Stevan, Even if the principal advantage this has over other plans were only the support behind it, that may be sufficient for it to be the key step we have all been waiting for in this field. I think we should all rejoice that this subject area is moving at last, after the disappointment caused by the abrupt halt to Varmus' original proposal.
Although limited to biomedicine, there is nothing to stop other fields from the use of equivalents, just as there is nothing to stop other fields from adoping your arrangments. I suggest that the best thing now is to strongly encourage the immediate practical use of the plan, since it meets the basic requirements of open access and archiving. The best way to help now is not by critiquing the details. We can all argue about how to improve it later--we should not hesitate to adopt it now. The argument for this is exactly the same as that for the immediate adoption of your proposal--we need something now. On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote: > On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Peter Suber wrote: > > > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html ] > > Bethesda statement on open access publishing > > The Bethesda statement is very useful and timely, but > it would be far more valuable if > ... David Goodman Princeton University and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU [email protected]
