Richard Poynder, Ten Years After, Information Today, October 1, 2004. An informal history of the the past 10 years of the OA movement, starting with Stevan Harnad's 6/27/94 listserv posting making the "subversive proposal" that authors archive their eprints for free online access by all, and offering the Harnadian perspective on subsequent events. Excerpt: "Harnad also became an ardent advocate for the creation of a self-archiving toolkit that could provide the OA movement with the means to compete with the electronic platforms that publishers were developing as they began to offer subscription-based online access to their journals. It is no accident that many of the OA tools subsequently produced were developed at Southampton University, where Harnad moved shortly after posting the Subversive Proposal....[I]f the aim of the OA movement is to provide unfettered access to research on the Internet, does it matter whether this is achieved via OA publishing or through self-archiving? In the short term, yes, says Harnad, since placing too much stress on OA publishing threatens to slow the adoption of OA....What has become 'abundantly clear,' concluded Harnad, is that 'universities and research funders must extend their existing publish-or-perish mandate to mandate that the publications must be made OA --either by publishing them in an OA journal, wherever possible (5 percent) or publishing them in a non-OA journal (95 percent) and self-archiving them.'...Whatever transpires, it is clear that traditional publishers can no longer ignore open access. In Part Two, I will explore in more detail how publishers are responding and pose the question: Is the self-archiving roadmap as straightforward as Harnad claims, or even sustainable?"
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/01/2004 11:20:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
