American-Scientist-E-PRINT-Forum: Self-Archive Unto Others As Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive

Doc name: opinion\harnad2.doc

Also exists in French see email [Please use French version too]

Self-Archive unto others . . . by Stevan Harnad

Scholars and scientists do research to create new knowledge so that others can use it to create still more new knowledge and apply it to improving people’s lives. They are paid to do research, but not to report their research. They report it their research for free because it’s not the royalty revenue from the sale of their research papers but rather their “research impact” that pays their salaries, funds their further research and earns them prestige and prizes. The more other researchers read, use, cite, and apply your findings, the greater your research impact. Hence So research papers are rather like advertisements: they bring rewards the more they are read and used.And since researchers give them away, a Hence any barriers that denying access to their potential users are a bad thing – for research, researchers and the society that funds the research and benefits from its findings (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/). Yet barriers do deny access to research papers. Tolls – in the form of journal Ssubscription and license fees tolls – must be paid by researchers’ universities for access to the journals in which the research is published. Yet the authors would much prefer it if there were no tolls at all, so that all would-be readers could use their research, and thereby maximize its impact. In the old days of paper-only publication, access-tolls were unavoidable because of the real and sizeable costs of printing and distribution.ng the paper. But today, in the today’s online age, that can all be done for almost nothing, on the Web. Yet access- blocking tolls are still being charged. Why? Research journal publication shers are is still stuck in the old system. Every All journals now has have both a paper edition and online edition, and they charge tolls for access to one or the other or both. Besides, most And most other kinds of authors are not like researchers: they do want to be paid royalties out of from the sales of their writing, so the toll barriers suit them just fine. The special case of r Research papers is are just a tiny and unrepresentative minority in the world of writing and its economics. So what are researchers, who seeking only research impact only, to do? The t Toll-booths deny access to all those potential users worldwide whose universities can’t afford to pay them. And journals are so expensive that most universities can’t no university can afford most more than a fraction journals (there are 24,000 research journals in all). Yet if the publishers cannot or will not make their research freely accessible for free on the Web, why can’t the researchers do it for themselves? ? Why don’t they just put them all up on their own Web sites for free? That is what the “self-archiving initiative” is doing. “Self-archiving” – http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ -- is one of the two open-access strategies of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ ) . To self-archive research is to deposit it it in the researcher’s own university “Eprint Archive.” -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html . (Eprints are electronic versions of research articles). The other second BOAI open- access strategy is to create new open-access journals, in place of the toll-access ones. But 24,000 journals is a large number to replace one by one, so self-archiving will probably need to come first lead the way. By self-archiving their papers in their own university’s Eprint Archives, researchers not only make them openly accessible to all potential users worldwide (their only real goal in doing so), but they also create competition with the toll-access version sold by the journals in which the research appears. No one knows what effect that competition will have. The open-access version and the toll-access version might continue to co-exist indefinitely. Or the open-access version may shrink the demand for the toll-access version, so the journals eventually have to downsize, cut their costs and become open-access journals. Research journals are dedicated to promoting research impact, not to blocking it. Fifty-five percent of journals them already officially support self-archiving in their copyright contracts. , because they are dedicated to promoting research impact, not to blocking it: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable.gif. Many of the rest those who do not yet support self-archiving officially will agree if asked by the author. For the few who journals that do not agree, simply self-archive the unrefereed preprint before submitting it to the journal, and, after refereeing, revision and acceptance, link it to a corrigenda file containing the substantive corrections.: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim. However much the journals downsize, there is one essential function that they will always have to perform, and that is peer review. But like the authors, the peers experts who evaluate review the research before it is published do it for free. , too. So the only real expense is administering the peer review. And that is what the journals have to keep on doing, because researchers cannot certify their own work. Quality-control always has to be out-sourced to a reputable, neutral third party. The good news is that, per article Fortunately, the cost per article of administering peer review is much less than a third of what is the combined tolls being paid per article in the combined tolls by all the universities that subscribe to the journal in which that article it appears. Peer review alone costs less than a third of the current tolls. If and when the subscribing universities are no longer paying to access the research output of other universities, they will easily be able to pay publishers journals the peer-review costs for their own research output out of only a third of their annual windfall toll-savings. That way, the essential costs get paid and the research is all openly accessible. And a All that’s needed it needs to make it happen is reciprocal self-archiving by universities, according to the Golden Rule: “self-archive unto others as ye would have them self-archive unto you.” Universities and research-funders should need merely extend their existing “publish or perish” mandate to “publish with maximal access.” (by self-archiving: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm ), Even Then, even if universities keep on paying journals the exact same tolls for many years to come, self-archiving will have freed all the new knowledge that scholars and scientists create, so that all other scholars and scientists can already use it to create still more new knowledge and to apply it to improving people’s lives.

Stevan Harnad is a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal.