The six current "(refereed)-literature-liberation" strategies (are there any others?) are compared in Ariadne's "Minotaur" section:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/ Comments are welcome in this Forum. Here is an excerpt, part of which has appeared here before: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Currently there are six candidate strategies for freeing the refereed research literature: 1. AUTHORS PAYING JOURNAL PUBLISHERS FOR PUBLISHER-SUPPLIED ONLINE-OFFPRINTS, FREE FOR ALL READERS [12] is a good solution where it is available, and where the author can afford to pay for it, but (i) most journals don't offer it, (ii) there will always be authors who cannot afford to pay for it, and (iii) authors self-archiving their own eprints accomplishes the same outcome, immediately, for everyone, at no expense to authors. Electronic offprints for-fee require authors to pay for something that they can already do for-free, now (as the authors of 150,000 physics papers have already done [13]). 2. BOYCOTTING JOURNALS THAT DO NOT AGREE TO GIVE AWAY THEIR CONTENTS ONLINE FOR FREE [19] requires authors to give up their established journals of choice and to switch to unestablished journals (if they exist), not on the basis of their quality or impact, but on the basis of their give-away policy. But if authors simply self-archive their papers, they can keep publishing in their established journals of choice yet still ensure free online access for all readers. 3. LIBRARY CONSORTIAL SUPPORT (e.g. SPARC [11]) FOR LOWER-PRICED JOURNALS may lower some of the access barriers, but it will not eliminate them (instead merely entrenching unnecessary fee-based access blockages still more deeply). 4. DELAYED JOURNAL GIVE-AWAYS -- 6-TO-12+ MONTHS AFTER PUBLICATION [14] -- amount to too little, too late, and further entrench the unjustifiable blockage of access to new research until it is not new (Harnad 2001a) [21]. 5. GIVING UP ESTABLISHED JOURNALS AND PEER REVIEW ALTOGETHER, IN FAVOUR OF SELF-ARCHIVED PREPRINTS AND POST-HOC, AD-LIB COMMENTARY (e.g. [15]) would put both the quality standards and the navigability of research at risk (Harnad 1998/2000) [22]. 6. SELF-ARCHIVING ALL PREPRINTS AND POSTPRINTS can be done immediately and will free the refereed literature overnight. The only things holding authors back are (groundless and easily answered) worries about peer review and copyright [16]. ------------------------------------------------------------------- See http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/ for full text -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): 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
