[Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/621-guid.html ]

A new open-access repository for preprints on biomedical research
findings prior to peer review -- "PLoS Currents: Influenza" -- is a
welcome development, as are all services that provide free online
access to research findings, before and after refereeing, in all
fields. As long as the unrefereed/refereed distinction is prominently
tagged, as it will be, it is always good to encourage researchers in
all fields to make their drafts available for peer and public scrutiny
as soon as they feel ready to do so.

It would, however, make more sense for central repositories like PLoS
Currents to harvest their contents from the researchers' own
institutional repositories, rather than to try to serve only as yet
another locus for direct central deposit. Researchers' institutions
are the universal providers of all research output, in all fields, and
central repositories should be facilitating universal self-archiving
and self-archiving mandates, rather than competing with them. That
said, self-archiving mandates [i.e., institutional and funder policies
requiring OA deposit] can and should be applied only to refereed
postprints, not to unrefereed preprints, whose self-archiving must be
left a matter of author choice.

I'm not sure, though, that is it quite accurate to describe me, in
1999, as having been "[o]ne of the fiercest critics of the proposal"!

I greeted the e-biomed proposal as an "extremely welcome and important
initiative... deserving of the strongest support" and went on [as is
my wont] to make some "recommendations... in the interests of
strengthening the proposal by clarifying some crucial central aspects
and modifying or eliminating some minor, weaker aspects."

Among those recommendations was that of making and retaining a clear
distinction between between (1) peer-reviewed journal publishing (now
called "Gold OA") and author self-archiving (now called "Green OA"),
as well as a distinction between (2) unrefereed drafts ("preprints")
and refereed, published articles ("postprints"). Each of these crucial
distinctions was conflated in the original 1999 e-biomed proposal, and
it is good to see them de-conflated 10 years later.

The fundamental dichotomy between unrefereed drafts and refereed
articles predates Open Access, PLoS, e-biomed, Arxiv, the Web and the
Net.

What has changed is that it can now all be done at a global scale, far
more rapidly, far more interactively, and by a means that is freely
accessible to everyone.

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). ABSTRACT:
Scientific publication is a continuum, from unrefereed preprints to
refereed reprints, to revisions, commentaries, and replies. All this
is optimally done electronically, as "Scholarly Skywriting."

___ (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending American Physical
Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic Publishing. Serials
Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for Electronic Publishing,
pp. 58 - 61.

___ (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of
Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.)
Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp.
397-414.

___ (1996) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality
Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G.
(Eds.) Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier. Cambridge MA:
MIT Press. Pp 103-118.

___ (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer
Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292.

___ (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
[online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B.
(2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield.
Pp. 235-242.

___ (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the
Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines. Retour a la tradition orale:
écrire dans le ciel a la vitesse de la pensée. Dans: Salaün,
Jean-Michel & Vendendorpe, Christian (dir). Le défis de la publication
sur le web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et méta-éditions. Presses de
l'enssib.

___ (2002) BBS Valedictory Editorial.

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open
Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs,
N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects.
Chandos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum