It would be very helpful if those of you who have access to the data could reply to the following 3 questions:
(1) How many refereed journals does your library subscribe to? (By "subscribe," I mean either Subscription (S) or License (L), on-paper or on-line, or both.) (2) What proportion is that, of the total number of refereed journals that are published (anywhere) that could conceivably be relevant to the researchers (in all fields) at your institution? (3) If we now add in your total potential annual budget for Pay-Per-View (P), in addition to the prior annual figures for S and L: What proportion of all the published papers in all the refereed journals of potential relevance to your researchers can you afford to purchase through Pay-Per-View? The reason I have requested the S/L/P data in this rather counterintuitive form is that I think these figures will prove to be very revealing. And it is precisely these figures -- the figures for all the papers your researchers MIGHT have wanted to read, if only they could access and afford them all -- that tell the true story of what the current status quo is costing research and researchers in lost impact and access. And what freeing it all would gain them. We are all too accustomed to think in terms of the journals our institutions CAN afford to access, rather than the ones they cannot. This short-sighted reckoning might be what is holding us back -- or preventing us from seeing the urgency and advantages of -- freeing this literature immediately through self-archiving. Here is a prediction: The data will show that even the very richest institutions, with the biggest S/L/P budgets (e.g., Harvard), will only be able to afford a minority of the total relevant annual corpus. And most institutions will be able to afford much less. This means that MOST of the refereed research literature is inaccessible to MOST researchers on the planet -- which is particularly scandalous, given that ALL of that literature is a give-away FROM all those researchers, and that there is no longer any reason, hence any justification, whatsoever, for ALL of them not having access to ALL of it, for free, right now. Here's hoping that the data you provide in response to these three questions (plus the January 23 release of the Eprints 1.1 institutional archive-creating software <http://www.eprints.org>, compliant with the January 23 release of the OAI 1.0 Open Archives protocol <http://www.openarchives.org>) will at last get us all to the optimal and inevitable in 2001! -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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