As I suspected, Peter and I are in almost 100% agreement. My cautionary suggestion (to prominently tag consumer-ripoff-facilitators so as to distinguish them unequivocally from producer-giveaway-facilitators) was only made in the hope of preventing misunderstandings on the part of others who, unlike Peter, have not yet given this crucial distinction enough thought.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Peter Suber wrote: > Thanks for writing. I accept the distinction between > give-away literature and non-give-away literature, and made a similar point > myself in my June 8 issue (fifth story): > > http://www.topica.com/lists/suber-fos/read/message.html?mid=1603288833&sort=d&start=0 > Let me put my position positively, not negatively. The scholarship > that should be free and online is that which its authors want to be free > and online. Since scholarly authors are not paid for journal articles > anyway, they lose nothing by making their work available for free, and they > gain readers (and impact, as you've argued). Book authors, and certainly > musicians, can hope for royalties from their work. More power to them. I > hope that authors of scholarly books will prefer wide readership and impact > to royalties (which are improbable for most anyway); but this is their > choice. Scholarship is more useful online than in print; and if online, > then free is better than priced, and affordable is better than > expensive. When authors and publishers of online scholarship choose to > limit readership in exchange for revenue, I hope they can find a way to > respect readers' fair-use, back-up, and migration rights, and I hope their > price is affordable; but so far, this combination is very rare. Note that > my list of readers' rights is limited; I don't say they have a right to > read or possess priced works without paying. By the same token, the > legitimate functions of copy protection are also limited, and I wish > publishers would back off from absolute copy protection to forms that only > protect their legitimate interests and are otherwise compatible with > readers' rights. This is complicated and controversial, but the good news > is that free online scholarship makes it all unnecessary. For works that > are fully free and online, we don't have to worry about fair use or copy > protection.