%A Stevan Harnad
%J Ariadne
%T Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison
%X Currently there are six candidate strategies for freeing the refereed research
                              literature: 

                              (1) Authors paying journal publishers for publisher-supplied online-offprints.
                              (2) Asking journals to give away their contents online for free and boycotting
                              those that do not. (3) Library consortial support (e.g. SPARC) for lower-priced
                              journals. (4) Delayed journal give-aways -- 6-to-12+ months after
                              publication. (5) Giving up established journals and peer review altogether, in
                              favour of self-archived preprints and post-hoc, ad-lib commentary. (6)
                              Self-archiving all preprints and postprints. 

                              (1) - (5) all require waiting for policy changes and, even once these are
                              available, all require a needless sacrifice on the part of authors. With (1) the
                              sacrifice is the needless author offprint expense, with (2) it is the author's right
                              to submit to their preferred journals, with (3) it is (as before) the author's
                              potential impact on those potential users who cannot afford even the lowered
                              access tolls, with (4) it is the impact of the all-important first 6-12 months
                              after publication, and with (5) the sacrifice is the quality of the literature itself. 

                              Only (6) asks researchers for no sacrifices at all, and no waiting for any
                              change in journal policy or price. The only delay factor has been authors' own
                              relative sluggishness in just going ahead and doing it! Nevertheless, (6) is
                              well ahead of the other 5 candidates, in terms of the total number of papers
                              thus freed already, thanks to the lead taken by the physicists.
%D 2001
%K electronic publishing, peer review, self-archiving, copyright
%L cogprints1702
%V 28

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