Harold Varmus: "Self-Archiving is Not Open Access"

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

             ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

If you wonder why there is internecine squabbling within the Open 
Access (OA) Community, you need go no further than Richard 
Poynder's latest OA interview (a skillful, revealing elicitation, 
as always), this time of Nobel Laureate and PLoS co-founder, 
Harold Varmus: 
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/06/interview-with-harold-varmus.html

     RICHARD POYNDER:
     "[T]here has been a long-standing and vigorous debate within the OA
     movement about the respective merits of the so-called Green and Gold
     roads. The debate seems to revolve around the issue of whether it
     is better for OA advocates to put all their energy into the creation
     of new open access journals, or to focus on lobbying research funders
     and governments to require researchers to self-archive the papers
     they have published in subscription journals. What are your views
     on that debate?"

     HAROLD VARMUS:
     "My views are very clear: at this point self-archiving is not Open
     Access. One of the important components of the definition of
     Open Access that we have all agreed on is that research information
     should be placed in a searchable database. Right now the only way
     to be confident that you can do that effectively is by using a large
     public digital library like PubMed Central."

I am spared having to respond (yet again) to this egregious 
nonsense by Peter Suber's spare reply in Open Access News:

     PETER SUBER:
     "Varmus is wrong to say that self-archiving is not OA. OA is a kind
     of access, not a kind of venue, and 'OA repositories' deliver this
     kind of access as well as 'OA journals', and distributed repositories
     deliver it as well as central repositories. Repositories certainly
     count as 'searchable databases'."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_04_fosblogarchive.html#114960586121434685

To see what definition of Open Access "we have all agreed on," 
please see the BOAI definition of OA, first coined by the BOAI 
(Peter Suber, principal drafter), 2001: 
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

Nor is the (profound) disagreement about the definition of OA 
merely semiological quibbling. The difference is strategic, and 
it has profound practical implications for OA (sic), and how soon 
we manage to reach it. Harold's continuing confusions about (what 
was eventually dubbed) OA began early on (1999) 
http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 but 
certainly not as early as OA itself began, which was in the 
1980's, with computer scientists self-archiving their papers in 
Anonymous FTP Archives. The rest of the road to the optimal and 
inevitable outcome is history still in the making (an outcome 
that some OA advocates are hastening and facilitating; others, 
alas, rather less than they might if they listened a little more 
attentively and reflected a bit more: The Midas Touch can be the 
Kiss of Death sometimes...)

     Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis. To
     appear in: Jacobs, N., (Ed) Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical
     and Economic Aspects. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited, Chapter 8.
     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/

Stevan Harnad