[Asis-l] Stevan Harnad on Open Access to science literature

[Michel J. Menou]

Further to the announcement of the the launch of a special section on
open access and scientific publishing by The Science and Development
Network (SciDev.Net), our colleague Barry Mahon told me of the note
below which Stevan Harnad kindly authorized me to repost here.

This is a key subject <hich is affecting us from many different stand
points.

Michel



> ------- Start of forwarded message -------
> From: Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> To: SEPTEMBER98-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Reply-To: September 1998 American Scientist Forum <SEPTEMBER98-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
> Subject: Fwd: Re: On the Need to Take Both Roads to Open Access
> Date: 05/11/2003 16:13:10
> 
> Dear Katie Mantell:
> 
> As you requested, I have transmitted widely your announcement about
> SciDevNet's coverage of open access:
> http://www.scidev.net/ms/open_access/
> 
> As you also ask for my comments, Here they are:
> 
> (1) The SciDevNet's coverage is very helpful and welcome, but at the
> moment it is *extremely* lop-sided, covering only one of the two roads
> to open access -- open-access journal publication -- but not the other
> road: open-access self-archiving of toll-access journal publications:
> http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html
> 
> (2) You do cite the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) but you do
> not note that the BOAI consists of *two* open-access strategies, of
> which the second (BOAI-2) is open-access journal publication but the
> first (BOAI-1) is open-access self-archiving:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> 
> (3) This is an important omission, because in actual numbers, open-access
> self-archiving is generating far more open access articles per year than
> open-access journal-publishing, and open-access via this road is also
> able to grow much sooner and faster. In fact, in all likelihood, the
> "green" road of open-access self-archiving is itself also the surest
> way to reach the "golden" road of open-access journal-publishing!
> 
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0030.gif
> 
> Complete series:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm
> or
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt
> 
> (4) This is why it is so important not to represent "open-access" as
> merely being synonymous with "open-access-publishing"!
> 
> (5) In your key reports and documents, you have mostly BOAI-2 reports and
> documents. May I suggest adding the following BOAI-1 reports and
> documents:
>  
> (i) The BOAI-1 (self-archiving) FAQ:
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
> 
> (ii) The original self-archiving proposal (Okerson & ODonnell 1995)
> http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html
> 
> (iii) The University self-archiving policy model:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html
> 
> (iv) The Research-Funder open-access policy model:
> http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/
> 
> (v) The Berlin Open Access Declaration:
> http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
> 
> (vi) SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide
> http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html
> 
> (6) Among "Open Access Initiatives" could I suggest adding
> 
> (i) The SHERPA Project
> http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
> 
> (ii) The DARE Project
> http://www.surf.nl/en/themas/print/index2.php?oid=7
> 
> (iii) The Australian initiative
> http://alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2002/10/eprints.html
> 
> (iv) French initiatives:
> http://www.tours.inra.fr/tours/doc/comsci.htm
> 
> (v) The cross-institutional archive, OAIster
> http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
> 
> (7) To "Open Access Literature" I suggest adding:
> 
> Harnad, S. (2001) The self-archiving initiative
> http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html
> 
> Pinfield et al (2002) "Setting up an institutional e-print archive"
> http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/intro.html
> 
> And to links I would add:
>     
> Core metalist of open access eprint archives
> http://opcit.eprints.org/archive-core-metalist.html
> 
> as well as the following resources:
> 
> Very large harvested cache of open-access arcticles in Computer
> Science: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
> 
> GNU Open-Source Self-Archiving Software:
> http://www.eprints.org/
> 
> Citation-Impact-Measuring Search Engine for Open-Access Achives:
> http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search
> 
> Citation-Seeking Engine (looks for open-access full-texts)
> http://paracite.eprints.org/
> 
> American Scientist Forum (discussion of open access since 1998)
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
> 
> Open Archives Initiative
> http://www.openarchives.org/
> 
> Powerpoints for promoting open access:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.ppt
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.htm
> 
> These recommendations are all intended so as to make the SciDevNet
> site's contribution to open-access complete, rather than being, as it is
> now, merely a review of the open-access journal-publishing portion of
> the overall movements and initiatives toward open access.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Stevan Harnad
>