On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, JQ Johnson wrote: > The prohibition on preprints [in Chemistry] > was enshrined in journal policies, where the editors took very seriously > the idea that they should never accept a submission if it even smelled > of having been released to the public as a preprint. Fast forward to > 2002, and we still have Chemistry as a problem discipline for self > archiving, ETDs, and eprints.
Fortunately, editors of peer-reviewed journals are us. So if it is true that open access maximizes research visibility, accessibility, usage, citation and impact, whereas toll-access diminishes it -- and, in the online era, diminishes it needlessly -- then peer-reviewed journal editors, like researchers themselves, will come round, regardless of cultural variations in their past. Harnad, S. (2000) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing. Lancet Perspectives 256 (December Supplement): s16. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/03/index.html Cultural differences there are, and most of them have simply kept most of us unaware of the causal connection between research access and research impact, particularly because in the paper era there was nothing that could be done about it. The real costs of paper access were great, and had to be recovered through access-tolls; access-barriers were accordingly a natural and unquestioned part of the landscape. But unless the nature of the discipline-differences is such that there are disciplines that would *not* benefit from maximizing their research impact, and are *not* now deprived of potential impact by access-toll-barriers to potential users -- and I really doubt there are any such disciplines, though I'd be interested to hear -- then the the only discipline-differences are in informedness about the causal connection between access and impact, and what can be done about it, and how. (And we're working on remedying those cultural gaps!) > that disciplines do > have different cultures, and that these cultures do impact the rate of > adoption of changes in scholarly publishing. That's certainly true. But fortunately, these are academic disciplines, open to information and learning (rather than, say, military disciplines, following orders and doing things the way their predecessors did because that's just the way it's done!). They have all adapted quite extensively to the newfound possibilities opened for them by the Web in other respects; this is simply an especially big one of those new possibilities, requiring a bit more unpacking in order to see and understand, perhaps more unpacking for some disciplines than others, because of cultural differences. But the unpacking will go on, the scales will be removed, and the eyes will eventually see... Stevan Harnad