Reply to Harnad's post

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

>But to be able to do that, you will first have to deaconflate, once and
>for all, "OA" and "OA publishing"!

JE:  Economically speaking, this can't be done, except perhaps for a brief
period.  I wish it were otherwise, but it's not.  If libraries begin to
cancel subscriptions to journals because some or all of the journals'
articles are available through self-archiving (and why wouldn't they?),
then the journals will begin to cut back; some will decline, some will
disappear. Many will shed not a tear for such an outcome.  While the
*concept* of OA can be distinguished from that of OA Publishing, the
practical outcomes are the same.

And this, contra Stevan Harnad, is why the simple notion of author
self-archiving is bad for authors (emphasis on "simple"), because it
undermines the credentialling system without setting up an alternative
system.  I happen to believe that a new credentialling system will evolve,
and at its heart will be the elimination of pre-publication peer review
(substituting post-publication peer review).  It's simply naive to think
that something as radical and disruptive as OA could be brought about
without some painful dislocations in other parts of the system.

If one wanted to accelerate author self-archiving (and why not?), the way
to do this would be to add value to submitted articles by establishing a
system and network of links, annotations, and commentary.  In other words,
the fixed text of the article must become a "processed text," which places
the article into the dynamic community for which and from which it was
written (http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/esposito/index.html).

Joe Esposito