Richard Poynder interview with Stevan Harnad

From: Peter Suber <peters_at_EARLHAM.EDU>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2007 12:10:54 -0400

Today Richard Poynder released his interview with Stevan Harnad. 
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2007/07/oa-interviews-stevan-harnad.html

Even by the standard of Richard's rich, detailed interviews, this one is
unusually long and comprehensive (53 pages).  I recommend it for a
detailed, up-to-date account of Stevan's views on OA strategy, his
approach to advocacy, his contributions to OA beyond advocacy, and how OA
fits into his wider academic interests on the evolution of language and
cognition.

 From Richard's introduction:

      Stevan Harnad is a cognitive scientist based at the
      Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also one of the
      leading lights of the Open Access (OA) Movement, and a
      self-styled "archivangelist".

      Harnad is often portrayed as a bully and a fanatic ­ a man so
      determined to get fellow researchers to make their papers
      freely available on the Web that he will brook no
      disagreement, responding to all contrary views and dissenting
      voices with such a relentless barrage of rebuttals and
      reproaches that his opponents are eventually forced to
      retreat.

      But this is too simplistic a picture of the man. For Harnad,
      OA is not ­ as his critics claim ­ the obsession of a pedant
      with a one-dimensional view of the world, but the prelude to
      a fourth revolution in human cognition and communication.
      (The first three, he says, were language, writing, and
      print).
      The goal of OA, Harnad says, is to unleash a potential long
      latent in mankind's unique language capacity, one that will
      allow us to exploit at last the full power of our collective
      intellect through "scholarly skywriting" ­ a form of
      communication, he contends, for which our brains were
      pre-adapted a hundred thousand years ago, but that has been
      awaiting the online era for its realisation.

      However, before we can exploit the potential of this new form
      of communication, he says, we first need to make all research
      OA ­ an obvious next step that has been within our reach
      since the onset of the online era, but that we have still
      failed to take. And until we do, he says, we are denying
      ourselves access to our full potential.

      If his OA advocacy is at times on the testy side, adds
      Harnad, this is not so much evidence of an intemperate nature
      as of a patience that has been sorely tried by the inordinate
      amount of time it is taking us to grasp what is already well
      within our reach.

      What cannot be denied is that Harnad has exerted a very
      powerful influence on the development of the OA Movement. To
      a great extent he is the person who has articulated the main
      issues, and it is he who has ­ obsessively perhaps ­ kept
      people's minds focused, both on why OA is essential, and how
      we can best, and most rapidly, achieve it.

      Moreover, as Harnad is keen to point out, in addition to
      archivangelising for the last thirteen years, he has also
      created and commissioned many of the concrete practical tools
      now being used in our faltering steps toward OA....



     Peter

Peter Suber
Senior Researcher, SPARC
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Author, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber_at_earlham.edu
Received on Sun Jul 01 2007 - 17:34:29 BST

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