At 01:15 16/05/2008, Joseph J. Esposito wrote:
> Thus Stevan Harnad:
>
> "This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly
> -- to historians in hindsight."
>
> JE: Great to have a prophet in our midst, but my concern is more
> that Harnad and others continue to talk about the Internet as it
> was five years ago. The world has moved on. Harnad talks about
> institutional repositories as though they will be with us in even
> a few years (ever hear of Software As A Service--that is,
> services like Google and Salesforce.com?); and recently we had
> Heather Morrison on this list extolling one-hour peer review.
> Reading Peter Suber's blog is like getting into a time machine
> that only runs backward.
>
> This debate--open access vs. toll access--is, oh, so very 1990s.
Joe, No, OA is very much of the 2000s and moving forward.
More of that below.
In the 1990s as far as most journals were concerned the debate was
print vs electronic. There were subject archives (e.g. arXiv) at that
time, which were free but also electronic when journals weren't. The
transition to digital journals has led inevitably to wider open
access, but ironically it slowed progress towards free online access,
what we now call OA, at that time because providing electronic
content - with expansive new licencing terms, the 'big deal' - was
largely seen as a sufficient step. The publishers cleverly recognised
this in moving preemptively; the cleverer ones knew they were simply
putting off the day of reckoning for free online access.
"The immediate future of online journals is set to be dominated by
electronic editions based on established paper journals and retaining
the appearance of familiar paper layouts through Adobe Acrobat. The
innovative features made possible by online publishing may therefore
be obscured for a time."
A survey of STM online journals 1990-95: the calm before the storm,
Hitchcock, Carr and Hall, January 1996
http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/survey/survey.html
> What is happening instead is that open material is being subsumed
> into broader marketing networks, whose ultimate aim is to drive
> revenue (Nature Precedings) or build brands (Harvard open access
> policy). Better to think of open access as product sampling or
> an aspect of brand management. Sorry, Professor Harnad, but you
> lost this one and the Internet won.
Some of the recent developments you mention - the Harvard mandates,
'cloud' services - are game-changers in their different ways, but
these will strengthen institutional repositories, not replace them.
There have been other game-changers, and Stevan Harnad is responsible
for more than most in the area of OA - repository software, OA
citation impact services, mandates, to name a few - and if you hear
your publishing colleagues refer to 'Romeo green', then he shares
credit for that too with the original Loughborough project team.
Major recent developments such as the revised NIH mandate are
consistent with calls for change made years ago by Stevan Harnad and
others. How all this squares with having 'lost' I don't know.
Stevan Harnad has contributed to changing the game, but it's not
over, just as it wasn't with the transition to digital journals. The
objective is 100% OA, that is, to facilitate an open access version
of every new research and scholarly paper, not a bit here and there
(we've always had sampling, and that will never work for OA). That is
the purpose of IRs, not just for a few years but for the foreseeable
future given the 'preservation' objectives of many.
Disclosure, I work with Stevan Harnad. On these issues he challenges
his colleagues who err as much as anyone else, but always with the
same clear objective.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Received on Fri May 16 2008 - 11:21:09 BST