On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>> Stevan Harnad: We must think beyond just the NIH
mandate to
>> all university research output, funded and
unfunded, in all
>> disciplines.
>
> You don't really mean "all," do you, Stevan?
Repeatedly in the
> past you have excluded research that appears in book
form.
> This, of course, doesn't make sense from the standpoint
of
> achieving comprehensive coverage of all research output
of
> universities and imposes artificial barriers between
research
> appearing in different formats. There can ultimately be
no
> intellectual justification for this separation.
You are quite right, Sandy. I don't mean all research
output, I
mean all peer-reviewed journal/conference output (the c. 2.5
million papers per year).
(I keep ritually reiterating the same portmanteau phrases so
often that I sometimes truncate them to give those who have
heard
them too often a bit of a break!)
And you are also right that a distinction between a research
paper and a research monograph is not a principled
distinction
insofar as content is concerned. It is just a practical
distinction, insofar as (current) author motivation is
concerned.
But as a current, practical distinction, it is pertinent,
accurate, and needs to be taken into account:
*All* peer-reviewed research paper authors, without a single
exception, give away their articles, having written them
*exclusively* for research impact, not for royalty income
(actual
or potential). Let us call them "give-away
authors."
http:
//cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#1.1
This is simply not true of all scholarly/scientific book and
monograph authors (often the same authors, but wearing
different
hats): Not all (probably not even most) such book authors
are
give-away authors.
Hence it follows that even if most do not do it
spontaneously of
their own accord (for paradoxical reasons I've dubbed
"Zeno's
Paralysis -- consisting mostly of overwork inertia,
copyright
paranoia, and simple ignorance, lately diminishing),
give-away
authors can be induced by a mandate from their institutions
and
funders to go ahead and give away their give-away work by
self-archiving it free for all online (preferably in their
Institutional Repository), *willingly* (as Alma Swan's
surveys
have shown). http://eprints.
ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/
But non-give-away authors cannot and should not be mandated
to
give away their non-give-away work, so we should not even
think
of trying it. That would only complicate the already
needlessly
complicated road to Green OA self-archiving mandates for the
give-away work (already complicated by premature and
unnecessary
over-reaching on copyright retention and by completely
unnecessary insistence on direct central deposit instead of
institutional deposit and central harvesting).
</ritual-repetition>
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives
/369-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives
/374-guid.html
Counter-productively insisting on the OA self-archiving of
books
that authors do not currently wish to give away would be
very
much like insisting on copyright retention by authors who
are
paranoid about not putting their chances of publication in
their
preferred journals at any perceived risk. And it would be
just as
unnecessary -- since, for both of these desirable outcomes,
their
time will come in due course (as it will for Gold OA
publishing
too). But first things first. And it is Green OA
self-archiving
mandates for give-away research that will pave the way.
A symptom of the fact that OA book mandates would be a no-no
comes from the recent kerfuffle about Iowa Theses: Even
though
most theses are probably author give-aways, and will be
willingly
self-archived, those held in reserve for future book
publication
will not, so OA should not be mandated for them.
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/march/031708mfa.html
Here again, Green OA IRs offer a possible interim
compromise:
Like articles published in journals that have not yet
endorsed
immediate OA self-archiving, non-give-away theses can be
deposited as Closed Access instead of Open Access. The
authors
need simply refuse all email eprint requests received via
the
Button. (They can even store their refused eprint requests
and
use them as evidence of demand for their work when they
approach
a publisher!)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives
/274-guid.html
Stevan Harnad
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