Re: Article on arXiv

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

Why all this fuss?

A simple correction fixes the MIT FAQ (which also had some 
grammatical   gaffes):

http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/faculty-and-researchers/mit-faculty-open-access-policy/oapolicyprocedures/oa-policy-faq/#harmpub

> *Will this policy harm journals, scholarly societies, small
> friendly publishers, or peer review?
>
> *There is no empirical evidence that even when all articles are
> freely available, journals are canceled. The major societies in
> physics have not seen any impact on their publishing programs
> despite the fact that for more than 10 years an open access

> repository (arXiv) has been in existence
> containing nearly all of the physics  literature written in 
that
> time has been available and successful.

"that made freely available nearly all of the literature written 
in   certain fields of physics (e.g., High Energy Physics and 
astrophysics)   during that  interval."

(This makes the statement unimpeachably accurate [though still 
very   badly written[, while making the very same point -- not 
about physics   as a whole, but about those fields -- which also 
happen to have their   own journals.)

Stevan Harnad