*The lesson here: if people are devoted to their information, you can't get 'em to give it away for free, even if it costs a ton to hold on to it, and far fewer people will read it.
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/feb10/Poynder.shtml
FEATURE
Interview With Stevan Harnad
A Prophet Whose Time Has Come
by Richard Poynder
In June 1994, Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K., posted a message on a mailing list that called on fellow researchers to make their papers freely available on the internet. The message became known as the Subversive Proposal.
“For centuries,” wrote Harnad, “it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications made the Faustian bargain to allow a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership because that was the only way to make their work public in the era when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) were the only way to do so. But today there is another way. …”
In the online age, scientists can make their research freely available to all, he wrote, allowing them to better “build on one another’s work in that collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.” And the self-archiving movement was born; this later became known as Green Open Access.
Concluding that the logical place for researchers to make their papers available was not in large discipline-based databases such as arXiv (the physics preprint server) but in a network of local repositories, Harnad also became a key figure in the development of the institutional repository movement. (((One of those revolutionary groups one has never heard of. Maybe if they had some really violent-looking radical T-shirts: UP AGAINST THE REPOSITORY WALL, something of that ilk.)))
But it has been far from smooth sailing. Harnad had assumed that researchers would immediately see the logic of self-archiving, not the least of which are the benefits they would gain from the greater visibility and impact that their research would have once it was freely available. However, few did (only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously). (((That's because scientists don't work for "logical" reasons.)))
Out of growing frustration with researchers’ passivity, (((make that "passive aggression"))) Harnad became an ardent advocate for the introduction of self-archiving mandates. For the past several years, he has grown hoarse calling upon universities and research funders to require researchers to self-archive their papers, a message he feels has too often been diluted by growing interest in OA publishing (Gold Open Access), which Harnad believes to be a far less certain road to OA. (((There's always a rival freeware mafia. "Give it away." "No, no, man – give it to us. On our terms, not theirs.")))
Fifteen years after he posted his Subversive Proposal, the self-styled “weary archivangelist” is a somewhat disappointed OA advocate today.
There are still only 139 mandates in the world now, and many of those that have been introduced lack teeth. Consequently, most institutional repositories remain all but empty. Meanwhile, the research community keeps succumbing to what Harnad calls “gold fever.”
But it is not all doom and gloom. (((Because otherwise Microsoft would declare darkness the standard.)))
“All of the U.K.’s Research Funding Councils and 14 U.K. universities have mandated OA,” says Harnad. “So have NIH [the National Institutes of Health], Harvard and MIT in the U.S.”
And with last year’s reintroduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) and President Obama’s recent public consultation on requiring U.S. federal science and technology funding agencies to introduce public access policies, Harnad is hopeful that in 2010 we will finally see the tipping point needed to usher in universal OA. (((Keep hope alive.)))
Harnad discusses this and more in the interview that follows.
Q: Last year was the 15th anniversary of the Subversive Proposal , an online message you posted in June 1994 (and which subsequently formed the basis of a book ) calling on fellow researchers to make their papers freely available online by “ self-archiving ” them. This was 7 years before the term “open access” (OA) was coined. What would you say has been achieved since 1994?
A: The first point to make is that my call was not heeded! NIH Director and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus voiced a similar hope in 1999 (E-biomed), another milestone, but far more influential. (His call was not heeded either.)
There have been a number of other milestones. The first was the creation of the Cogprints repository in 1997 in order to help researchers self-archive. CogPrints was modeled on the physics preprint repository arXiv in the hope that if people wouldn’t put their papers into their own local ftp archive (as I had proposed), they might put them in a central one such as arXiv (i.e., Cogprints).
Today, Cogprints has still only attracted about 2,500 deposits, so it is a miserable failure....
(((More:)))
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/
(((Is that a real problem? Well... maybe I could find out, but...)))
