---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 13:51:38 EDT
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@PRINCETON.EDU>
Subject: Subversive Proposal

                       Proposal for Presentation
                  The Network Services Conference (NSC)
                  London, England, 28-30 November 1994

Name(s): Stevan Harnad
Affiliation(s): University of Southampton
E-mail address(es): harnad@mail.soton.ac.uk
Postal address(es): Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Centre
Title of presentation: PUBLICLY RETRIEVABLE FTP ARCHIVES FOR ESOTERIC SCIENCE
                       AND SCHOLARSHIP: A SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL
Abstract:
We have heard many 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 of his peers, his fellow esoteric
scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one
another's work in that collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.
For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of
esoteric publications made the Faustian bargain to allow a price-tag to
be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended
readership because that was the only way to make their work public in
the era when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) were
the only way to do so. 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. The only two
factors blocking it at the moment are (1) quality control (i.e., peer
review and editing), which happen to be implemented today 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 that preprint
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
minimal true costs and a fair return on 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)
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.