RE: A Prophylactic Against the Edentation of the RCUK Policy Proposal

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Joe 

You can call it unfortunate if you want, and you can ask us to invest our
life savings if it makes you feel better (and I'm not sure that I would
invest all of my life savings in any one industry - surly as a consultant
you would advise against putting all you eggs in one basket!).  But all
Stevan is asking for is one scrap of empirical evidence, one single hint
that 'self-archiving will lead to journal cancellations'.  With all of
your years' experience can you give Stevan that?

Also, you appear to be rather confused about what is being required. You
suggest that publishers are being asked to '"Give this away". Actually,
authors are being asked to self-archive.  The publishers are not being
asked to do anything at all.  Of course, if the publishers are not happy
publishing self-archived papers then they have every right not to publish
them.  But it is the author that is being asked to deposit (and the
funding body or institution has every right to make that a condition of
grant) - the publisher is not being asked to do anything!

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
http://www.sparceurope.org

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: 06 July 2005 22:21
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: A Prophylactic Against the Edentation of the RCUK Policy
Proposal

Stevan Harnad wrote:

>The argument that self-archiving will lead to journal cancellations and
>collapse, in contrast, is not based on objective fact but on
>*hypothesis*. There are of course also counter-arguments, based on
>counter-hypotheses

   http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2

>but it is also a fact that all objective evidence to date is *contrary*
>to the hypothesis that self-archiving leads to journal cancellation and
>collapse:

JE:  This is a very unfortunate statement.  The only valid metric is for
proponents of Open Access to invest their life savings in the companies
that publish research journals, in order to prove that they do not believe
that OA will hurt the financial performance of publishers that accommodate
OA.  I have no quarrel with those who believe that OA will hurt
traditional publishers, and no quarrel with those who experiment with
different forms of publishing that happen to be OA (e.g., arXiv)--and no
quarrel with funding bodies that require OA publication of funded
research.  But to say to a publisher, "Give this away; you're not going to
feel it at all," is simply ridiculous.

Joe Esposito