Food for thought

[Steven Weller <stevenw@IGLOU.COM>]

I snipped this from a mailing about PSYCOLOQUY. This abstract was listed,
which gives another view on the whole eolectronic/paper publishing and
future of libraries discussion:


--------------------->8------------------------------------------

Harnad, S. (1994) Publicly Retrievable FTP Archives for Esoteric
Science and Scholarship:  A Subversive Proposal.  To be presented at:
Network Services Conference, London, England, 28-30 November 1994
FILENAME: archive.NOW
DIRECTORY: pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal

   esoteric   213 aj .es-*-'ter-ik
   LL [italic esotericus], fr. Gk [italic es{o-}terikos], fr. [italic
   es{o-}ter{o-}], compar. of [italic eis{o-}], [italic es{o-}] within,
   fr. [italic eis] into, fr. [italic en] in -- more at [mini IN]
   1 a  aj designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
   1 b  aj of or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group
   2 a  aj limited to a small circle <~ pursuits>
   2 b  aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini CONFIDENTIAL] <an ~ purpose>
           esoterically 21313 av  -i-k(*-)l{e-}

ABSTRACT: We have heard many sanguine predictions about the demise of
paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems
a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically
hasten that day. It is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade,
no-market) scientific and scholarly publication (but that is the lion's
share of the academic corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for
which the author does not and never has expected to SELL his words. He
wants only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes and minds of his
peers, his fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so
that they can build on one another's contributions in that cumulative.
collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry. For centuries, it was
only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications
entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag to be erected as
a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership, for
that was the only way they could make their work public at all during
the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was
their only option. But today there is another way, and that is PUBLIC
FTP: If every esoteric author in the world this very day established a
globally accessible local ftp archive for every piece of esoteric
writing he did from this day forward, the long-heralded transition from
paper publication to purely electronic publication (of esoteric
research) would follow suit almost immediately. This is already
beginning to happen in the physics community, thanks to Paul Ginsparg's
HEP preprint network, with 20,000 users worldwide and 35,000 "hits" per
day, and Paul Southworth's CICnet is ready to help follow suit in other
disciplines. The only two factors standing in the way of this outcome
at this moment are (1) quality control (i.e., peer review and editing),
which today happens to be implemented almost exclusively by paper
publishers, and (2) the patina of paper publishing, which results from
this monopoly on quality control. If all scholars' preprints were
universally available to all scholars by anonymous ftp (and gopher, and
World-Wide Web, and the search/retrieval wonders of the future), NO
scholar would ever consent to WITHDRAW any preprint of his from the
public eye after the refereed version was accepted for paper
"PUBLICation." Instead, everyone would, quite naturally, substitute the
refereed, published reprint for the unrefereed preprint. Paper
publishers will then either restructure themselves (with the
cooperation of the scholarly community) so as to arrange for the
much-reduced electronic-only page costs (which I estimate to be less
than 25% of paper-page costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears
in most current publishers' estimates) to be paid out of advance
subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university
publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies) or they
will have to watch as the peer community spawns a brand new generation
of electronic-only publishers who will. The subversion will be
complete, because the (esoteric -- no-market) peer-reviewed literature
complete, because the (esoteric -- no-market) peer-reviewed literature
will have taken to the airwaves, where it always belonged, and those
airwaves will be free (to the benefit of us all) because their true
minimal expenses will be covered the optimal way for the unimpeded flow
of esoteric knowledge to all: In advance.

PSYCOLOQUY is a refereed electronic journal (ISSN 1055-0143) sponsored
on an experimental basis by the American Psychological Association
and currently estimated to reach a readership of 40,000. PSYCOLOQUY
publishes brief reports of new ideas and findings on which the author
wishes to solicit rapid peer feedback, international and
interdisciplinary ("Scholarly Skywriting"), in all areas of psychology
and its related fields (biobehavioral science, cognitive science,
neuroscience, social science, etc.). All contributions are refereed.

gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
ftp://princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy

--
Steven Weller  <Windsor Consulting Group>         +1 502 454 0054 (voice)
                                                  +1 502 451 5935 (fax)
2014 Cherokee Pkwy, Suite J, Louisville, KY 40204, USA
<OS-9 Consultancy and Software>    stevenw@iglou.com or sweller@aol.com