Signing off
Hello Stevan, Just a farewell note. I'm finally leaving the AmSci Forum list because I have grown so tired of watching you ride your own particular hobbyhorse that I simply have to leave the room. Below is the message that was the last straw. You made it crisply clear, for the nth time, that you not only have no interest in fairness arguments having to do with making science open and transparent, you also refuse to listen to them and in every case reflexively urge others to shut their mouths and ears. Such arguments are, to me, as compelling as any argument based on access for researchers. Furthermore, you well know that the traditional publishing system is subsidized to give scholars access (through libraries). The leg you attempt to stand on is a fine argument for library funding and even more liberal policies of library access but truly fails as a sufficient argument for open access online. (And books--what a red herring! You well know that secondary literature--books, magazines, TV programs etc.--is not primary research output. It is not generally what the taxpayer funds. I believe the term for a supposedly logical argument that relies on irrelevant facts is specious.) I work now at an institution where investigators have access to more or less anything they want. Those faculty who are participating in the Harvard repository are not, as far as I know, doing so for Harnad reasons. I urge you to respect the motivational power and the principles of those who advocate true open access and even real reform that embraces principles of social responsibility. But others have urged you to, and so I have no illusion that you will ever move your tent to be with the other occupiers of science publishing. There are many voices on the list that I will miss. Your shrill one I will not. I believe that I was the very first subscriber to the list so long ago. I thought you deserved a farewell, and perhaps I wanted to finally, albeit privately, get a word in. There would have been no point in saying these things on the list; I have no real standing in this matter as you see it, not being a researcher myself, and you would simply have snapped back with your usual arguments. Too bad. Ros Begin forwarded message: From: Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com Date: November 22, 2011 9:06:47 PM EST To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Double-Pay Double-Talk: Not a good justification for Open Access Reply-To: American Scientist Open Access Forum american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Michael Eisen mbei...@gmail.com wrote: Under the current model members of the public who want to access a paper are paying for THE PAPER twice. They are heavily subsidizing the subscriptions that pay for journals - providing far more than the cost of publishing through indirect costs and other means. And then they're paying again to access the article themselves. I wish it were that simple, Mike, but it's not. On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, Stevan Harnad wrote: Are tax-payers paying twice when universities pay to buy for their users books based on tax-payer funded scholarly and scientific research? If not, then tax-payers are not paying twice when universities pay to buy journal subscriptions for their users either. (Whereas if so, then Open Access is up against a far, far bigger obstacle than journal subscription access barriers: They are up against the entire book industry, including both its publishers and its authors. And US research funder mandates cannot and will not change that.) Please let's stick to the fair, real, realistic and unassailable rationale for mandating open access: Research is funded (by the tax payer) and conducted and published (by the researcher) so that its findings can be accessed, used and built upon by its primary intended users (researchers) for the benefit of the tax-payer and research progress.
Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum
Hello Sally, Just a note to say that although I'm no longer with American Scientist, this Forum is my creation--I invited Stevan to launch it-- and I can see to a moderator change (by making the necessary contact with the system administrator) if need be. Oh yes, and as a member of the list, I vote to keep Stevan. Rosalind Reid (now) Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing
Re: Elsevier Science Policy on Public Web Archiving Needs Re-Thinking
Rosalind Reid r...@amsci.org: In this week's snail mail I found a letter from someone at the Institute of Physics (in the UK) wanting to let us know about a major new e-journal starting up within the next few weeks, to be funded entirely by article charges and posted on the Web without charge. This is an experiment that may test many of the hypotheses offered here. It's called the New Journal of Physics and will cover all of physics. The list of editors begins with Nobelist J. G. Bednorz. The two sponsoring societies, the IOP and Deutzche Physikalische Gesellschaft, have committed to maintaining the journal's permanent archive free for all time. They appear to have dealt with a large number of the issues mentioned here, except that I see no mention of support for authors who cannot afford the article charge of US$500. Submission and manuscript handling will be all-electronic; IOP is able to handle files from various word processors in addition to TeX, and also accepts e-prints from xxx. Anne Dixon, IOP's assistant director, proposes that this is a way for learned societies to chart a way forward at a time of upheaval in scientific publishing. Perhaps I've missed comments from the APS participants about this initiative, or perhaps no one knows how the economics of the NJP are going to work out--or for that matter whether it will attract good articles and citations. Looks like an interesting test, anyway. Details at http://www.njp.org. (No articles yet, but they promise immediate publication upon acceptance.) Rosalind Reid Editor, American Scientist [Moderator's note: The AJP project has been mentioned in several postings, most recently by Arthur Smith in the prior one on this thread. It may surprise some to hear that I think page-charges for that commendable project might be premature! A tide-over subsidy for the next few unstable years might be a safer way to ensure its survival through the transition period into the online-only era supported by author-end page charges n place of reader-end S/SL/PPV. As other contributors have noted, an attitude change toward page-charges will be needed first, and that will in turn have to be preceded by (1) a realisation of the optimality of free online access, (2) a substantial migration by authors and readers to that mode of access, leading to (3) library serial cancellations and hence (4) substantive savings on which to draw to provide support for (5) author page charges. But perhaps physicists, already in the forefront of revolutiuonary developments with xxx, will be forward-looking enough to leap directly from the premises to the optimal and inevitable conclusions without need of further cultural evolution or subversion! -- Stevan Harnad]
Re: PDF vs Markup Languages
On Mon, 31 Aug 1998 07:51:03 -0400, Clinton Jones clin...@ttalk.com wrote: I think that some journals, particularly 'reprinted' ones will always have to be provided in a PDF format, primarily because redoing them in HTML will be too costly and too time consuming. I am afraid that PDF's will be around for a long time to come but I agree that all new documents should be provided in a HTML format and not relatively inflexible PDF. This posting reminds me that subscribers to this list might wish to read another article in the current American Scientist: Brian Hayes's Computing Science column, titled Bit Rot (online at http://www.amsci.org/amsci/issues/Comsci98/compsci1998-09.html, and also as PDF and Postscript files). The column points out how poorly formats such as PDF preserve knowledge for the future. Electronic presentation of publications is now in a stage where one must make hard choices between display/print quality and broad access (offered by PDF), author-interface advantages and ease of self-publishing (as with TEX's handling of mathematics) and archiving/user considerations (optimized by markup languages such as SGML, HTML and XML). The archiving questions are the stickiest: How do you make a document so that it will be useful a decade from now? As Tom Walker and Clinton Jones point out, PDF is what works most easily today if you sidestep archiving concerns. I'd say further that it's the obvious short-term (cheap!) solution in all disciplines where authors are unlikely to be able to converge on a common software for article submission. Rosalind Reid Editor, American Scientist
