Peter Suber

Open access to the scientific journal literature

None of the advantages of traditional scientific journals need be sacrificed in order to provide free online access to scientific journal articles. Objections that open access to scientific journal literature requires the sacrifice of peer-review, revenue, copyright protection, or other strengths of traditional journals, are based on misunderstandings.

Open access, impact, and demand

Why some authors self archive their articles T he great current divide in scientific publishing is between open access articles—that is, those freely available on the internet—and non-open access ones, those for which a reader has to pay on order to gain access to them. Before Jonathan Wrens study appeared (p 1128)1 we knew that open access copies of scientific journal articles published in non-open access (subscription based) journals were a fairly small subset of the overall journal literature.2 Wren studied just which subset it was and found that papers from journals with high impact factors were more likely to have free online copies at other locations around the web than papers from low impact journals. To show why this matters, and why its puzzling, lets review what we knew before Wren did his study. We knew that some scientists deposited copies of their published articles in open access repositories, a process called self archiving. We knew that about 80% of subscription based journals allowed their authors to do so.3 Hence, we knew that self archiving was compatible with copyright and with publication in a non-open access journal. We knew that it took an author about 10 minutes to self archive one paper.4 We knew that the open access archives where authors deposited articles were “interoperable,” which means that they conformed to a common standard allowing users to search them all at once, as if they comprised one grand, virtual archive. We knew that there were many …

Ensuring open access for publicly funded research

The right way to mix green and gold approaches

Where Does the Free Online Scholarship Movement Stand Today

There’s a lot happening these days to create free online access to peerreviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles. Here are some of the more significant trends: • More disciplines are setting up preprint archives. • More open-access peer-reviewed journals are popping up in every field. Most of these are online-only. But journals like BMJ and Cortex show that even the costs of a print edition do not foreclose the possibility of free online access to full text. • More universities are supporting institutional self-archiving for their research faculty. • More priced journals are experimenting with ways to offer some online content free of charge, and experimenting with ways to cover the costs of providing this kind of free access. • Editorial “declarations of independence” against publishers who limit access by charging exorbitant subscription prices are becoming more common. See my list at <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#declarations>. The most recent was last October, when 40 editors of Machine Learningissued a public letter explaining their resignation from the journal. One of the editors, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, then launched the Journal of Machine Learning Research , which MIT Press agreed to provide to readers free of charge. • More scholars are demanding that journals offer free online access to their contents. The Public Library of Science, <http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org>, has collected more than 29,000 signatures from researchers in 175 countries in the six months since its launch. • More white papers, task forces, projects, and initiatives are endorsing the Open Archives Initiative. The two most recent are the International Scholarly Communications Alliance, <http://makeashorterlink.com/?A15D6226>, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative, <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/>. • More initiatives are acknowledging that progress requires the launch of new open-access journals. Both the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) have come to this conclusion. One of the most interesting trends is for priced journals to experiment with free online scholarship (FOS). In the February issue of Inf rmation Today , Derk Haank, the CEO of Elsevier, said that his company has the same goal as the PLoS, <http://www.infotoday.com/it/feb02/kaser.htm>. Even though this is a very misleading overstatement, Elsevier is making some notable experiments in FOS. For example, it owns ChemWeb and the Chemistry Preprint Server, which both provide free access to all their contents. It allows authors to self-archive preprints, even if not postprints. Its science search engine, Scirus, not only searches Elsevier journals, but a growing number of FOS sources such as

A bibliography of works on reflexivity

“Reflexivity” is the generic name for all kinds and species of circularity. It includes the self-reference of signs, the self-appplication of principles and predicates, the self-justification and self-refutation of propositions and inferences, the self-fulfillment and self-falsification of predictions, the self-creation and self-destruction of logical and legal entities, the self-augmentation and self-limitation of powers, circular reasoning, circular causation, cyclic and spiral recurrence, feedback systems, mutuality, reciprocity, and organic form. It includes the fallacious, the vicious, the trivial, and the question begging, but also the sound, the benign, the useful, and the inescapable. It ranges from the prosaic to the numinous, from the paradoxical to the self-evident, from science to religion. It is reality and appearance, native to the processes of the world and to our knowledge and discourse about them.

Question-Begging Under a Non-Foundational Model of Argument

I find (as others have found) that question-begging is formally valid but rationally unpersuasive. More precisely, itought to be unpersuasive, although it can often persuade. Despite its formal validity, question-begging fails to establish its conclusion; in this sense it fails under a classical or foundationalist model of argument. But it does link its conclusion to its premises by means of acceptable rules of inference; in this sense it succeeds under a non-classical, non-foundationalist model of argument which is spelled out in the essay. However, even for the latter model question-begging fails to link the conclusion to premises that the unconvinced would find more acceptable than the conclusion. The essay includes reflections on the conditions under which the circularity of mutually supporting claims can avoid question-begging and legitimately be persuasive.