Re: Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation

["B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>]

Joe Esposito says:

"What is really needed in the research community is not open 
access but 'open access follow-through.'"

I'm not quite sure what "open access follow-through" entails. 
Maybe Joe could explain?

Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN


--- On Mon, 8/18/08, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
> Subject: Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Date: Monday, August 18, 2008, 5:47 PM
> Sigh.  Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> I kept resisting the posting of a message that amounts to 
> "nyah, nyah" but this is too rich: 25 Green OA self-archiving 
> mandates by funders worldwide, including NIH, 6/7 of RCUK and 
> ERC, and 25 institutional mandates, including Harvard, Stanford 
> and CERN, and Joe and Jan think the future of green is bleak?"
>
> JE:  I have never said the future of OA is bleak.  I have said 
> precisely the opposite, that OA is inevitable.  And Harnad 
> knows this, but insists on misrepresenting my position.  I say 
> he knows this because he wrote a long and vitriolic response to 
> an article of mine several years ago; that article has been 
> cited on this list before ("The Devil You Don't Know," 
> http://firstmonday.org). In that piece I asserted that "Open 
> Access is the future." Consider how bizarre this is:  Harnad 
> writes a long attack on an article that mostly agrees with him.
>
> What I have said is that OA in itself is unimportant and that 
> it inevitably will drive up costs.  The Harvard faculty can 
> mandate OA for itself (and, as far as I know, it is within the 
> faculty's right to do so), but it won't make people read more 
> thoughtfully. The NIH can mandate OA for materials based on 
> research it underwites (and why not?  They paid for it), but it 
> won't improve the quality of the material.  I think it is 
> highly doubtful (but neither proven nor provable) that the OA 
> articles mandated by the Wellcome Trust (for research it has 
> funded, etc., etc.) will yield more citations or higher impacts 
> than had the material been toll access.  OA doesn't make us 
> smarter, it does not improve the economy of the United Kingdom 
> (one of Harnad's claims of a couple years ago, if I understood 
> the argument correctly), and it does not "democratize" 
> knowledge or research, except in Lake Woebegone, where all the 
> children are above average.
>
> Thus, even as OA is becoming increasingly widespread, the 
> rationale for supporting it becomes weaker and weaker. This is 
> the house of cards:  not OA itself, but the reasons to support 
> it.
>
> What is really needed in the research community is not open 
> access but "open access follow-through."  But this 
> follow-through applies whether documents are OA or toll access. 
> And that is why OA is not that important.  Harnad is solving 
> the wrong problem.
>
> Joe Esposito