Re: Time is on Whose Side?

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

At 01:15 16/05/2008, Joseph J. Esposito wrote:

> Thus Stevan Harnad:
>
> "This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly 
> -- to historians in hindsight."
>
> JE:  Great to have a prophet in our midst, but my concern is 
> more that Harnad and others continue to talk about the Internet 
> as it was five years ago.  The world has moved on.  Harnad talks 
> about institutional repositories as though they will be with us 
> in even a few years (ever hear of Software As A Service--that 
> is, services like Google and Salesforce.com?); and recently we 
> had Heather Morrison on this list extolling one-hour peer 
> review. Reading Peter Suber's blog is like getting into a time 
> machine that only runs backward.
>
> This debate--open access vs. toll access--is, oh, so very 1990s.
Joe, No, OA is very much of the 2000s and moving forward. More of 
that below.

In the 1990s as far as most journals were concerned the debate 
was print vs electronic. There were subject archives (e.g. arXiv) 
at that time, which were free but also electronic when journals 
weren't. The transition to digital journals has led inevitably to 
wider open access, but ironically it slowed progress towards free 
online access, what we now call OA, at that time because 
providing electronic content - with expansive new licencing 
terms, the 'big deal' - was largely seen as a sufficient step. 
The publishers cleverly recognised this in moving preemptively; 
the cleverer ones knew they were simply putting off the day of 
reckoning for free online access.

"The immediate future of online journals is set to be dominated 
by electronic editions based on established paper journals and 
retaining the appearance of familiar paper layouts through Adobe 
Acrobat. The innovative features made possible by online 
publishing may therefore be obscured for a time." A survey of STM 
online journals 1990-95: the calm before the storm, Hitchcock, 
Carr and Hall, January 1996 
http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/survey/survey.html

> What is happening instead is that open material is being 
> subsumed into broader marketing networks, whose ultimate aim is 
> to drive revenue (Nature Precedings) or build brands (Harvard 
> open access policy).  Better to think of open access as product 
> sampling or an aspect of brand management.  Sorry, Professor 
> Harnad, but you lost this one and the Internet won.
Some of the recent developments you mention - the Harvard 
mandates, 'cloud' services - are game-changers in their different 
ways, but these will strengthen institutional repositories, not 
replace them.

There have been other game-changers, and Stevan Harnad is 
responsible for more than most in the area of OA - repository 
software, OA citation impact services, mandates, to name a few - 
and if you hear your publishing colleagues refer to 'Romeo 
green', then he shares credit for that too with the original 
Loughborough project team.

Major recent developments such as the revised NIH mandate are 
consistent with calls for change made years ago by Stevan Harnad 
and others. How all this squares with having 'lost' I don't know.

Stevan Harnad has contributed to changing the game, but it's not 
over, just as it wasn't with the transition to digital journals. 
The objective is 100% OA, that is, to facilitate an open access 
version of every new research and scholarly paper, not a bit here 
and there (we've always had sampling, and that will never work 
for OA). That is the purpose of IRs, not just for a few years but 
for the foreseeable future given the 'preservation' objectives of 
many.

Disclosure, I work with Stevan Harnad. On these issues he 
challenges his colleagues who err as much as anyone else, but 
always with the same clear objective.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865