Re: Correction (RE: Thatcher vs. Harnad)

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

  4. Navigation (info-glut)

         "I worry about self-archiving because there is already too much
         to read, and it is already too hard to navigate it on paper;
         adding eprints will just make this situation even worse.

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#4.Navigation

  7. Peer review

         "I worry about self-archiving because on-line eprints are not
         refereed, as they are on-paper: What will become of peer review?"

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#7.Peer

Stevan Harnad


On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Paul Courant wrote:

> The "good thing" is not barriers to authors per se, it is
> effective mechanisms to allow readers to avoid wasting their
> scarce time.  The publishing industry is often helpful, not so
> much via pricing and scarcity but via trusted editors, reviewers
> and imprints.  Almost everyone in the scholarly world also uses
> informal networks for the same purpose. If I want to find out
> what to read in an area that I do not know well, I make a few
> calls and send a few e-mails and usually have a very nice reading
> list by the end of the day.  Joe's parable of the Economist makes
> the point that time is scarce very well.  I agree that time is
> scarce, and I would argue that the   difficult issue is
> determining how to allocate our time across things that we have
> NOT already seen.  I'm not sure I want to trust scholarly
> publishers to make that choice for me via imposing barriers on
> authors, although I'm glad to accept their help, and the help of
> formal and informal communities of practice, as well as that of
> my neighborhood librarian, and Peter Brantley's listserv and
> blog, just to name a few.
>
> On 6/28/07 10:29 PM, "Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Barriers to authors are a good thing, not a bad thing.  While 
>> no one would want a system where only the rich can publish 
>> (which is not the case today) or only the rich can read (which 
>> is not the case today), I would think no one would want a 
>> system where any author (poster?) can lay equal claim on our 
>> attention.  The question is how to apportion attention.  The 
>> current dominant method, the user-pays publishing world, for 
>> all its flaws, does a good job in allocating attention. Its 
>> assumption is that people will measure the allocation of 
>> attention by the amount of money they choose to spend on 
>> objects of their attention.  Thus publishers compete to have 
>> the most attention-worthy products. You pay attention to what 
>> you pay for.
>>
>> I cancelled my subscription to The Economist not because I 
>> can't afford it but because I don't have the time to read it. 
>> It competes with everything else I have to read, a list that 
>> continues to grow. The Economist is a very good publication, 
>> but not good enough, at least to me.  I stopped reading it 
>> when I began to subscribe to Peter Brantley's READ 2.0 
>> mailgroup.  I had to choose, but not because of money. 
>> Brantley could charge three times the price of The Economist 
>> and I would still subscribe.
>>
>> The image promulgated by some open access advocates is a world 
>> of researchers with time on their hands.  They have nothing to 
>> occupy themselves with since they can't get access to 
>> everything that is published, everything that has been 
>> published, and presumably anything that would be published if 
>> publishers weren't such nasty SOBs who like to say no. 
>> What's better, a doubling of accessible materials or an added 
>> hour in the workday to review materials already available.?
>>
>> Joe Esposito