IEEE, has already gone
"Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the
Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.
On the Deep Disanalogy
Between Text and Software and
Between Text and Data
Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned
A CC License is always desirable and welcome, but it is unnecessary for the self-archiving of authors' own peer-reviewed journal articles.
With 93% of journals having already given their authors the green light to self-archive
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
what is needed is that authors should now go ahead and self-archive -- not waste yet another decade
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml -- this time needlessly trying to negotiate a CC license with their publishers!
The American Chemical Society (ACS) should (and will) be ashamed of itself, forgetting it is a Scholarly Society and acting for all the world like just another corporate bottom-feeder, trying to squeeze the most revenue out of the leastmost commodity ("branding"). They might as well be peddling hog-bellies, or H2O rights in Bolivia.
Fear not. The bottom line is not the scruple-free conduct of its handsomely paid executives and legal staff http://www.idontcare.com/acs but the ACS membership (and history itself), which will hold ACS accountable if it continues down this solipsistic, sociopathic path instead of doing what scholarly societies are meant to do.
Meanwhile, it would be fun if the various other "X Scholar" entities took out a class action suit against ACS's "SciFinder Scholar"...
On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned
Stevan Harnad
It would be a *great* conceptual and strategic mistake for the movement dedicated to open access to peer-reviewed research (BOAI) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ to conflate its sense of "free" vs. open" with the sense of "free vs. open" as it is used in the free/open-source software movements. The two senses are not at all the same, and importing the software-movements' distinction just adds to the still widespread confusion and misunderstanding that there is in the research community about toll-free access.
I will try to state it in the simplest and most direct terms possible: Software is code that you use to *do* things. It may not be enough to let you use the code for free to do things, because one of the things you may want to do is to modify the code so it will do *other* things. Hence you may need not only free use of the code, but the code itself has to be open, so you can see and modify it.
There is simply *no counterpart* to this in peer-reviewed research article use. None. Researchers, in using one another's articles, are using and re-using the *content* (what the articles are reporting), and not the *code* (i.e., the actually words in the text). Yes, they read the text. Yes (within limits) they may quote it. Yes, it is helpful to be able to navigate the code by character-string and boolean searching. But what researchers are fundamentally *not* doing in writing their own articles (which build on the articles they have read) is anything faintly analogous to modifying the code for the original article!
I hope that that is now transparent, having been pointed out and written in longhand like this. So if it is obvious that what researchers do with the articles they read is not to modify the text in order to generate a new text, as programmers may modify a program to generate a new program, then where on earth did this open/free source/access conflation come from?
And there is a second conflation inherent in it, namely, a conflation between research publishing (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles) and public data-archiving (scientific and scholarly databases consisting of the raw and processed data on which the research reports are based).
Digital data archiving (e.g., the various genome databases, astrophysical databases, etc.) is relatively new, and it is a powerful *supplement* to peer-reviewed article publishing. In general, the data are not *in* the published article, they are *associated with* it. In paper days, there was not the page-quota or the money to publish all the data. And even in digital days, there is no standardized practice yet of making the raw data as public as the research findings themselves; but there is definite movement in that direction, because of its obvious power and utility.
The point, however, is this: As of today, articles and data are not the same thing. The 2,000,000 new articles appearing every year in the planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (the full-text literature that -- as we cannot keep reminding ourselves often enough, apparently -- the open/free access movement is dedicated to freeing from access-tolls) consists of articles only, *not* the research data on which the articles are based.
Hence, today, the access problem concerns toll-access to the full-texts of 2,000,000 articles published yearly, not access to the data on which they are based (most of which are not yet archived online, let alone published; and, when they *are* archived online, they are often already publicly accessible toll-free!).
No doubt research practices will evolve toward making all data accessible to would-be users, along with the
The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www
Stevan Harnad
Normal
Stevan Harnad
2
0
2003-10-13T15:09:00Z
2003-10-13T15:09:00Z
6
866
4939
Universite du Quebec a Montreal
41
9
6065
10.2006
200
(1) It is another
step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.
(2) It both
demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing
consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining
it.
It is all the more important, therefore, that
on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2)
we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy,
open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
-- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the
power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.
A KEY-STROKE KOAN
FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES
Here is an extremely conservative
calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the
importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:
If, in addition to signing the PLoS open
letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become
open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml),
not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all
their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the
proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif--
but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of
postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they
had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the
resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would
still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years
(1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the
cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.
Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS
open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access
journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait
yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines,
for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one
by one.
As we make our estimate less conservative and
arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and
then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if
asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who
have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only
on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.
And perhaps then we will be less surprised
that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat
seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the
handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of
which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're
prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for
our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o
Slashdot Mirror
IEEE, has already gone "Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=82084
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
what is needed is that authors should now go ahead and self-archive -- not waste yet another decade
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml
-- this time needlessly trying to negotiate a CC license with their publishers!
See also:
"Apercus of WOS Meeting: Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsc
Re: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/8250/8250acs.html
t ml
The American Chemical Society (ACS) should (and will) be ashamed of
itself, forgetting it is a Scholarly Society and acting for all the
world like just another corporate bottom-feeder, trying to squeeze the
most revenue out of the leastmost commodity ("branding"). They might as
well be peddling hog-bellies, or H2O rights in Bolivia.
Fear not. The bottom line is not the scruple-free conduct of its handsomely
paid executives and legal staff
http://www.idontcare.com/acs
but the ACS membership (and history itself), which will hold ACS
accountable if it continues down this solipsistic, sociopathic path
instead of doing what scholarly societies are meant to do.
Meanwhile, it would be fun if the various other "X Scholar" entities took
out a class action suit against ACS's "SciFinder Scholar"...
Eligible candidates include:
American Scholar http://www.pbk.org/pubs/amscholar.htm
Black Scholar http://www.theblackscholar.org/
Zetetic Scholar http://tricksterbook.com/truzzi/ZeteticScholars.h
Stevan Harnad
Source: /2967.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hyperm ail/Amsci
On the Deep Disanalogy
Between Text and Software and
Between Text and Data
Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned
Stevan Harnad
It would be a *great* conceptual and strategic mistake for the movement
dedicated to open access to peer-reviewed research (BOAI)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ to conflate its sense of "free"
vs. open" with the sense of "free vs. open" as it is used in the
free/open-source software movements. The two senses are not at all the
same, and importing the software-movements' distinction just adds to
the still widespread confusion and misunderstanding that there is in
the research community about toll-free access.
I will try to state it in the simplest and most direct terms possible:
Software is code that you use to *do* things. It may not be enough to
let you use the code for free to do things, because one of the things you
may want to do is to modify the code so it will do *other* things. Hence
you may need not only free use of the code, but the code itself has to
be open, so you can see and modify it.
There is simply *no counterpart* to this in peer-reviewed research
article use. None. Researchers, in using one another's articles, are
using and re-using the *content* (what the articles are reporting), and
not the *code* (i.e., the actually words in the text). Yes, they read the
text. Yes (within limits) they may quote it. Yes, it is helpful to be able
to navigate the code by character-string and boolean searching. But what
researchers are fundamentally *not* doing in writing their own articles
(which build on the articles they have read) is anything faintly analogous
to modifying the code for the original article!
I hope that that is now transparent, having been pointed out and written
in longhand like this. So if it is obvious that what researchers do with
the articles they read is not to modify the text in order to generate a
new text, as programmers may modify a program to generate a new program,
then where on earth did this open/free source/access conflation come from?
And there is a second conflation inherent in it, namely, a conflation
between research publishing (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles) and
public data-archiving (scientific and scholarly databases consisting of
the raw and processed data on which the research reports are based).
Digital data archiving (e.g., the various genome databases, astrophysical
databases, etc.) is relatively new, and it is a powerful *supplement*
to peer-reviewed article publishing. In general, the data are not *in*
the published article, they are *associated with* it. In paper days, there
was not the page-quota or the money to publish all the data. And even
in digital days, there is no standardized practice yet of making the raw
data as public as the research findings themselves; but there is definite
movement in that direction, because of its obvious power and utility.
The point, however, is this: As of today, articles and data are not
the same thing. The 2,000,000 new articles appearing every year in the
planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (the full-text literature that
-- as we cannot keep reminding ourselves often enough, apparently --
the open/free access movement is dedicated to freeing from access-tolls)
consists of articles only, *not* the research data on which the articles
are based.
Hence, today, the access problem concerns toll-access to the full-texts
of 2,000,000 articles published yearly, not access to the data on which
they are based (most of which are not yet archived online, let alone
published; and, when they *are* archived online, they are often already
publicly accessible toll-free!).
No doubt research practices will evolve toward making all data
accessible to would-be users, along with the
The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:
(1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.
(2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.
It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.
A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES
Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:
If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.
Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.
As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.
And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o