On my other points: On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 03:07:58PM +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote: > I have, as moderator, terminated discussion on a few irrelevant or > saturated topics (is there a conspiracy of university administrators to > control researchers' intellectual property? is the library serials > crisis simply a consequence of under-funding the libraries? how can we > reform or abandon peer review?), but comments, whether supportive or > critical, on the Forum's central theme -- "How to free the refereed > literature online, now? -- have never been suppressed.
You may see it as closing discussion of all sides of a topic, but I see some character of closing down just one side of a debate. Obviously you are referring to Al Henderson's argument that free scholarly communication is a stress response to penny-pinching by university administrations. I'll grant that he has said that many times, and I'll also grant that the argument sounds absurd to me. (I am one of the researchers supposedly bullied by the administration, and if anything my complaint is that the higher-ups are biased in favor of the historical subscription-based system.) But even though I don't agree with him at all, he is no more repetitive than you are or I am. Invoking cloture strikes me as an overreaction. > I couldn't agree with you more! But what gives you the impression that > this Forum is trying to prevent companies from doing whatever they > like? What you said originally was: The Elsevier policy of publicly archiving pre-refereeing preprints could be a good first step towards the optimal and inevitable, but it is also possible that it is intended as a Trojan Horse,... I think it's divisive to speculate that someone else's e-print archive is a Trojan Horse. It's true that I'm not sure that the CPS is compatible with Elsevier's mission of maximizing profit. But let's give it the benefit of the doubt. -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
