Online discussions are wonderful, and take on a creative life of their own, but a moderated Forum is moderated so that the discussion stays focused on the dedicated topic, and keeps those who are tuned in for that topic, and that topic only, involved and interested.
This Forum is dedicated to freeing the refereed journal literature online. It is not concerned with freeing music, video, software, or (importantly) e-books. Nor is it concerned with newer and better ways for authors to get income on any of the above (including their refereed journal articles). So unless there are any relevant and explicitly stated lessons to be learned -- from the napster/Gnutella-style cyber-theft of music and other products by their consumers, or from forms of micropayment for the cyber-peddling of products -- for the ostensibly opposite concerns of the give-away authors of the refereed research literature, I am afraid I must now invoke cloture on this thread. Some closing (sic) comments below. -- Stevan Harnad (Moderator) > On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Murray Turoff wrote: > > What we are really missing on the WEB is micro financial transactions. This is irrelevant to the authors of the give-away refereed-research literature, who do not seek access tolls barriers, but their removal. > The ability of the creator of a piece of information to place their own > transaction price on it. Some one that wants a copy of a given song We are not song-writers, selling our wares, but researchers, reporting our work. We seek research-impact, not paper-income. > will have a transfer made to the greater of a dime or some similar > amount. But it is a price the author sets. 80% of that money should > go to the creator and 20% to the distributor running the distribution > software which is the reverse of current pricing for music, books, etc. Our "product" is not in that "etc." list. On the contrary, there is a profound DISanalogy between our nontrade, give-away product, and that entire trade etc-list. Let the "80%" of the potential revenue from the toll-booths blocking access to my research findings (paid by the few institutions/individuals who can afford it) be forfeited completely in favour of free access. And let the minuscule "distribution costs" be borne by Open Archiving: http://www.openarchives.org http://www.eprints.org The only expense remaining to be paid for is that of the SERVICE of Quality-Control and Certification (QC/C: peer review/editing); let that be paid for out of the small portion that it actually represents of the "80% + 20%" annual savings above, by the institution of each researcher (the one whose serials budget will benefit 100% from those 100% savings). > If the industry does not make radical change and the financial > institutions continue to try to perpetuate their monopoly on financial > transactions (credit cards) all this will end up going off shore and be > run by outfits in little known countries. Perhaps true, but alas totally irrelevant to the subject matter and objectives of this Forum. > I have seen a number of Ph.D. students create CD's of out of print > classic books that they are suppose to be reading for an indepth > understanding. This is just another example of the same consequence. Are the books in the public domain? If so, anyone can archive them in the Open Archives (and at most only the one-off scanning/OCR costs need to be covered). Are the books under copyright? In that case this is theft, and if the authors are opposed to giving their works away, certainly not to be condoned or imitated here. And as a form of Vanity Press for authors peddling or giving away their own books, without QC/C, it is a welcome parallel enterprise, but not relevant to this Forum, which is concerned with the give-away, QC/C-based research literature only. > Now they are trading CD's of such items among their community. I expect > DOVER to start issuing CD's of out of print books that the copyright has > expired on to go beyond their paper library. If they don't someone > else will and replace their wonderful service. Let us hope that the "someone" who picks up on archiving expired copyright scholarly/scientific books (as opposed to trade potboilers) online will settle for getting back the costs of the scanning/OCR; otherwise, let's hope "someone else" will. That is the virtue of expired copyright in (the Open Archiving sector of) the PostGutenberg Galaxy. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@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.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org