On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Stevan Harnad wrote:
>sh> And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already distributed
>sh> all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may
>sh> wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally online or
>sh> offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time?
>
> This sounds like the beginning of the free-as-beer or free-as-speech
> discussion from the GNU project all over again,
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Please see this prior item on this same Amsci subject-thread:

    "On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and
    Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html

Here is am excerpt:

        MC: "The open source software community [uses] the shorthand
             'free, as in beer'"

    The open/free distinction in software is based on the modifiability
    of the code. This is irrelevant to refereed-article full-text. (And
    the beer analogy was silly and uninformative in both cases! Lots of
    laughs, but little light cast.)

> Redistribute means the permission to copy the article and republish it
> on another website or on another medium.  Some say that this right is
> necessary to assure that the contents will be permanently available,
> because you cannot trust any one institution to be around for ever.

Are we now transmuting the free/open red herring into the preservation
red herring?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation

> Most eloquently put, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload
> their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror
> it." (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)  The crucial
> question is then: Do you allow the world to mirror it?

Short answer: While the canonical version of the toll-access journal
literature is being bought and sold via access-tolls to institutional
subscribers/licensees, the preservation burden is *entirely* in the
hands of the toll-access providers and clients (i.e., publishers and
libraries). The self-archived version is merely a secondary supplement,
to provide open access for those whose institutions cannot afford the
primary toll-access version. It is not a substitute for the toll-access
version. It hence has no primary preservation burden (yet it has been
successfully surviving since at least 1991, thank you very much).

The analogy between free/open software and free/open access to the
refereed journal literature is a disanalogy and a misleading distraction.

> The conference paper that I have on http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html
> is available for all to read free of charge, but you cannot
> copy-and-republish because I own the copyright, and I don't allow free
> copying and redistribution.  If I find that you store a copy of it on
> your openly available website, I will ask you to take it down.

Why would I store a paper on my own website that is freely and permanently
available on another website? If I need to use it, I download and use it
from your website. If I need to refer to it, I cite it and link the URL.

On the permanence and preservation of *your* website, see above. We are
talking about secondary access-provision (to published articles)
through self-archiving here, not about self-publication:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4

About hypothetical future transitions in which the archiving/access/preservation
burden of the primary corpus is off-loaded onto the secondary corpus: Let's
talk about crossing that bridge if and when it looks as if it's coming close.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2

Till then what is needed isn't worries about preserving this still secondary
(and sparse) corpus, but positive measures to hasten its growth.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.1
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif

> But free software such as Linux is free to download, republish at your
> own website, sell on CDROM or redistribute in *almost* any way.  This
> is not to say that it is in the public domain, which it is not.  It is
> owned by its creators and licensed to you under the conditions set
> forth in the GNU General Public License.

Irrelevant to the open access movement's goal of attaining toll-free
full-text access online to the 2,500,000 annual articles in the 24,000
peer-reviewed journals for those of its would-be users whose institutions
cannot afford the tolls to access the journal's proprietary canonical
version.

No need to "republish" anything. All that's needed is:
FREE, IMMEDIATE, PERMANENT ACCESS TO REFEREED-ARTICLE FULL-TEXTS ONLINE.
That's what the author's self-archived version -- in his own institution's
open-access archive for its own research output -- is intended to provide.
And that is what open-access provision is about.

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist Open Access Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
    Post discussion to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org

Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm