I suggest it is time that OA advocates upgrade our standards. The self-archiving of posprints whose reliability and correctness is unknown is a very poor excuse for the real version. It adds complexity for students, and in fact makes it necessary for a research to be either use published articles only, or verify for each article used that the 2 versions do in fact match.
(preprints are another matter: they serve the same function electronically that they did in Xerox: to make the author's draft available before formal publication.or even before refereeing if so desired) It was right to use this admittedly less than perfect method as a first step towards publisher acceptance. I think we can now ask for better, and find our request matched by the more forward-thinking of publishers. Poliically, it seems that it seems to be of little value to ask for just a compromise, as we watch the NIH proposal become weaker and weaker. I note that (even) the American Physiological Society now says it makes more sense to deposit the actual article. To insert from liblicense: "We already make content available on the Web at 12 months through links at Medline," said Alice Ra'anan, American Physiological Society spokesperson. "They'd be better off using the definitive article rather than the manuscript. " Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Mon 1/17/2005 2:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving On the list of publishers at: http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html is it the case that any publisher that is green is also pale-green? Just a fine point. Thanks [Reply: Not necessarily, but it does not matter much. Open Access is about postprints, so if a journal is postprint green, it's as green as it needs to be, and as green as 100% OA needs it to be. The unrefereed preprint is an added bonus to OA. All authors may self-archived their pre-refereeing preprints without needing the green light from anyone. But it is always more encouraging to an author if the publisher endorses preprint self-archiving too. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids -- S.H.] -- Brian Simboli Science Librarian Library & Technology Services E.W. Fairchild Martindale 8A East Packer Avenue Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170 (610) 758-5003 E-mail: [email protected]
