June 27 2004: The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" at 10

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

                ** Apologies for cross-posting **

        THE 1994 "SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING" AT 10

                   Stevan Harnad

Today, June 27 2004, is the 10th anniversary of the "Subversive Proposal"
which was first posted June 27 1994:

    http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/sub01.html

and then published as:

    Harnad, S. (1995) A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann
    Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals
    at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic
    Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries,
    June 1995.  http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/subvert.html
    http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

This seems a good moment to take a critical look at where the Proposal
stands today: where it was on target, and where it missed the mark:

>   I. OVERTURE: The Subversive Proposal
>   
>   esoteric 213 aj .es-o-'ter-ik
>   
>   1 a aj designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
>   1 b aj of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group
>   2 a aj limited to a small circle <~ pursuits>
>   2 b aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini CONFIDENTIAL] <an ~ purpose>
>   (From the networked Merriam Webster Dictionary at Princeton University)

This "esoteric/exoteric" distinction turns out to have been just an
out-of-focus first-approximation. The relevant distinction is not esoteric
vs. exoteric writing but *give-away vs. non-giveaway* writing (a better
approximation) and, in particular, peer-reviewed journal articles --
written solely for research impact, not for royalty outcome -- vs. most
other forms of writing.

That is what gradually came into focus in the ensuing years as the true
target of what eventually came to be called "Open Access" (OA).
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

>   We have heard many sanguine predictions about the demise of paper
>   publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a
>   long way off. 

Since then, just about all of peer-reviewed journal publishing has become
hybrid, with both a paper and an online edition (and a still-small but
growing number of online-only journals). But paper has not died yet. Nor
was converting to online-only the real issue: The real issue was (and
always had been) toll-free online access to the full-text of peer-reviewed
journal articles, i.e., Open Access (OA), in order to maximise their usage
and impact.

>   This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It
>   is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade, no-market) scientific and
>   scholarly publication (but that is the lion's share of the academic
>   corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for which the author does
>   not and never has expected to SELL the words.

[Moderator's note:  Due to the requirements of our listproc software and
the length of this posting, and with the permission of the author, we
refer you to the full message, which can be found at:

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

Many thanks]

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