It's only now that I found some time to react.
Stevan's statement below makes his position clear, at least to me. Stevan is
like the son who tells his friends that cars are practically for free. The
only thing that you have to do is beg your father to buy you one.
Rightly so!
The point is I am the father.
Leo Waaijers
[Reply from Stevan Harnad: I am not telling my friends
(fellow-researchers) to ask their fathers (institutional librarians)
to buy them a car (journal). I am suggesting they walk! It costs
nothing to self-archive one's own (published) journal-articles,
and it has nothing *whatsoever* to do with one's institution's
journal expenditures. Please don't confuse it with telling my
friends to publish in OA ("gold") journals, which *do* cost their
fathers some money!]
-----Original Message-----
From: Stevan Harnad
Sent: Tuesday, 23 March, 2004 18:27
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Waaijers, Leo wrote:
> As someone must bear the costs, this someone must be the author's
> institution then. However, in many a case this is the same institution as
> the reader's. So, at the end of the day the financial effects of both
> approaches (toll gate, or 'open submission' as Declan Butler calls it
> elegantly, and 'open access') meet at the table of the financial
> manager of the institution.
Yes, both Toll-Access (TA) Journal-Publishing and Open-Access
(OA) Journal-Publishing are paid for by the institution -- the
reader/institution in the one case and the author-institution in the
other.
But it must be noted that OA provision via author self-archiving is
orthogonal to this; it is done in parallel. It neither decreases nor
increases an institution's expenses (the annual expense per paper
self-archived is truly trivial). It merely increases an institution's
access to the research output of other institutions -- and increases
the impact of an institution's own research output. The latter in turn
usually means more research funding for the institution. But not for the
library. The library spends neither more nor less, and receives neither
more nor less, with institutional self-archiving.
It is this that needs to be borne in mind in reckoning the costs and
benefits of institutional self-archiving, not its implications for the
institutional library budget!
Stevan Harnad
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Received on Tue Apr 06 2004 - 14:07:48 BST