lib-ir: Fwd: STM Talk: Open Access by Peaceful Evolution -- Stevan Harnad

[Carol Hixson <chixson@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>]

>Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 14:16:16 +0000 (GMT)
>From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
>Subject: STM Talk: Open Access by Peaceful Evolution
>
>
>Abstract of invited talk to be given on Thursday May 15 in Amsterdam
>at the STM Conference "Universal Access: By Evolution or Revolution?".
>http://www.stm-assoc.org/aboutstm/calendar.html
>
>          Open Access by Peaceful Evolution
>          Stevan Harnad
>
>The open access movement was originally inspired by research-author and
>research-user frustration with the continuing loss of research impact
>because of access-blockage by unaffordable tolls in a new era when
>all peer-reviewed research output is so clearly within universal reach
>thanks to the Internet. The movement's efforts and motivation were at
>first led by the library community and directed against the publisher
>community. The motivation was right, but the target was wrong, and indeed
>unfair, and little progress was made. (Prices would probably have come
>down anyway, with global licensing developments.) The research community
>has since realized that its real target should have been *itself* all
>along: Only now are researchers and their institutions grasping
>that the way to maximize their research impact is to self-archive their
>own peer-reviewed research output in their own institutional open-access
>Eprint Archives. The toll-access and open-access versions will co-exist
>and co-evolve, possibly indefinitely, or they may converge on a new
>system, whereby the publisher is paid for the peer review and any
>other essential added value as a service-cost on each institution's
>own *outgoing* research, instead of an access-cost on the *incoming*
>research from all other institutions.
>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html
>The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is promoting both
>self-archiving (BOAI-1) and open-access journal publishing (BOAI-2), and
>SPARC is promoting business models for both. The only thing publishers
>must avoid at all costs is to appear to be trying to deliberately
>block the evolution of self-archiving through restrictive copyright
>policies! That would would be very bad public relations with the research
>community, creating and highlighting a dramatic conflict between what
>is obviously in the best interests of research and researchers, their
>institutions and funders, and the society benefitting from the research,
>on the one hand, versus what is in the best interests of journal
>publishers' current revenue streams and business models on the other
>-- a conflict of interest that could indeed precipitate a revolution,
>now that necessity is so obviously no longer a justification, as it was
>in paper days! Far better to allow evolution to take its natural course
>peacefully, and adapt to it accordingly.
>http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm
>
>Stevan Harnad