Self-Archiving Mandates

In the Gutenberg Galaxy of print-on-paper, right up to the present day, researchers have had a quasi-universal "mandate" to make their findings known: "Publish or Perish".

The reason was that findings buried in a file drawer may as well not have been found at all. Publishing the findings makes it possible for other researchers to use, apply, and build upon them.

In today's PostGutenberg Galaxy of globalised bits-on-line, we need to generalize and universalise the old Gutenberg mandate in a simple and natural way:

Researchers need to maximise access and usage by making their research freely accessible to all users online: Instead of mailing paper reprints of their articles to would-be users who request them, an inexhaustible supply of online eprints needs to be provided by self-archiving all published articles, free for all, in each researcher's Open Access Institutional Repository.

Prompted by a proposal by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives to find a catchy French PostGutenberg gloss of "Publish or Perish," a number of candidates immediately come to mind, both in English and in French. So let's have an (informal, unofficial) contest. (No prize, but the winner is likely to become the OA movement's slogan for the PostGutenberg extension of the Publish or Perish mandate.)

Please email candidates to me (harnad AT soton dot ac dot uk), not to the American Scientist Open Access Forum. I will then post them collectively (with the names of proponents, or anonymously: please indicate your preference) for a vote.

Here are a few to get you started:

ENGLISH:
Publish or Perish --->
Disseminate or Decease
Broadcast or Bury
Air or Expire
OA or Decay
Archive to Survive
Post or Ghost ...

FRENCH:
Publier ou périr --->
Diffuser ou Décéder...

Multilingual entries are welcome! Alma Swan wrote:

"The challenge is - in all languages - to get the [new] wide meaning and the alliteration!" [fore or aft]

(There is already a Hungarian gloss "Kiadsz vagy Kimaradsz" (roughly "give out [= publish] or get left out"] by Tamas Somogyi of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and soon, I hope, in Portuguese...)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum