On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Jan Velterop wrote: > My suggestion: > "Journals that charge anybody for access to the online > version of research articles, or erects other access barriers > such as compulsory registration, anytime, anywhere, are not > included. (Charging only for the parallel print edition is > acceptable.)"
Jan's version is definitely better than mine. (I had forgotten about tricks like compulsory registration!) But the wording still does not quite work. We need to exclude any access-charge and any gerrymandered access but I believe (strongly) that we need not and should not exclude the following: You are a journal publisher. You commit to making the full-text contents of all your articles accessible online immediately, permanently and directly (i.e., no registration barrier, no gerrymandered ebrary-style interface or download) to all web-users, no strings attached AND (not BUT, AND) you also sell another edition, either on paper or online, for tolls, to those who can and do pay them. I see no reason (nothing to be gained) for denying such a publisher the golden "OA" label! Whereas I do see the loss of many potential OA publishers who are deterred by the fact that we declare that committing to providing permanent OA to all their contents is not enough: they must also renounce all parallel efforts to recover costs through tolls! I strongly urge that it be made clear that (ungerrymandered) OA provision to all of its articles by the journal is all that is required to make a journal an OA journal. The journal's cost-recovery model and methods are not part of the definition of either OA or OA publishing. Only OA provision is. We are trying to effect a transition here, as soon as possible. Arbitrary ideological barriers are not a practical help in this. The endstate will be what we all desire, but let us not get needlessly restrictive while the cupboard"s still bare! Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php