutenberg era the detective novelist neither has nor WANTS any further options, whereas the give-away scientist always wanted and now at last has an option that allows him to give his research reports away; and the true causal underpinnings of this new option can only become clearer with time and open discussions like this, not murkier than they are now.

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html

For the record, though, detective authors do indeed SELL their texts, whereas scientists have always GIVEN THEM away. The "Faustian" analogy is to the soul, not the sale: Faust signs away his soul in exchange for immediate earthly rewards. In the age of auto-archiving, it will become increasingly apparent that there is no longer any need for scientists to pay this price...

> The ability to self-publish and self-distribute, or auto-archive, on
> the Internet in no way lessens the ability of biomedical publishers to
> influence the careers of researchers, and thus does very little to
> lessen their overall power over scientists.

Indeed it does not; and my concern is only to ensure that biomedical publishers make no attempt to CURTAIL that ability with respect to researchers work!

The journal brand names, certifying the quality standards that have been met by a research report, will continue to exist and to bring their rewards. But the give-away research report itself will be publicly auto-archived, free at last to have its full impact on one and all, without restraint from S/L/P.

> Why has the power of publishers apparently not succeeded in resisting
> the power of the Internet in the field of physics? Although I am not
> intimately familiar with the situation in physics, I would assume that
> the amount of money at stake for publishers of physics papers and their
> power over career advancement are not sufficient to win the battle.

I don't doubt the difference in the amount of S/L/P revenue at stake, but I would strongly doubt that salaries, promotion, tenure, grants, impact and awards are determined one bit less by the brand-name of the journals in physics than they are in any other discipline.

So is the difference in S/L/P revenues alone going to be the decisive factor in whether or not the rest of science is to be denied access to the optimal?

> In medicine, vast sums of money are at stake: the health care sector
> comprises some 15% of our economy.

Please! What proportion of that 15% is journal S/L/P? Let's keep things in proportion here and not mix apples and oranges...

> Pharmaceutical companies have fortunes to spend on advertising, which
> goes straight into the pockets of journal publishers.

Maybe they will succeed in obtruding those ads into some online archives (as others have on the Web), although one rather hopes not. But in any case, that is neither here nor there: Are lost ad revenues then a substantive reason for continuing to hold give-away research reports hostage?

> And the careers of researchers rise and fall on their publication in
> the most prestigious journals.

This point has already been answered. The journal quality/prestige hierarchy can and will remain intact, irrespective of whether QC/C and distribution costs are coupled or decoupled, and irrespective of whether they are recovered through reader-institution end S/L/P or through author-institution end publication costs paid out of institutional S/L/P savings.

So, please, let us not conflate either the dissociability or the cost-recovery model with the prestige value of the journal brand-name.

> Furthermore, many of the most prominent researchers are [a] on the
> editorial boards of journals and [b] have a vested interest in the
> continuation of this system.

It is certainly true that [a], but there are good reasons to doubt [b], for, when fully informed about the causal contingencies and noncontingencies, those board members are still OURSELVES, and it is unlikely that they will forget that their primary allegiance is to biomedical science and not to biomedical journal revenue streams.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html

> Thus, unless the "unpublished researchers of the world unite", and
> overthrow the industrial-editorial complex (a rather unlikely
> scenario)

The auto-archiving initiative is not analogous to a communist or anarchist revolution by any stretch of the imagination. And I strongly doubt that there is an "editorial complex" dedicated to opposing what is so obviously best for science. In any case, apart from the question of whether auto-archiving rights are contested or uncontested by journals, auto-archiving can follow its own subversive agenda without any further ado. Nothing needs to be overthrown; the public reports of scientific research need merely be given away, as they were always meant to be.

> the current status will not change greatly, at least as far
> as intellectual property rights are concerned. The New England Journal of Medicine
> will be able to enforce its Ingelfinger rule, if it so
> chooses, and will be able to interpret and enforce its requirements on
> authors.

Let us see whether it will be as easy to do so when the true underlying causal contingencies and options are relentlessly unmasked for one and all. One cannot second-guess the biomedical cavalry when it comes to water and drinking, but one can at least assure that they clearly SEE the water.

As to whether Ingelfinger should continue to rule, see:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0019.html

> Of course, journals are adapting to online publication and will
> continue to do so. They will surely collaborate with the NIH in order
> to allow more widespread distribution of their content, perhaps at
> reduced cost. But this will occur in a negotiated fashion, and is not
> likely to entail eliminating the toll-gate system that Harnad so
> deplores. The NIH would be well advised to consider the copyright
> system currently in place and its evolution (or lack thereof) in its
> laudable plans to make biomedical information more accessible to all.

NIH is not interested in merely becoming an online S/L/P provider for journals with E-biomed, nor should it be. The journals' proprietary online archives can do that perfectly well for themselves, and for NIH to collaborate, even for the sake of reducing S/L/P costs, would be self-defeating, for it would be to let the Trojan Horse of S/L/P itself inside the gates of a public archive that is meant to be free for one and all. In fact, at this point, there is no contingency whatsoever between NIH's E-biomed and the journals (and implying that there was or would be one was highly premature, as I indicated in my initial critique of the first draft of the E-biomed proposal). E-biomed is to be a free, public, auto-archive, just like LANL. Official journal overlays would only come at a later stage, following rather than preceding the success of E-biomed along the lines of the success of LANL.

http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45

In other words, E-biomed is not eliminating the S/L/P toll-gate system; it is merely offering authors a reliable, credible means of bypassing it, so they can give their unrefereed preprints and refereed reprints away for free for all, just as they had always wished to do, to the eternal benefit of biomedical science and hence all mankind.

Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/

Laura DeFrancesco, Ph.D., Managing Editor, Bioresearch On Line, August 10, 1999

The latest version of the e-biosci (formerly e-biomed) proposal published in Science (August 6) addresses the concerns of the journals and does little to address the needs of scientists.

I thought this was about researchers gaining access to information in a timely fashion. Instead, researchers will still be held hostage by editorial boards who get to decide what papers to post, they will see the papers no sooner, (in fact later for some of the journals), and they certainly won't be getting it for free.

This appears to be little more than a capitulation to the journals and societies that run them.

Laura DeFrancesco, Ph.D.
Managing Editor
Bioresearch On Line
http://bioresearchonline.com

Bruce Macdonald, August 10, 1999

Thank you for the efforts toward improving rapid access to medical information through on-line publishing, and for requesting comments.

As a person with Wegener's granulomatosis, I was frustrated for a year knowing there had to be journal articles, but was unable to find them on line. Finally I discovered Medline and was able to obtain some 51 articles through a friendly medical librarian which were of great value to me.

It is vital to PATIENTS seeking medical information that they be able to tell peer-reviewed articles from author self-archived articles that are not peer-reviewed articles. As patients are usually untrained medically, we cannot judge the truth of an article but have to rely on clear indications of which are accepted peer-reviewed articles and those which are not.

This is NOT to discourage self-archiving of unreviewed articles, but only to plead that there be an obvious way to distinguish peer-reviewed articles from non-peer-reviewed.

In this connection, what I've read of Dr. Harnad's comments on this subject convinces me that he has proposed a system that could work well for medical professionals, and patients alike. There is great value to having self-archived non-peer-reviewed articles, so long as it is obvious to the user these are not yet peer-reviewed.

Please don't give short shrift to patients looking for information. We can be a desperate lot, and the barriers to medical information are fairly daunting especially if one doesn't have ready access to a medical library.

Thanks for your attention.
Bruce Macdonald
Spring Lake, Michigan

Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, August 9, 1999

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Arthur Smith (American Physical Society) wrote:

> If self-archiving succeeds as Harnad promotes, it is clear that
> journals will have to change, and will be expected to.
> They, and the editors who represent them, have every right to know > what to expect, and to have a say in how their journals respond.

Journals and their editors certainly have every right to know what to expect (insofar as anyone can know for sure), and it is to be hoped that heads will be put together to make rational plans for how to respond if/when the effects of freeing the literature through self-archiving should have their likely effect on S/L/P demand. This Forum (among others) has strongly recommended concerted advance planning for this eventuality.

But meanwhile the self-archiving initiative should certainly not wait.

There is no reason whatsoever why AUTHORS should sit back and wait to self-archive until journals and their editors first see fit to plan a transition scenario in case self-archiving should one day cause S/L/P revenues to decline -- for in that case the wait could prove to be a long one indeed! LANL authors did not wait; it is time now for other authors in all the other disciplines to follow suit. The creation of further self-archiving facilities modeled on LANL, such as CogPrints, E-biomed, and Scholar's Forum should facilitate this.

There is at present only one contingency between author self-archiving and journal plans and policies, however, and that concerns copyright, in particular, the author's right to self-archive. Now that LANL has shown the way, not only is there no longer any justification at all for continuing to hold authors' refereed papers hostage to S/L/P access tolls, but there is no justification for holding them hostage to journals' failure to make contingency plans either.

The handwriting is on the wall (or in the sky, as it were): Self-archiving, is within reach of all, and it works, to the benefit of all, as LANL has resoundingly demonstrated. If authors see this and fail to take advantage of it -- if they are led to the water yet fail to drink -- that will be their own fault, and nolo contendere.

But if they are deterred from doing it by journal policies that attempt to forbid it, then I am afraid there may be unstable times ahead; for such restrictive copyright policies are no longer either ethically justifiable, technically enforceable, nor even logically coherent (for there is a slippery slope from the author's raw, unrefereed first draft, circulated [to how many people?] informally in paper before submission to the journal, to the public archiving of that draft, to the public archiving of successive revised drafts, all the way up to the final, accepted, refereed draft: where is there an ethically justifiable, technically enforceable, logically coherent boundary line along this give-away continuum?).

So if "how their journals respond" refers to how they respond to S/L/P decline as a result of self-archiving, by all means journals should be as informed and proactive as possible; but if it refers to how they respond to the THREAT posed by self-archiving -- i.e., what they can do to prevent it -- then I am afraid this would only escalate the conflict of interest rather than resolve it.

> Many have responded by not accepting papers that have
> previously appeared on preprint servers, and/or by holding authors to
> egregious copyright agreements that preclude subsequent self-archiving.

Yes, and fortunately Arthur Smith's Editor in Chief and many others have come out strongly against this self-serving policy, which is so contrary to the interests of research and researchers.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html

> How do you get self-archiving started if nobody in a field does it,
> and the journals are already online and accessible from most institutions
> with researchers who might care?

Partly by creating reliable public self-archiving facilities modeled on LANL (such as CogPrints, E-Biomed, Scholar's Forum)

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm
http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/

and partly by tirelessly preaching to the auctorial thoroughbreds the benefits of partaking of these waters.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.learned.serials.html

> I have some experience dealing with major scientific societies in > the U.S. and I can tell you that very few of them are comfortable with > the projected revenue loss they see coming from your predictions.

No doubt. But are they more comfortable with trying to hold the journal literature hostage from the optimal and inevitable?

> We who do not agree are definitely in the minority. In the U.S.
> it is the physical society, the astronomical society, and with perhaps
> some equivocation the mathematics society on one side, and everybody
> else pretty much on the other.

Patience. Physicists and mathematicians may be smarter, but eventually the rest of us will catch up too.

> The British Medical Journal, which is partly sponsoring its own
> author self-archive, is the only bio-medical publisher I have seen
> that strongly advocates it.

There is no reason for publishers to ADVOCATE self-archiving; they need only refrain from trying to PREVENT it.

http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/comment.htm

> And I have a hard time believing that Stevan's current arguments will
> win more than a handful of converts from the opposition, given their
> current entrenched positions.

That may be true, but I am not primarily preaching to publishers here, but to authors: They are the "self" in the self-archiving initiative.

> LANL has grown at a pretty much linear
> rate, handling probably 25,000 new submissions this year, 20,000 last
> year, 15,000 the year before, etc. Projecting this linear growth
> forward it will take another 10 or so years to capture all articles
> published in pure physics (currently something like 1/3 of papers we
> receive also appear on the archive), roughly 50 years to capture
> both pure and applied physics, and at least 200 years to capture most
> of scientific publishing. A lot can happen in 10 years, let alone 200.

All true. Let us hope that once E-biomed is on-line the pace will quicken. A lot can happen in 10 months too, when it comes to self-archiving.

> Anyway, the point is there is absolutely no guarantee that self-archiving
> will prevail among authors, and there are good reasons to think existing
> journal publishers and their editors will work against it.

There certainly is no guarantee that self-archiving will prevail, but there are strong reasons to believe it would be optimal for research and researchers. Let us hope that if publishers work against it, it will only be by trying to offer something even better, rather than by trying to forbid it.

As to editors: the editors are US (just as the authors, referees and readers are us); let us only hope they/we do not forget it:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0019.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0021.html

> recent discussion has revolved around differences between
> physicists and mathematicians and even between subfields of
> mathematics - not that any of the arguments in opposition hold much
> water, but they are there, and they are acting to prevent author
> self-archiving from taking hold in that community.

Let us hope that arguments that don't hold much water don't keep us from the water for much longer...

> Journals and their editors need to support this, or it will
> not happen. The time is past for being subversive.

I don't see this at all! On the contrary, the time is very much now.

Subverting a system means taking matters in one's own hands in order to bring about an alternative. I cannot legally archive YOUR articles, nor you mine, in order to bring us both to the optimal and the inevitable; but each of us self-archiving our own small portion of this give-away literature can -- and could do so almost overnight.

http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/