David Goodman unfortunately misunderstands the nature and purpose of an institutional requirement to provide Open Access [OA] to publications -- publications already required by the existing institutional publish-or-perish policy. The requirement puts no contraint whatsoever on where or how research is published, only on its accessibility. David instead gets carried away by some (rather alarmist!) subjective speculations of his own, having nothing to do with what it being proposed:
On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, David Goodman wrote: > We should never ask or permit any governing body, private or official, > to impose any requirement on anyone about the manner they choose to > publish. No one has proposed anything of the sort! It continues to be 100% up to the author in what journal they publish. Authors need only provide Open Access to their publication. It would be a good idea to read the actual measures proposed, before taking an abstract ideological stance: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php It would also be a good idea to note what authors themselves say about such a requirement: Swan & Brown's (2004) JISC/OSI author survey "asked authors to say how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in... repositories. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly." Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224. http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/ > The most that can safely be said is that just as an individual university > can insist on certain arbitrary standards for publications that count > for hiring, promotion or tenure, it can insist on OA for that purpose. Completely irrelevant. We are not talking about setting arbitrary standards for publishing. We are talking about publishing in the peer-reviewed journals of the authors' choice, exactly as before, but about now making those articles openly accessible online to all their would-be users toll-free, so as to maximize their usage and impact. > It is a dangerous error to say that any such requirement may be imposed > by a political body or by a funding body, or on a state- or nation-wide > basis. To illustrate, suppose an organization or government were to > demand that none of them be published in OA journals--they have no more > right to do that than to do the opposite. David has gone off into subjective speculations of his own here. What was proposed was merely that authors should provide toll-free access to their publications by adding a few extra keystrokes to the ones they already to in order to write, submit, and revise them for publication -- to self-archive them. Yes, a university and funding agency *can* (and should, and will) require these few extra keystrokes -- as surely as it can require the keystrokes for publishing in the first place. Let us not wrap this simple, reasonable (and probable) measure in an alarmist mantle of "dangerous errors," "state requirements," and "arbitrary standards." We are talking about providing OA to our journal articles, that's all! Stevan Harnad