Just three small but important points about Joseph Esposito's essay in First Monday: "The devil you don't know: The unexpected future of Open Access publishing" http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_8/esposito/
> Harnad is careful not to drag non-research publications... into the OA fray This is correct. The primary target literature for OA is not the "esoteric" literature, as I first inchoately thought 10 years ago: http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ It is the author give-away literature, written by authors only for impact, not for royalty income or fee income: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.2 And the one literature that fits this description without a single exception is the 2.5 million annual articles published in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals. *That* is the literature that the "OA fray" is about, and the reason is that until it is made 100% OA, its authors and articles continue to lose research impact, needlessly, at a cost to them, their institutions, their funders, and to research itself. http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt > Harnad's self-archiving strategy does not mandate peer review. How can a strategy for self-archiving peer-reviewed journal articles "mandate" peer review? It is for the employers and funders of researchers to mandate peer-reviewed publication (and they do), and for peer-reviewed journals to provide it (and they do). What needs to be mandated now is self-archiving itself (and the US House Appropriations Committee as well as the UK Parliament Science and Technology Committee have very recently recommended exactly that: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/congress.html http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm Self-archiving is intended to provide OA to 100% of the annual 2.5 million peer-reviewed journal articles, in order to maximize their usage and impact. It is a good idea to self-archive research before and after peer-review, but not *instead*! And self-archiving is not primarily preprint self-archiving but postprint self-archiving. It is providing OA to the refereed version that is the fundamental goal of the OA movement, for 100% of the annual 2.5 million articles. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-self-archive http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-vs-publication > For purposes of this essay, the importance of Harnadian self-archiving > is that it belongs to the author-pays OA universe: There is no "Harnadian" self-archiving, there is just self-archiving (of each author's own peer-reviewed journal articles, after, and, optionally also before, peer review). This certainly does not belong to the "author-pays OA universe" in the sense that the other road to OA -- publishing in OA journals -- does. OA journals recover their costs by charging the author-institution instead of the user-institution. I was, and still am, one of the proponents of that cost-recovery model: Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis? Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 1995) http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001691/00/harnad95.quo.vadis.html But publishing in OA journals is the "golden" road to OA, and I have never believed that that road can or will get us to 100% OA anywhere near quickly or surely enough to invest our hopes and efforts in it alone, or even primarily. It is the "green" road of self-archiving that I advocate, and it is erroneous and misleading to describe this road as part of the "author-pays OA Universe". Self-archiving is no more "author-pays" than author web-pages are. The only thing the author pays is a few keystrokes! Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html Of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, 5% are OA and 95% are non-OA. OA is provided to that remaining 95% by individual authors self-archiving the articles they publish in them. The peer-review costs are still born by those non-OA journals, and recovered in the usual way: through institutional subscription/license fees. I am not sure Joseph Esposito quite understands this green road to OA, or even that where it leads is indeed OA, 100% OA. He seems instead to devote a good deal of imagination to speculating about why on earth 84% of the over 8000 journals surveyed have already given their official "green light" to self-archiving! http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php I recommend reading the relevant portion of the Self-Archiving FAQ, the "Poisoned Apple" worry: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32.Poisoned Stevan Harnad
