Dear Stevan, "Open Access and the Future of Scientific Publishing" by Carrie Lock, recently appeared in *Science Editor*, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 22-23. This article, like many in the popular press, deals exclusively with open-access journals. The BioMed Central, PubMed Central, and PLoS models are briefly described. It does not once mention the possibility of placing an article in an open-access personal, institutional, or discipline archive while also publishing it in a peer-reviewed toll-access journal. Institutional archives are mentioned only in the context of some future model of publishing wherein journals will exist only to offer a Seal of Approval to archived articles.
What bothers me about this article is that it did not appear in the popular press. It appeared in a professional journal for editors, published by the Council of Science Editors. This is an organization for which you presented a Keynote Address on self-archiving at their annual meeting in 2003. A report of that address appeared in the same journal last October: Miller, Lee. 2003. Author/Institution Self-Archiving and the Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. A Report on the Keynote Address by Stevan Harnad at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Council of Science Editors. Science Editor 26 (5): 150-151. As you and David Prosser have pointed out in this Forum, 84% of the 8242 journals surveyed to date have given their authors the green light to self-archive their articles in open-access archives. It astonishes me that authors of articles on open access continue to pretend that open-access journals provide the only way to offer free world-wide access to their articles. When are authors going to wake up? They can increase the impact of the articles they publish in respected, well-established print journals simply by making those articles instantly available in open-access archives. The increased impact inevitably will increase the stature of the journals that published those articles. That's the message that many editors and publishers ... and authors of articles on open-access publishing ... seem to be missing. Lee Miller ******************************************** Lee Miller 185 Midline Road Slaterville Springs, NY 14881 USA (607) 539-7508 [email protected]
