Pogo: We have seen the enemy, and he is us...

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

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 brs4@lehigh.edu wrote:

> As someone who takes the maxim, if it looks too good to be true, it
> probably is, I confess to being skeptical about publisher guarantees
> of an author "right" to self-archiving.
> 
> Let's see what publishers do when someone does the obvious thing: provide
> an open access software engine that takes an article title and takes one
> directly to the corresponding self-archived article w/o a lot of
> background noise.

Too late: The engine(s) already exist. For starters, see:

http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
    and
http://citebase.eprints.org/

And, for example, a quarter of a million articles have been self-archived
by physicists since 1991, since well before any physics publishers were
green: Far from trying to get those articles taken off-line, most physics
publishers have since given self-archiving their formal green light.  
http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html

(APS was, as far as I know, the very first publisher to go green):

    "Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society)" (1999)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0471.html

So may I suggest to the research community and its funders that, rather
than listening to the armchair prophets of gloom (who have been
speculating for over a decade now), they should look instead at the
empirical facts and then go ahead and self-archive? The light is green,
and it doesn't get any greener...
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31-worries

In other words (to paraphrase Pogo), we have seen the enemy, and he is
*us* (not our publishers!)!

Swan & Brown's (2004) JISC/OSI survey reported asked authors

    "how they would feel if their employer or funding body required
    them to deposit copies of their published articles in... [OA
    archives]. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly..."

    Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey
    Report.  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html

    Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access
    publishing.  Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224.
    http://www.ingentaselect.com/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v17n3/s7/

So 100% OA simply awaits the implementation of the UK Select Committee's
and the US House Appropriations Committee's recommendation to mandate
taking the green road to OA.

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Stevan Harnad