On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Helene Bosc wrote: > May I suggest the abbreviated acronym FIPA instead of FIPA-TRAFTO?
The acronym for FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS ONLINE was only meant tongue-in-cheek (as I assume Helene's comment was too). > your definition of FIPA-TRAFTO is ideal but rarely observed It depends what you mean by rare. Open access articles are, I agree, still far too rare, relative to toll-access articles (only about 10% of the total yearly output of 2,500,000 refereed research articles). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif But within that 10%, most of it is 100% "FIPA-TRAFTO." This includes the approximately 2.5% that is open-access for having been published in one of the open-access journals existing today, and the approximately 7.5% that is open-access for having been self-archived by its author -- mostly before the published version appears (first as a "preprint," then as a "postprint"): http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-self-archive > the more common OAI documents presently observed in archives [are] > fulltext, tagged as refereed (including journal-name) but with a *later* > deposit date [than its publication date] Actually, I wonder what data Helene has in mind. For example, the quarter million self-archived papers in the Physics ArXiv http://www.arxiv.org are mostly deposited as preprints, long before publication. The same is true for the computer-sciences tech-reports harvested by http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs (though those are not OAI-compliant). The legacy (retrospective) literature in CogPrints http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ and departmental archives like http://eprints.lub.lu.se/ and http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ is obviously deposited long after its publication, but its *current* literature is deposited at or before its publication date. And we are talking here about current research, not retrospective research. I think Helene might have in mind the (needlessly timid) self-archiving policies of some other institutions, recommending self-archiving after publication rather than at or before (presumably because of what they imagine to be copyright or legal constraints): (1) Clearly, these delays are moot for the 55% of journals that already support author self-archiving of the preprint, postprint or both: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif (2) Clearly journals that support self-archiving only 6 months or a year or more after publication are not supporting open-access, and this should not be described as open-access provision. The "immediate" is critical for the benefits of open access for research progress, and we should not buy into any embargo policy whatsoever. Harnad, S. (2001) AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late. Science dEbates [online] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b So, no, I would say that delayed/embargoed access is *not* open access, and should not be described as such. (That does not mean delayed access is not better than no access. But it is not open access. Just as lower-toll access is better than higher-toll access but is not open access.) Moreover, how full are the archives of those institutions whose policy is delayed depositing? One would like to see some evidence that such timid policies at least generate more archive content than the bolder ones: Do they? (My guess is no, and that that this needless delay-constraint probably deserves a place on the list of etiologies for Zeno's Paralysis: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31-worries.) 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 & 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Dual Open-Access Strategy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif