A 11:46 05/10/04 -0400, Brian Simboli a E9crit : > I'm not convinced that green self-archiving holds out any more promise > of providing a stable, long term way to fulfill third world needs > satisfactorily than does the development of gold open access or low-cost > TA solutions. Apparently you think this to be the case. What arguments > might you give here, other than an emotional appeal?
1) With emotions you can lead the world. 2) Stevan Harnad has developed, more than once, in this Forum and elsewhere, a number of specific arguments for privileging the green road, and I agree with those arguments. (It is not necessary for me to repeat them here, and less well.) 3) But concretely, I can explain my own involvement in the green road: Our research laboratory's field is Biology and we have been able to commute unproblematically between both the gold and green roads (i.e., publishing in Open Access [OA] journals and OA self-archiving]. I have been encouraging our researchers to publish in Biomed Central (gold) journals. But since 2002, our researchers have only published 3-4 articles a year in those gold periodicals whereas their other 160 articles are still being published in the conventional non-OA journals. What to do about making those articles OA? > The "obvious" solution is not always the best. Immediate solutions are > not always in the best long-term interest. 4) My immediate solution is to fill our OA Archive through librarian-assisted proxy self-archiving http://phy043.tours.inra.fr:8080/ This will now be done rapidly (and awaits only my finding time enough to self-archive the backlog on behalf of the researchers in my lab!). I have a lot of articles (including those articles on LH and FSH that were recently requested by the Algerian teacher I mentioned in my prior posting) published in green journals. More than 100 articles are waiting to be archived. (Recall that 92% of journals now officially give their "green light: to author self-archiving: http://romeo.eprints.org/ ). I cannot see any problem at all with this "obvious" solution. Helene Bosc Bibliothecaire Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6175 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours-Haras Nationaux 37380 Nouzilly France http://www.tours.inra.fr/ TEL : 02 47 42 78 00 FAX : 02 47 42 77 43 e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr