On Sun, 9 Jul 2000, Christopher D. Green wrote: >sh> Please note that you are now asking about embargo POLICY, not copyright >sh> LAW, and embargo policy has no legal status. It is merely a practice >sh> that a journal may or may not adopt, and may or may not follow (such as >sh> not accepting articles in Spanish or on Experimental Oenology). > > This is a fine distinction in principle, but in practice it makes no > difference for people who must attempt to publish in American > Psychological Assocaition journals in order to advance (or even > maintain) their academic careers now. The simple fact (whether legal, > political, or even crassly careerist) is that scientific psychologists > will not be self-archiving in droves until the problem is resolved.
Don't be so pessimistic! The problem IS solved, insofar as legality is concerned. Moreover, the APA embargo policy is not even enforceable. So it is now all just about PERCEIVED (but unreal) risk: I know Physicists are somewhat brighter than us Psychologists, but not THAT much brighter. We will catch on soon, especially with the help of interoperable Open Archives, as they sprout at the universities and begin to fill with distributed content. The universities will be allies too, with their embattled periodicals budgets. But the biggest ally will be the palpably growing impact of those who ARE sensible enough to take this small step: We are developing citation-analytic and other informetric/webmetric tools to measure, estimate and predict the enhanced impact gained by freely accessible refereed papers compared to "controls" kept behind the financial firewall: http://opcit.eprints.org See also: http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/elib04.html http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~cssrccc2/papers/ > Despite your apparent optimism about the matter, I have seen no > indication that APA will "see the light" given the extraordinary degree > of control they currently have. As you know better than most, they have > been relatively resistant to even acknowledging the importance of > electronic media. Just a bit more patience (and a bit more boldness)... > Question: Do you know what the current policies are among the few, > major non-APA scientific psychology journals? e.g., American Journal of > Psychology (U. Illinois), Psychological Science (APS), Cognitive > Science (Ablex), and Cognition (Elsevier) come immediately to mind. > There must be others as well. No I don't, but as you know, I am not a supporter of the "switch" strategy, not even among established journals, to favor the ones that allow self-archiving (although it is again a strategy I wish well). The strategy I advocate is the legal but subversive one of BOTH sticking to one's established journal of choice AND self-archiving. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] 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
