Re: Live online discussion about open access: Chronicle of HigherEducation

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 23:05:45 +0000

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Lila Guterman wrote:

> Two sidebars accompany the main article:
>
> "2 Routes to Open Access: Archives and Institutional Subscriptions"
> http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i21/21a01101.htm ...
>
> I'd welcome feedback as well as questions and comments for the live chat
> on Thursday.

Here are three small but important corrections to Lila's excellent
side-bar article (CHE, 30 January 2004): one of a noun, one of a number,
and one of a conjuction:

(1) Open Access journals do not charge "subscriptions"! Toll access
journals charge subscriptions (access-tolls). ("Memberships" are a kind of
pre-commitment by an institution to submit -- and by open-access journals
to accept -- a number of articles yearly from that institution. This
is just to help get open-access journals going; it obviously would not
scale up as more and more journals convert to open access. Institutions
cannot pre-commit their authors to journals, and peer-reviewed journals
cannot pre-commit their referees to accept them!

(2) The article says "archives have been set up by other universities,
including the California Institute of Technology... and, most prominently,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has developed software
used by at least 15 other institutions." Actually, the University of
Southampton UK, more prominently, developed software used by at least
140 other institutions, among them the California Institute of Technology!
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all

(3) Lila paraphrases me as saying "researchers are unlikely to make use
of the archives unless universities require it": I believe what I said
was "until." (I am an optimist.)
http://software.eprints.org/handbook/universities.php

Stevan Harnad
Chaire de Recherche du Canada
Centre de Neuroscience de la Cognition (CNC)
Universite du Quebec a Montreal
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3P8
tel: 1-514-987-3000 2461#
fax: 1-514-987-8952
harnad_at_uqam.ca
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Received on Tue Jan 27 2004 - 23:05:45 GMT

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