FOR WHOM THE GATE TOLLS?
How to Free the Scholarly and Scientific Research Literature
Online Through Author Auto-Archiving
Stevan Harnad
Intelligence/Agents/Multimedia Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
ABSTRACT:
It is a foregone conclusion that all refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them
already are. This means that one can access them from any networked desk-top. The literature
will all be interconnected by citation, author, and keyword/subject links, allowing for unheard-of
power and ease of access and navigability. Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be
linked to the official refereed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates,
comments, responses, and underlying empirical databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness
and interactiveness of scholarly and scientific research and communication in remarkable new
ways. New scientometric indicators of digital impact are also emerging <http://opcit.eprints.org>
to chart the online course of knowledge. But there is still one last frontier to cross before science
reaches the optimal and the inevitable: Just as there is no longer any need to be constrained by
the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer any need to be
constrained by the impact-blocking financial fire-walls of
Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature that its authors
have always donated for free (and its referees have refereed for free), with the sole goal of
maximizing their impact on research (by accessing the eyes and minds of fellow-research) and
hence on society. Generic interoperable (OAi-compliant) software is now available for
institutions to install so their authors can self-archive their refereed papers publicly in
Auto-Archives <http://www.eprints.org/> for free. This will usher in the optimal and the
inevitable: Journal publication will down-size to just implementing the service of
Quality-Control and Certification (QC/C, through peer review and editing), which will be paid
for up-front at the author-institution end out of only a small portion (about $300 per paper) of the
annual savings from the cancellation of all S/L/P tolls at the reader-institution end. Journal
publishers are best advised to prepare for and accommodate the optimal/inevitable solution for
science in the new era of "Scholarly Skywriting," rather than to try to delay or block it via
restrictive submissions and copyright policies that merely amplify the conflict of interest inherent
in the revolutionary possibilities for scholarly and scientific communication opened up by the
PostGutenberg Galaxy.
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication
Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343
(reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the
Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review
2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2 1992; and
in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach Holme
Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of
Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A.
Okerson, ed), 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research
Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and in
Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994; and in Japanese in "Research and
Development of Scholarly Information Dissemination Systems 1994-1995.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.h
tml
Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
[online]
(5 Nov. 1998) and in Exploit Interactive 5 (2000)
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
Longer version:
http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals.
D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
Harnad, S. (2000) E-Knowledge: Freeing the Refereed Journal Corpus
Online. Computer Law & Security Report 16(2)
78-87. [Rebuttal to Bloom Editorial in Science and Relman
Editorial in New England Journalof Medicine]
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm
Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in
the online era. Culture Machine 2
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Varian/new1.htm
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/cmach/launchpad/frm_f1.htm
Light, P., Light, V., Nesbitt, E. & Harnad, S. (2000) Up for Debate:
CMC as a support for course related discussion in a campus
university setting. In R. Joiner (Ed) Rethinking Collaborative
Learning. London: Routledge (in press).
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.skyteaching.htm
l
Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing
Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the
OpCit Project). Current Science 79(5) 629-638.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.htm
http://www.iisc.ernet.in/~currsci/sep102000/629.pdf
Harnad, S. (2000) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the
Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing. Lancet
(in press)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm