Re: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Todd Puccio <puccio@nova.edu> 
wrote:

> ...On the topic of researchers not being able to afford access 
> to articles...
>
> ...If a particular article is known, how often is it 
> unavailable through Inter-Library Loan ? ILL is very quick 
> these days and much less expensive than an entire journal 
> subscription.

But incomparably more expensive and incomparably slower than just 
clicking to have immediate and sure access to every potentially 
relevant article.

***

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu> wrote:

> The key question, for me, is what "use" here means. If it means 
> just consulting a draft version for the ideas and information 
> it conveys in a general way, I'm sure that is no different from 
> what has been going on forever in the world of scholarship.

Except that universally mandated self-archiving means that anyone 
can immediately consult any one of the annual 2.5 million 
peer-reviewed papers published, not just the ones their 
institution can afford to subscribe to. In the past, the only way 
to do that was to wait for Current Contents, mail a reprint 
request, and wait again, hoping for the best.

> If it means citing the draft version in your own published 
> article, then I'd say there is ground for concern. 
> Proliferation of citations to drafts cannot be good for 
> scholarship. This is not to say it doesn't, or never should, 
> happen: one may think, for instance, of references to a paper 
> delivered at an academic conference, which is usually not a 
> peer-reviewed version. But the more that Green OA encourages 
> people to be lazy and cite drafts instead of versions of 
> record, the more scholarship will suffer.

We are talking about final, peer-reviewed drafts, and yes, the 
published articles can be cited on the basis of having accessed 
the final draft. No, scholarship will not suffer from this vastly 
enhanced access and usage, it will benefit vastly. Minor 
discrepancies between the final draft and the version of record 
will occasionally occur (major ones even more rarely), and will 
be corrected once detected, and scholarliness will adapt to the 
new possibilities. But for an active researcher, the possibility 
of such minor discrepancies is certainly not grounds for 
renouncing (or delaying) the possibility of all that newfound 
access.

Stevan Harnad