"We admire the goal, and suspect that evolutionary forces may be moving us toward it. We have decided to make our own back research reports and articles freely available after 12 months--at our own Web site--later this year." (AAAS)

The release of the contents of Science after a delay of 12-months is too little, too late.

"To begin a conversation among scholars with a threat of economic boycott is unfortunate." (AAAS)

"[T]he archive [Roberts et al.] advocate... should include all scientific papers... should be free... PubMed Central (PMC) is given as the model... We believe other alternatives exist that can meet most of these goals faster and more effectively without putting nonprofit scholarly publishing at risk." (AAAS)

There are problems, however, with the Roberts et al. proposal: Although a free online version of the entire refereed corpus would undoubtedly be beneficial to the world scientific and scholarly community, this proposal does ask both publishers and authors to give something up in exchange: Publishers are asked to give up their contents online, and authors are asked to give up those publishers who decline to do so. If these sacrifices are necessary in order to gain the benefit of a free refereed literature, then we can weigh them, along with the likelihood that the parties involved will be willing or even able to make the sacrifices. But are the sacrifices really necessary?

The answer is that they are not, for there is an alternative way to free the entire refereed literature without asking anyone to give up anything, and that is through author self-archiving. The strategy has already been tested and demonstrated to work by physicists. They have already freed 30-40% of their literature in this way. All that is needed is for physicists to accelerate their own rate of self-archiving (which, at its current linear growth rate, would take another decade to free 100% of its refereed literature) and to extend it to all the other disciplines.

Physics self-archiving began as centralized (in the Los Alamos Archive and its 14 mirror sites worldwide). What can now accelerate and extend the self-archiving initiative to all the other disciplines is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which has designed a standard for metadata tagging and harvesting that makes distributed interoperable Archives possible at the individual University and Research Institution level; interoperability means it can all be harvested into a global "virtual" archive, its full contents seamlessly searchable and accessible for free from any researcher's desktop. Institutions can now create OAI-compliant Eprint Archives using free, open-source software: http://www.eprints.org. The responsibility and the incentive and the initiative for self-archiving can then be distributed worldwide at the University level, where its cost per paper becomes negligible, whereas its benefits in terms of increased accessibility, visibility and research impact are appreciable (not to mention its eventual potential to relieve the institutional libraries' serials crisis).

"There already are multiple-journal sites--for example, the nonprofit HighWire Press (HWP), which archives over 230 journals, including biological, physical and interdisciplinary papers. More than 200,000 articles are freely available at this site. By comparison, there are only about a dozen journals at PMC, limited currently to biology." (AAAS)

"Why not begin with the already populated venue and add the integration, rather than the other way around? Why not use taxpayer dollars to promote innovative search technologies that do not require taking control of services provided by the private sector?" (AAAS)

"The proposition of Roberts et al. raises problems for Science, and for other journals. First, it will reroute an economically important source of online traffic for journals that offer content and other products on their sites. " (AAAS)

Currently, both the essentials (QC/C) and the add-ons are "wrapped" into the same product, with the result that the refereed papers are held hostage to the add-ons, which are kept behind a financial fire-wall and paid for by Subscription, Site-License, or Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls.

It is from these S/L/P access-barriers that refereed research must be freed, and the arithmetic is already clear: If and when the availability of the free online version of refereed papers causes publisher S/L/P revenues to shrink (and institutional S/L/P savings to grow) to the point where there is no longer enough money to pay the essential 10% QC/C costs out of the S/L/P revenues, then they can be covered by the institutions out of 10% of their annual windfall S/L/P savings in the form of per-paper fees paid to journals for the QC/C service for their own authors' papers.

In other words, there is no benefit whatsoever to research and researchers in maintaining "an economically important source of online traffic for journals" when there is clearly an alternative that can provide the QC/C and free online access too. Journals that are not interested in downsizing to this new PostGutenberg niche can elect to pull out, in which case their editorial boards, referees, authors and titles can migrate to new journal publishers that are happy with the new niche.

But this endstate is unlikely to be reached either by publisher voluntary downsizing now, or by author migration to new journals (although it would be splendid if it could). It will only be reached under pressure from the natural force of author/institution self-archiving.

"Second, unlimited redistribution of content could lead to misuse of content and loss of quality control. " (AAAS)

"Third, it may expose users to risks historically associated with monopoly suppliers. For example, recently PubMed--on which PMC will depend--unexpectedly failed to process new content for over a month, inconveniencing authors and publishers." (AAAS)

And have the editors of Science not noticed that journals occasionally slip on deadlines too? In any case, whatever it is that makes the current journal literature reliable and robust, we can be sure that it is not eo ipso the fact that S/L/P meters are running.

"Subscription and advertising revenue will be at some risk and transferring primary access to someone else's site may expose us to further losses." (AAAS)

"The value we add--through peer review, perspective and context-setting analysis of research, and good news coverage--requires revenue support from advertising." (AAAS)

"Moreover, Science supports other activities of AAAS--including science and public policy, kindergarten through 12th- grade education, a career-mentoring Web site for young scientists, and innovative "knowledge environments." These benefit scientists from all fields. Posting our back content on a site that primarily serves biomedical scientists would confer a benefit on one group by taking benefits away from another--creating, in effect, a transfer payment from the sciences in general to biology in particular. That bothers us." (AAAS)

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm

But if Science authors were asked forthrightly whether they wish to continue subisdizing AAS's "other activities" at the cost of their own lost research impact (because of the S/L/P toll-barriers), is there any doubt at all what their reply would be?

If, however, researchers were ever asked, clearly and directly, whether they would like to see the accessibility and impact of their research continue to be held hostage to all these other "good works," is there any doubt whatsoever as to what their reply would be?

"We worry, too, about another group of journals that will be entering a riskier environment. Our association is an umbrella organization, including many specialized scientific societies as affiliates. Their more focused journals must remain viable to ensure continued publishing options in highly specialized fields and for younger scientists. In most cases, academic library subscriptions provide the economic "floor" that guarantees financial sustainability. If papers from specialized journals were to become available on the PMC site, budget-conscious library directors would be tempted to cancel subscriptions. Some of the signers of the petition are scientists who belong to those very societies. Have they considered that their initiative will put PMC in competition with their own journals? " (AAAS)

The earlier formula -- that the 10% QC/C costs can always be paid out of the 100 S/L/P savings -- covers all refereed journals, great and small.

"When tax-exempt organizations go into competition with commercial entities they must pay unrelated-business income tax. When tax-supported organizations compete with commercial entities and nonprofits, the public has usually raised strong objections." (AAAS)

"There are also questions about whether the proposed location for PMC--the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health--is the right one. NIH already sponsors, through its extramural programs, much of the biomedical research PMC will archive. It regulates the conduct of that research, controls much of the training of the next generation of researchers, and archives primary data. It now proposes that the results of the research it funds be given over by publishers and authors to a server subject to its exclusive control. The Congress or the President can eliminate support for certain kinds of science and have done so in the past. Would PMC then be able to archive papers on those subjects? Concentrating this kind of womb-to-tomb control in a single federal agency has risks, and we should ask whether we are entirely comfortable with a state-run, centrally managed economy in biomedicine." (AAAS)

"Proponents of this plan include scientists of high reputation: Nobel laureates, leaders of institutions, and others whom we all admire. Nonetheless, we think its potential consequences require careful analysis and policy debate. We at Science are determined to participate in a constructive spirit." (AAAS)

REFERENCES

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://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 http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html

Harnad, S. (1994) A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

Harnad, S. (1998a) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Free the Online-Only Refereed Literature. American Scientist Forum. http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

Harnad, S. (1998b) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature 395(6698): 127-128 http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html

Harnad, S. (1998/2000) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html Longer version in Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html

Harnad, S. (1999a) 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. (1999b) Advancing Science By Self-Archiving Refereed Research. Science dEbates [online] 31 July 1999.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12

Harnad, S. (2000a) 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 Journal of Medicine]
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm

Harnad, S. (2000b) Ingelfinger Over-Ruled: The Role of the Web in the Future of Refereed Medical Journal Publishing. The Lancet Perspectives 256 (December Supplement): s16.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm

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

Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in the online era: What Will Be For-Fee And What Will Be For-Free? Culture Machine 2 (Online Journal)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Varian/new1.htm
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm

Odlyzko, A.M. (1998) The economics of electronic journals. In: Ekman R. and Quandt, R. (Eds) Technology and Scholarly Communication. Univ. Calif. Press, 1998.
http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/complete.html

Odlyzko, A.M. (1999a) Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals, A. M. Odlyzko. Journal of Electronic Publishing 4(4)
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/odlyzko0404.html

Odlyzko, A.M. (1999b) The rapid evolution of scholarly communication," to appear in the proceedings of the 1999 PEAK conference.
http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/rapid.evolution.pdf