>AMERICAN SCIENTIST, published by SIGMA XI, the Scientific Research Society
>invites you to contribute to an On-Line Forum On:
>
>    Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals
>    Walker, T.J. (1998) American Scientist 86(5)
>    http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html
>
>Moderated by:        Stevan Harnad
>                     Cognitive Sciences Center
>                     Department of Electronics and Computer Science
>                     Southampton University
>                     Highfield, Southampton
>                     SO17 1BJ  United Kingdom
>                     [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]
>                     http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/intpub.html
>                     http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.ht
>
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>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Moderator's Introduction:
>
>(Please don't just read this, but the Walker target article too.)
>
>                FOR WHOM THE GATE TOLLS?
>
>        FREEING THE ON-LINE-ONLY REFEREED JOURNAL LITERATURE
> 
>                Stevan Harnad
>                Southampton University
>
>It is a foregone conclusion that the refereed journal corpus will
>all soon be available on-line. The question is: Will access to it have
>to continue to be blocked by financial firewalls as in the era of paper
>publication?
>
>This is not just a matter of marginal conveniences or utopian details:
>The difference between free and fee-based access is the difference
>between a seamless, completely interlinked learned literature at the
>fingertips of every scholar and scientist in the world and a
>jerry-rigged agglomeration of toll-ridden proprietary packages -- the
>on-line counterparts of exactly what we have now in the trade world of
>scholarly paper journals, funded through Subscriptions, Site-Licenses
>and Pay-Per-View (tear-sheets, photocopy, interlibrary loan)
>(S/SL/PPV) tolls,
>
>And for the author, the difference is even greater than for the reader,
>for it is the difference between free versus toll-gated access
>to one's work, work that one has submitted to the journal for free
>with the express wish of having it certified and then made public.
>
>What will the true cost of certification and publication be once
>everything is on-line-only? In other words, what will be the cost of
>quality control for content (refereeing/editing) and form
>(copy-editing/mark-up) once all expenses associated with paper
>production are gone? Paper publishers say they will not be much lower
>(30% at most), but today's brave new on-line-only publishers are
>finding otherwise (70% at least). If the latter are right, then it will
>no longer make sense to recover those reduced costs from S/SL/PPV, with
>its attendant restrictions on access: Author pages charges, funded by
>University savings from journal subscription cancellations, could cover
>them up-front, and all authors, readers, and Learned Inquiry itself
>would be the beneficiaries.
>
>Suppose we agree that this outcome would be the best one: How do we
>get there (page-charge-based free access to all) from here (access
>restricted by S/SL/PPV)?
>
>Thomas Walker (1998) recognises that making the refereed journal
>literature in all disciplines on-line and free for all, with no
>financial firewalls, is the optimal and inevitable solution for science
>and scholarship, and he proposes the following transition scenario: Let
>journals -- immediately, while we are still in the hybrid paper/on-line
>era -- finance free access to on-line reprints out of author
>page-charges (for about the same price as paper reprints currently).
>The work of authors who pay appears instantly; those who do not pay
>must wait a year for their work to appear publicly on-line; until then,
>toll-based paper is the only means of access.
>
>This would be responsive to the need and desire of authors for instant
>free access to their work today, and it would hasten reader addiction
>to this new mode of access, thereby hastening the day when paper, and
>its expenses, and the S/SL/PPV tolls that needed to be levied to cover
>them, can all be jettisoned and author page charges take over entirely,
>making the entire literature free for all.
>
>The only problem with this scenario is that, human nature being what it
>is, people will not part with their money unless there is no
>alternative. And there IS an alternative for providing free on-line
>access to one's work in the paper era: Authors can put their papers
>on-line themselves -- on their institutional home servers or in
>centralised ones such as http://xxx.lanl.gov, the NSF/DOE-supported
>Physics Eprint Archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
>
>The outcome would be the same as the one sought by Walker: Reader
>demand for the free on-line versions would rise (xxx has 70,000 hits
>daily, and new papers are archived at the rate of 100 per weekday),
>demand for the paper versions would fall, library subscriptions would
>be cancelled, paper publishers would be forced to restructure as
>on-line-only publishers, costs would scale down to on-line-only, and
>THEN (when costs approached those or today's paper reprints) authors
>would be willing to pay page charges, not for the electronic archiving,
>which they could do at least as well for themselves, but for the
>quality control and subsequent certification that journals have always
>provided. Publishing being the imperishable mark of productivity that
>it is, Universities will find the resources out of their library
>windfall savings to cover the relative pittance it will cost to reap
>the benefits of the optimal and the inevitable.
>
>Does that settle it then? Not quite. There are still some controversial
>issues that have only been glossed over here, and it is hoped that the
>discussion will focus on these. They are at the heart of the
>controversy about the future course of refereed journal publishing.
>
>(1) What IS the true cost of on-line-only publication of a mainstream
>journal? 
>
>(2) What is the current status of copyright agreements in relation to
>public on-line archiving of one's own work? More important, what
>justification is there for attempting to restrict such author
>archiving in domains where authors neither seek nor receive fees or
>royalties, but only maximal accessibility to their work?
>
>(3) How can chaos be avoided in the unstable period of journal
>cancellations, while S/SL/PPV-supported paper is not yet phased out,
>costs are not yet down to online-only levels, and author page-charges
>are not yet phased in?
>
>Please read the Walker target article and then post your comments to
>the list:  
>            [log in to unmask]
>or link to: 
>            http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Some relevant background links:
>
>Ginsparg, P. (1996) Winners and Losers in the Global research Village.
>Invited contribution, UNESCO Conference HQ, Paris, 19-23 Feb 1996
>http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/pg96unesco.html
>
>Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research
>Communication. Computers in Physics. (August, American Institute of
>Physics).  8(4): 390-396.
>http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/
>
>Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum
>of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/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://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.
html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad91.postgutenberg.html
>
>Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the
>American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic
>Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for
>Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub.
html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad92.interactivpub.html
>
>Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis?
>Serials Review 21(1) 78-80 (Reprinted in Managing Information
>2(3) 31-33 1995)
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad95.quo.vadis.html
>
>Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and
>Scholarship:  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://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/subvert.html
>ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal/
>
>Harnad, S. (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.
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.interactive.co
gnition.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad95.interactive.cogniti
on.html
>
>Harnad, S. (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.
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad96.peer.review.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad96.peer.review.html
>
>Harnad, S. (1997) How to Fast-Forward Serials to the Inevitable and
>the Optimal for Scholars and Scientists. Serials Librarian 30: 73-81.
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.learned.serial
s.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad97.learned.serials.html
>
>Harnad, S. (1997) The Paper House of Cards (And Why It Is Taking So Long
>To Collapse). Ariadne 8: 6-7.
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.paper.house.ar
iadne.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad97.paper.house.ariadne
.html
>http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/harnad/
>
>Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net:
>The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright.
>Antiquity 71: 1042-1048
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.antiquity.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad97.antiquity.html
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.toronto.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad97.toronto.html
>
>Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature
>(in press). URL available 2nd week of September.
>
>Harnad, S. & Hemus, M. (1997) All Or None: No Stable Hybrid
>or Half-Way Solutions for Launching the Learned Periodical Literature
>into the PostGutenberg Galaxy. In Butterworth, I. (Ed.) 
>The Impact of Electronic Publishing on the Academic Community.
>London: Portland Press. Pp 18-27.
>http://tiepac.portlandpress.co.uk/books/online/tiepac/session1/ch5.htm
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.hybrid.pub.html
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad97.hybrid.pub.html
>
>Hitchcock, S., Carr, L., Harris, S., Hey, J. M. N., and Hall, W. (1997)
>Citation Linking: Improving Access to Online Journals.
>Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on
>Digital Libraries, edited by Robert B. Allen and Edie Rasmussen
>(New York, USA: Association for Computing Machinery), pp. 115-122.
>http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/acmdl97.htm 
>
>Hitchcock, S., Quek, F., Carr, L., Hall, W., Witbrock, A.,
>and Tarr, I. (1997) Linking Everything to Everything: Journal
>Publishing Myth or Reality? ICCC/IFIP conference on
>Electronic Publishing 97: New Models and Opportunities, Canterbury,UK, April.
>http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/IFIP-ICCC97.html 
>
>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/economics.journals.txt
>
>Odlyzko, A.M. (1997) The slow evolution of electronic publishing. In
>Electronic Publishing - New Models and Opportunities, A. J. Meadows and
>F. Rowland, eds., ICCC Press, 1997.
>http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/slow.evolution.txt
>
>Odlyzko, A.M. (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending
>demise of traditional scholarly journals, International Journal of
>Human-Computer Studies (formerly International Journal of Man-Machine
>Studies), 42 (1995), 71-122.
>http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/tragic.loss.txt
>
>Okerson A. & O'Donnell, J. (Eds.) (1995) 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/index.html
>ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal/
>
>Transition from Paper Study Group. (1998) Who Should "own" Scientific
>Papers? Science.  Science available URL on Sept. 4
>
>Walker, T.J. (1998) Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals.
>American Scientist 86(5)
>http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html
>
>
>
>


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