On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Tom Abeles wrote: > Perhaps one of the issues is that the open archives concept also > exposes all of these millions of refereed articles to the public at > large. Academics might find that the "Sokal Affair" was benign compared > to a potential fire storm in a time of shrinking public support for post > secondary education.
Open access does provide access to the general public too, but neither that -- nor the library serials crisis, nor the access-problems of the developing world, nor teacher/student needs or usage -- are the primary factors that will persuade researchers to self-archive their work. For researchers the direct and decisive reason will be maximixing their own research impact. > What indeed would happen if the weight of decisions on promotion/tenure > and pay were shifted towards teaching and measures of student satisfaction > rather than peer review? Or articles that did not meet standards in > one or more publications appear vetted by another source- what then? These (in my view incorrect and irrelevant) speculations have been much discussed in the pages of the American Scientist Forum: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2523.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2340.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0479.html In brief, the question of the relative weight to give teaching and research in promotion is irrelevant to the question of open access. The importance of peer review to research quality is also not at issue: we are concerned with open access to the current (and currently inaccessible) peer-reviewed literature, such as it is, not access to some hypothetical future alternative. And competent peer-reviewers are already a scarce enough resource today so that speculations about multiple submissions and multiple publication can only come appeal from those who haven't a clear idea of what the realistic options are. (The same is true about the commendable notion that everyone should have a round-the-clock personal tutor, and physician.) > In essence, while OAI opens research for sharing, its potential to cause > restructuring within The Academy is more than idle speculation or an > intellectual exercise But speculating about it now risks delaying open access still further. The facts are enough: Open access to the peer-reviewed research literature, such as it is, is highly desirable because it increases the potential research impact of that literature. All other benefits are secondary. And nothing more is at issue than access to that literature, which is not contingent, conditional upon, or predictive of, any other speculative outcome: just open access itself. Stevan Harnad