THES article on research access Friday June 6 2003

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Margaret H. Freeman wrote:

> On 6/10/03 1:26 PM, "Stevan Harnad" <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>sh> So copyright is certainly not the problem.
>
> That may be true for certain disciplines, but I can attest that in the
> humanities, where we cite original literature, we find it expensive and
> sometimes impossible to make our research internet accessible.

All disciplines cite original literature.

That publisher copyright is not an obstacle to the
self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles is true of
*all* disciplines. Humanities are not an exception. Please
see the publisher self-archiving policy table in:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm

But perhaps you did not mean peer-reviewed journal copyright, but
book copyright. The humanities as a whole do publish far more of their
research in book form rather than as journal articles, and in general
book-authors and their publishers do not wish to give away the
full-texts of their potentially royalty-bearing books. In this
case there is still a solution that allows their work's impact to
be measured in exactly the same way as with journal articles --
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search -- namely, if authors
self-archive (in addition to self-archiving the full-text of any
journal articles they write) their books' metadata-only (author,
title, publisher, year), along with the full-texts of only
their reference lists. That will allow a book-citation impact
factor (not currently available anyewhere) to be calculated
in exactly the same way as the article-citation impact:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/bookcite.htm

This will also add to the visibility of the book -- and it
might even allow a rudimentary download estimate to be made:
http://citebase.eprints.org/java/correlation/correlation.html

In addition, for esoteric monographs that expect only a succes d'estime,
but not much by way of royalties, the possibility of increasing their
impact still further by making their full-text openly accessible might
in some cases encourage authors to make different arrangements with
their publishers, perhaps to publish them in an online-only monograph
series, especially if otherwise publication expenses might have been
difficult to recover.

The humanities too, along with the sciences, may also wish to enhance
the research value of their publications by self-archiving the data on
which they are based -- a possibility that had been excluded, for
reasons of page-limits and their expense in the case of both books and
journal articles:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/data-archiving.htm

Stevan Harnad