I've just stumbled upon Doug Brent's Steven Harnad's Subversive Proposal: Kick-Starting Electronic Scholarship, in EJournal. This article picks up on Harnad's argument that much or all of the future of scholarly publishing lies in transferring scholarly research from behind the for-profit publishing industry's toll-gate and firewall (the market's version of a trade in knowledge) to the internet. This work indicates that the case for the open access to knowledge was being argued for a decade ago, and I've stumbled into the archives. It is the archives since the EJournal itself stopped publication in 2004.

Brent says that Harnad argued that internet publication not only eliminates much of the cost of publishing, but also allows for an extremely quick turnaround of articles and responses to them. This quick turnaround is, of course, especially important in the sciences, where ideas become stale within weeks or even days. Brent adds that Harnad argued for more than timely presentation of ideas:

He argues that in the electronic world, *presentation* of ideas as lapidary product of thought can be replaced by in-process texts that participate in the *development* of thought. The process is more akin to oral dialogue than to electronic representations of finished texts.

Harnard argument is that scholars working in what he calls the 'esoteric' fields of narrow specialisms (particularly the sciences) do not need to publish on paper; they merely wish to be read by their peers. And since they don't expect to be paid for what they make public, why shouldn't they put their work straight onto the Net in preprint form. They can invite comment, make whatever revisions they feel warranted, then archive the finished article in digital form. By following this procedure, peer review is maintained, but the system works more rapidly and less expensively.

That does away with the 'tradition' and 'authority' of the refereed and printed journal to concentrate on electronic communication between peers. Hanard says that his toll-free access proposal applies only to the refereed journal literature, not to books, textbooks, magazine articles, best-sellers, films, etc. Brent comments that though electronic publication obviously provides an alternative to the Faustian bargain:

Yet electronic publication has been slow in coming and slower in meeting acceptance. Many on-line journals are nothing more than mirrors of paper journals, which continue to be the main conduits for academic knowledge and associated academic rewards. Trade publishers are obviously in no hurry to move to electronic publishing because it is difficult to see how to make any money at it. Harnad's "subversive proposal" suggests that scholars not wait for the publishing industry to ooze slowly onto the net. Harnad recommends that we leave the publishing industry behind and take to the skies ourselves

Sadly, few academics are making available on the Net, in publicly accessible archives on the World Wide Web, the texts of their current papers or even the past ones that still sitting on the computers hard drive. Though academic researchers have taken full advantage of email, online discussion groups, online storage and exchange of data and even online refereeing of papers for their journals they have not embraced the free, open, global access to their work that the internet provides. As Harnard points out the major exception is the centralized Los Alamos Physics Archive --it is the exemplar of Give-Away research literature.

The Universities, in spite of the serials budget crunch, have not taken steps to help disseminating research by installing open archives and providing their authors with the technical proxies to self-archive their papers for them where needed. Is this because of copyright restrictions? As has been pointed put author self-archiving can legally get round any copyright restrictions in the following manner:

First the author publicly archives a preprint of the paper on the web. Then they submit the paper to a refereed journal. The author makes amendments in light of referees' and editors' comments, then signs the publisher's copyright agreement The author then posts a note onto the web pre-print, pointing out where areas of correction might need to be made, in effect turning the pre-print into a version of the draft refereed paper.

Is the next barrier to self-archiving the embargo policies of academic journals? Some journals state that they will not referee (let alone publish) papers that have previously been "made public" in any way, whether through conferences, press releases, or on-line self-archiving. However, the Ingelfinger Rule, apart from being directly at odds with the interests of research and researchers and has no intrinsic justification whatsoever -- other than as a way of protecting journals' current revenue streams. It is not a legal matter and, as it is unenforceable, so researchers can ignore it completely.