Congratulations on this splendid and informative interview of Peter Suber in Michigan Virtual University's "The Technology Source."
> <http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1025>The Free Online > Scholarship Movement: An Interview with Peter Suber The interview contains only one very minor but rather important error: > ...Physicists are way ahead of everyone else. There is free online access > to nearly 100% of physics papers today, at least as preprints... It is true that physicists are way ahead of everyone else, that they were the first to self-archive, that self-archiving in physics has been growing steadily for over a decade, and that in some SUB-fields of physics (e.g. high energy physics), free access is virtually 100%. Unfortunately, however, self-archiving in physics as a whole is not yet near 100%, and will not be for nearly another decade at its present linear growth rate, which has been rock-steady for over a decade now: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Tim/sld002.htm It is precisely for this reason that many in the open-access movement have put their energy and efforts behind distributed institution-based self-archiving rather than waiting for centralized, discipline-based self-archiving to accelerate and generalize to the rest of the disciplines. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Tim/sld004.htm The discipline does not look like the right entity to join the author in universalizing self-archiving at long last: The right entity, the one sharing the same interests in and benefits from maximizing its researchers' impact is the researcher's institution. See: http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/submissions/ http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html http://tardis.eprints.org/ Harnad, S. (2001) "Research access, impact and assessment." Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
