On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, George Lundberg wrote: > if the "function of self-archiving" is so easily misunderstood by me, > perhaps some others will also misunderstand and believe that what they are > reading purports to be valid, even if self-published--excuse > me--self-archived.
Yes, prima facie misunderstanding is rife in this general area. And I'm certainly trying to do my bit toward dispelling it. But dozens of published papers, many many talks, and countless email comments have not yet proved to be a match for the very same questions that keep getting raised, and answered, only to be raised again, elsewhere, by someone else. One might be tempted to conclude that the answers are inconclusive, but usually they are so trivial that the only explanation is that this general area is so novel (though trivial), and goes so much against established habits, that people simply make the same unreflective, reflexive responses over and over again: The token not only fails to drop, it even fails to be noticed! This self-archiving vs. self-publication misunderstanding is a case in point. It has come up so many times that it has earned a FAQ of its own (in fact several) -- but that has not prevented it from continuing to rear its head on every occasion: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8 The short, explicit mnemonic I have proposed (below) has not helped to pre-empt the misunderstanding either, even though using it should make it crystal clear that the conflation is self-contradictory: "Distinguish self-publishing (vanity press) from self-archiving (of published, refereed research)" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 Would the still shorter "Self-Archiving of Published (Refereed) Research" help keep the distinction clearer? > I am not alone in the view that widespread electronic > distribution of information by whomever is, in fact, a form of publishing. Yes, but that is utterly irrelevant, since the main focus here is the widespread electronic distribution (by self-archiving) of PUBLISHED information. The rest is just a matter of tagging it as such. Yes, there is also self-archiving of unpublished, or prepublication information, and that is valuable and welcome too (being another, earlier embryonic stage of research reporting), but that is not the focus of this Forum, which, to repeat, is about the freeing of the refereed, published research literature online, not about the archiving of the "gray" literature. > I suppose due process for the reader of such material might consist of large > red labelled flashing warnings as a legal disclaimer about the absence of > any form of validation of the content so as not to mislead or misrepresent? I have to confess that I do not understand the motivation for this well-meaning but rather strident concern about the capacity of the reader to see (or heed) whether an item is labelled "REFEREED" (plus journal-name) or otherwise. We seem to be perfectly capable of making that distinction in the analog world. Why the alarm about whether we can use the same labels in the digital world? But fine: Let those who feel that such tags need to flash flamboyantly implement them so to flash... -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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