Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls?
www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/39/
Published as: Harnad, Stevan (2003)
Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving:
Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access.
In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003.
www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/digital-libraries.htm
[Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.
www.jpgmonline.com/article.asp?issn=0022-3859;year=2003;volume=49;issue=4;spage=337;epage=342;aulast=Harnad]
[French version: Harnad, S. (2003) Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre.
In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds)  Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou. Pp. 77-103.
www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/cielographie.pdf
www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=7
www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/texte2.pdf]

For Whom the Gate Tolls?

How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature
Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now

Stevan Harnad
Intelligence/Agents/Multimedia Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/

ABSTRACT: All refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them already are. This means that anyone will be able to access them from any networked desk-top. The literature will all be interconnected by citation, author, and keyword/subject links, allowing for unheard-of power and ease of access and navigability. Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be linked to the official refereed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates, comments, responses, and underlying empirical databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness, interactivity and productivity of scholarly and scientific research and communication in remarkable new ways. New scientometric indicators of digital impact are also emerging (opcit.eprints.org) to chart the online course of knowledge. But there is still one last frontier to cross before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable: Just as there is no longer any need for research or researchers to be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer any need to be constrained by the impact-blocking financial fire-walls of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature. Its author/researchers have always donated their research reports for free (and its referee/researchers have refereed for free), with the sole goal of maximizing their impact on subsequent research (by accessing the eyes and minds of fellow-researchers, present and future) and hence on society. Generic (OAi-compliant) software is now available free so that institutions can immediately create Eprint Archives in which their authors can self-archive all their refereed papers for free for all forever (www.eprints.org/). These interoperable Open Archives (www.openarchives.org) will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable "virtual archives" (e.g., arc.cs.odu.edu/). "Scholarly Skywriting" in this PostGutenberg Galaxy will be dramatically (and measurably) more interactive and productive, spawning its own new digital metrics of productivity and impact, allowing for an online "embryology of knowledge."
 

OVERVIEW:

Abstract

An Anomalous Picture

Resolving the Anomaly:

1. Five Essential PostGutenberg Distinctions:

1.1. Distinguish the non-give-away literature from the give-away literature
1.2. Distinguish income (arising from article sales) from impact (arising from article use)
1.3. Distinguish between copyright protection from theft-of-authorship (plagiarism) and copyright protection from theft-of-text (piracy)
1.4. Distinguish self-publishing (vanity press) from self-archiving (of published, refereed research)
1.5. Distinguish unrefereed preprints from refereed postprints


2. The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers

3. Two useful acronyms, one new distinction, and one new ally

 
3.1. S/L/P [Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View] tolls: The impact/access-barriers
3.2. Peer Review
3.3. Separating (i) peer-review service-provision from (ii) eprint access-provision (and from (iii) optional add-ons)
3.4. Interoperability: The Open Archive initiative (Oai) 4. The Subversive Proposal  
4.1 Enough to free entire refereed corpus, forever, immediately: i.  Universities install and register OAI-compliant Eprint Archives (www.eprints.org).
ii.  Authors self-archive their pre-refereeing preprints and post-refereeing postprints in their own university's Eprint Archives.
iii.  Universities subsidize a first start-up wave of self-archiving by proxy where needed.
iv.  The Give-Away corpus is freed from all access/impact barriers on-line. 4.2 Hypothetical Sequel: v.  Users will prefer the free version?
vi.  Publisher toll-revenues shrink, Library toll-savings grow?
vii.  Publishers downsize to providers of peer-review service + optional add-ons products?
viii.  Peer-review service costs funded by author-institution out of reader-institution toll savings?


5. PostGutenberg Copyright Concerns

 The following digital copyright concerns are relevant to the non-give-away literature only: 5.1. Protecting Intellectual Property (royalties)
5.2. Allowing Fair Use (user issue)
5.3. Preventing Theft of Text (piracy) The following digital copyright concern is relevant to all literature, both give-away and non-give-away: 5.4. Preventing Theft of Authorship (plagiarism) The following digital copyright concern is relevant to the give-away literature only: 5.5. Guaranteeing Author Give-Away Rights


6. How to get around restrictive copyright legally ("Preprint+corrigenda Strategy")

 6.1. Self-archive the pre-refereeing preprint
6.2. Submit the preprint for refereeing (revise etc.)
6.3. At acceptance, try to fix the copyright transfer agreement to allow self-archiving
6.4. If 6.3 is successful, self-archive the refereed postprint
6.5. If 6.3 is unsuccessful, archive the"corrigenda"


7. What you can do now to free the refereed literature online

 7.1. Researchers: self-archive all present, future (& past) papers
7.2. Universities: Install Eprint Archives, mandate them; help in author start-up
7.3. Libraries: Maintain the University Eprint archives; help in author start-up
7.4. Students: Stay the course! Surf! The future is optimal, inevitable and yours!
7.5. Publishers: concede on self-archiving and be prepared to separate essential peer-review service costs (to the author-institution) from optional add-on product costs (to the reader-institution)
7.6. Government/Society: mandate public archiving of public research worldwide


8. Zeno's Prima-FaQs "I worry about self-archiving because...":

  1. Preservation  2. Authentication  3. Corruption  4. Navigation (info-glut)  5. Certification  6. Evaluation  7. Peer review  8. Paying the piper  9. Downsizing 10. Copyright 11. Plagiarism 12. Priority 13. Censorship 14. Capitalism 15. Readability 16. Graphics 17. Publishers' future 18. Libraries'/Librarians' future 19. Learned Societies' future 20. University conspiracy 21. Serendipity 22. Tenure/Promotion 23. (your prima-FaQ here...)


9. Related Issues

 
9.1 Napster
9.2 Peer-review reform
9.3 "Scholarly Skywriting"
9.4. Embryology of Knowledge
9.5 Leading horses to the waters of self-archiving vs. getting them to drink 10. APPENDIX A: Eprints.org Software for Creating Institutional and Individual Open Archives
11. APPENDIX B: Some Relevant Chronology and URLs

REFERENCES

An Anomalous Picture

What is wrong with this Picture?


1. A brand-new PhD recipient proudly tells his mother he has just published his first article. She asks him how much he was paid for it. He makes a face and tells her "nothing," and then begins a long, complicated explanation...

 
2. A fellow-researcher at that same university sees a reference to that same article. He goes to their library to get it: "It's not subscribed to here. We can't afford that journal. (Our subscription/license/loan/copy budget is already overspent)"

 
3. An undergraduate at that same university sees the same article cited on the Web. He clicks on it. The publisher's website demands a password: "Access Denied:Only pre-paid subscribing/licensed institutions have access to this journal."

 
4. The undergraduate loses patience, gets bored, and clicks on Napsterto grab an MP3 file of his favourite bootleg CD to console him in his sorrows.

 
5. Years later, the same PhD is being considered for tenure. His publications are good, but they're not cited enough; they have not made enough of a "research impact." Tenure denied.

 
6. Same thing happens when he tries to get a research grant: His research findings have not had enough of an impact: Not enough researchers have read, built upon and cited them. Funding denied.

 
7. He decides to write a book instead. Book publishers decline to publish it: "It wouldn't sell enough copies because not enough universities have enough money to pay for it. (Their purchasing budgets are tied up paying for their inflating annual journal subscription/license/loan costs...)"

 
8. He tries to put his articles up on the Web, free for all, to increase their impact. His publisher threatens to sue him and his server-provider for violation of copyright.

 
9. He asks his publisher: "Who is this copyright intended to protect?" His publisher replies:  "You!"

 
What is wrong with this picture?

 
(And why is the mother of the PhD whose give-away work people cannot steal, even though he wants them to, in the same boat as the mother of the recording artist whose non-give-away work they can and do steal, even though he does not want them to?)

Resolving the Anomaly:

How a few critical distinctions plus a few simple actions
can restore sense to it all

1. Five Essential PostGutenberg Distinctions:

In order to understand what is wrong with the picture, you first have to make five critical distinctions. If you fail to make any one of these distinctions, it will be impossible to make sense of the picture or to resolve the anomaly, an anomaly  completely unique to the online era of "Scholarly Skywriting" (Harnad 1990) in the "PostGutenberg Galaxy" (Harnad 1991).

1.1. Distinguish the non-give-away literature from the give-away literature

This is the most important PostGutenberg distinction of all. It is what makes this small refereed research literature anomalous (~20,000 refereed journals, ~2,000,000 articles annually) -- fundamentally unlike the bulk of the written literature: Its authors do not seek, nor do they receive, royalties or fees for their writings. Their texts are author give-aways (Harnad 1995a). The only thing these authors seek is research "impact" (Harnad & Carr 2000), which comes from accessing the eyes and minds of all potentially interested fellow-researchers everywhere, now, and any time in the future.

The litmus test for whether a piece of writing falls in the small give-away sector of the literature or the much larger non-give-away sector is: "Does the author seek a royalty or fee  in exchange for his writings?" If the answer is yes (as it is for virtually all books [cf. Harnad, Varian & Parks 2000] and newspaper or magazine articles), then the writing is non-give-away;if the answer is no,then it is give-away.

None of what follows here is applicable to non-give-away writing, but the non-give-away model is the one that most people have in mind for all of writing. So it is not surprising that that small fraction of writing that the more general model does not fit should seem anomalous.

1.2. Distinguish income (arising from article sales) from impact (arising from article use)

Unlike all other authors, researchers derive their income not from the sale of their research reports but from the scholarly/scientific impact of their reported findings, i.e., how much they are read, cited, and built-upon by other researchers. Hence all fee-based access-barriers are income-barriers for research and researchers (Harnad 1998a), restricting their potential impact to only those (institutions, mainly) who can and do pay the access-fees.

As most institutions cannot afford the access-fees to most refereed research journals, this means that most research papers cannot be accessed by most researchers (Harnad 1998b): Currently, all that potential impact is simply lost.

Note that although researchers do not derive income from the sale of their refereed research papers ("imprint income"), they do derive income from the impact of those papers ("impact income").

The simple reason why researchers, unlike non-give-away authors, do not seek imprint-income for their refereed research is that the access-tolls for collecting imprint-income are barriers to impact-income (research grants, salaries, promotion, tenure, prizes), which is by far the more important reward for researchers, most of whose refereed papers are so esoteric (Harnad 1995b) as to have no imprint-income market at all.

1.3. Distinguish between copyright protection from theft-of-authorship (plagiarism) and copyright protection from theft-of-text (piracy)

These two very different aspects of copyright protection have always been conflated (Harnad 1999b), because it is the much larger and more representative non-give-away literature that has always been the model for copyright law and copyright concerns. But copyright protection from theft-of-authorship (plagiarism), which is essential for both give-away and non-give-away authors, has nothing at all to do with copyright protection from theft-of-text (piracy), which non-give-away authors want but give-away authors do not want. One can have full protection from plagiarism without seeking any protection from piracy.

1.4. Distinguish self-publishing (vanity press) from self-archiving (of published, refereed research)

The essential difference between unrefereed research and refereed research is quality-control (peer review, Harnad 1998/2000) and its certification (by an established peer-reviewed journal of known quality). Although researchers have always wished to give away their refereed research findings, they still wish them to be refereed, and certified as having met established quality standards. Hence the self-archiving of refereed research should in no way be confused with self-publishing, for it includes as its most important component, the online self-archiving, free for all, of refereed, published research papers.

1.5. Distinguish unrefereed preprints from refereed postprints

("eprints" = preprints + postprints)

Eprint archives, consisting of research papers self-archived online by their authors, are not, and have never been, merely "preprint archives" for unrefereed research. Authors can self-archive therein all the embryological stages of the research they wish to report, from pre-refereeing, through successive revisions, till the refereed, journal-certified postprint, and thence still further, to any subsequent corrected, revised, or otherwise updated drafts (post-postprints), as well as any commentaries or responses linked to them. These are all just way-stations along the scholarly skywriting continuum.

2. The Optimal and Inevitable for Researchers

  • The entire full-text refereed corpus online
  • On every researcher's desktop, everywhere
  • 24 hours a day
  • All papers citation-interlinked
  • Fully searchable, navigable, retrievable
  • For free, for all, forever
All of this will come to pass. The only real question is "How Soon?" Will we still be compos mentis and fit to benefit from it,  or will it only be for the napster generation?  Future historians, posterity, and our own still-born scholarly impact  are already poised to chide us in hindsight (Harnad 1999b).

What can the research community do to hasten the optimal and inevitable? Here are some recent concepts that may help:

3. Two useful acronyms, one new distinction, and one new ally

3.1. S/L/P [Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View] tolls: The impact/access-barriers

access-tolls are the access-barriers, hence the impact-barriers, for researchers and their give-away research. Access-tolls are the journal publisher's means of recovering costs and making a fair profit. High costs were inescapable in the expensive and inefficient on-paper Gutenberg era; but today, in the on-line PostGutenberg era, continuing to do it all the old Gutenberg way, with its high costs, must be clearly seen as the optional add-on (for this give-away literature only: not for the royalty/fee-based literature!) that it has become, rather than as the obligatory feature it used to be.

Beware of the language of obligatory "value-added," with which the peer-reviewed literature must, by implication, continue to be inextricably wrapped. The only essential service still provided by journal publishers (for this anomalous, author-give-away literature in the PostGutenberg era) is peer review itself.

The rest -- on-paper versions, PDF on-line page images, deluxe online enhancements -- are all potentially valuable features, to be sure, but only as take-it-or-leave-it options. In the on-line era there is no longer any necessity, hence no longer any justification whatsoever, for continuing to hold the refereed research itself hostage to access-tolls and whatever add-ons they happen to pay for.

Beware also of any attempt to trade off S for L or L for P: Pick your poison, all three are access-barriers, hence impact-barriers, and hence all three must go -- or rather, they must all now become only the price-tags for the add-on, deluxe options that they buy for the researcher and his institution, but no longer also for the peer-reviewed essentials, which can now be self-archived for free for all.

3.2. Peer review

Peer review itself is not a deluxe add-on for research and researchers: This quality-control service and its certification is an essential (Harnad 1998/2000). Without peer review the research literature would be neither reliable nor navigable, its quality uncontrolled, unfiltered, un-sign-posted, unknown, unaccountable.

But the peers who review it for the journals are the researchers themselves, and they review it for free, just as the researchers report it for free. So it must be made quite clear that the only real peer-review cost is that of implementing the peer review, not actually performing it.

Estimates (e.g., Odlyzko 1998) as well as the real experience of online-only journals (e.g., Journal of High Energy Physics jhep.cern.ch/; Psycoloquy
www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/) have shown that the peer-review implementation cost is quite low -- about 10-30%% of the total amount that the world's institutional libraries (or rather, the small subset of them that can afford any given journal at all!) are currently paying annually per article in access-tolls .

Once the 70-90% Toll-based add-ons become optional, the essential 10-30% peer-review cost could easily be paid out of the 100% toll savings -- if ever the world's libraries decide they no longer need the add-ons. (The other 70-90% savings can be used to buy other things, e.g., books, which are not, and never will be, author give-aways.)

3.3. Separating (i) peer-review service-provision from (ii) eprint access-provision (and from (iii) optional add-ons)

Researchers need not and should not wait until journal publishers voluntarily decide to separate the provision of the essential peer-review service from all the other optional add-on products (on-paper version, publisher's PDF version, deluxe enhancements) before their give-away refereed research can at last be freed of all access- and impact-barriers.

All researchers can free their own refereed research now, virtually overnight, by taking the matter into their own hands; they can self-archive it in their institutional Eprint Archives: www.eprints.org. Access to the eprints of their refereed research is then immediately freed of all toll-barriers, forever.

3.4. Interoperability: The Open Archive initiative (Oai)

Papers self-archived by their authors in their institutional Eprint Archives can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, with no need to know their actual location, because all Eprints Archives are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) meta-data tagging protocol for interoperability: www.openarchives.org

Because of their OAI-compliance, the papers in all registered Eprints Archives can be harvested and searched by Open Archive Services such as Cite-Base cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/help/index.php3 and the Cross Archive Searching Service arc.cs.odu.edu/, providing seamless access to all the eprints, across all the Eprint Archives, as if they were all in one global, virtual archive.

4. The Subversive Proposal

4.1 Enough to free entire refereed corpus, forever, immediately:

 Eight steps will be described here. The first four are not hypothetical in any way; they are guaranteed to free the entire refereed research literature (~20K journals annually) from its access/impact-barriers right away. The only thing that researchers and their institutions need to do is to take these first four steps. The second four steps are hypothetical predictions, but nothing hinges on them: The refereed literature will already be free for everyone as a result of steps i-iv, irrespective of the outcome of predictions v-viii.

i.  Universities install and register OAI-compliant Eprint Archives (www.eprints.org)

The Eprints software is free and will be open-sourced. It in turn uses only free software; it is quick and easy to install and maintain; it is OAI-compliant and will be kept compliant with every OAI upgrade: www.openarchives.org/. Eprints Archives are all interoperable with one another and can hence be harvested and searched (e.g., arc.cs.odu.edu/) as if they were all in one global "virtual" archive of the entire research literature, both pre- and post-refereeing.

ii.  Authors self-archive their pre-refereeing preprints and post-refereeing postprints in their own university's Eprint Archives.

This is the most important step; it is insufficient to create the Eprint Archives. All researchers must self-archive their papers therein if the literature is to be freed of its access- and impact-barriers. Self-archiving is quick and easy; it need only be done once per paper, and the result is permanent, and permanently and automatically uploadable to upgrades of the Eprint Archives and the OAI-protocol.

iii.  Universities subsidize a first start-up wave of self-archiving by proxy where needed.

Self-archiving is quick and easy, but there is no need for it to be held back if any researcher feels too busy, tired, old or otherwise unable to do it for himself: Library staff or students can be paid to "self-archive" the first wave of papers by proxy on their behalf. The cost will be negligibly low per paper, and the benefits will be huge; moreover, there will be no need for a second wave of help once the palpable benefits (access and impact) of freeing the literature begin to be felt by the research community. Self-archiving will become second-nature to all researchers as the objective digitometric indicators of its effects on citations and useage become available online  (Harnad 2001e; Lawrence 2001a, 2001b) (e.g., cite-base or ResearchIndex).

iv.  The Give-Away corpus is freed from all access/impact barriers on-line.

Once a critical mass of researchers has self-archived, the refereed research literature is at last free of all access- and impact-barriers, as it was always destined to be.

4.2 Hypothetical Sequel:

 Steps i-iv are sufficient to free the refereed research literature. We can also guess at what may happen after that, but these are really just guesses. Nor does anything depend on their being correct. For even if there is no change whatsoever -- even if Universities continue to spend exactly the same amounts on their access-toll budgets as they do now -- the refereed literature will have been freed of all access/impact barriers forever.

However, it is likely that there will be some changes as a consequence of the freeing of the literature by author/institution self-archiving. This is what those changes might be:

v.  Users will prefer the free version?

It is likely that once a free, online version of the refereed research literature is available, not only those researchers who could not access it at all before, because of toll-barriers at their institution, but virtually all researchers will prefer to use the free online versions.

Note that it is quite possible that there will always continue to be a market for the toll-based options (on-paper version, publisher's on-line PDF, deluxe enhancements) even though most users use the free versions. Nothing hangs on this.

vi.  Publisher toll revenues shrink, Library toll savings grow?

But if researchers do prefer to use the free online literature, it is possible that libraries may begin to cancel journals, and as their windfall toll savings grow, journal publisher tollrevenues will shrink. The extent of the cancellation will depend on the extent to which there remains a market for the toll-based add-ons, and for how long.

If the toll-access market stays large enough, nothing else need change.

vii.  Publishers downsize to providers of peer-review service + optional add-ons products?

It will depend entirely on the size of the remaining market for the toll-based options whether and to what extent journal publishers will have to down-size to providing only the essentials: The only essential, indispensable service is peer review.

viii.  peer-review service costs funded by author-institution out of reader-institution toll savings?

If publishers can continue to cover costs and make a decent profit from the toll-based optional add-ons market, without needing to down-size to peer-review provision alone, nothing much changes.

But if publishers do need to abandon providing the toll-based products and to scale down instead to providing only the peer-review service, then universities, having saved 100% of their annual access-toll budgets, will have plenty of annual windfall savings from which to pay for their own researchers' continuing (and essential) annual journal-submission peer-review costs (10-30%); the rest of their savings (70-90%) they can spend as they like (e.g., on books -- plus a bit for Eprint Archive maintenance).

5. PostGutenberg Copyright Concerns

There is a great deal of concern about copyright in the digital age, and some of it may not be easily resolvable (e.g., what to do about the pirating of software and music). But none of that need detain us here, because digital piracy is only a problem for non-give-away work, whereas we are concerned here only with give-away work. (Again, failing to make the give-away/non-give-away distinction leads only to confusion, and the misapplication of the much bigger and more representative non-give-away model to the anomalous give-away corpus, which it does not fit.)

The following digital copyright concerns are relevant to the non-give-away literature only:

5.1. Protecting Intellectual Property (royalties)

This is as much of a concern to authors of books as to authors of screenplays, music, and computer programs. It is also a concern to performers who have made digital audio or video disks of their work. They do not wish to see that work stolen; they want their fair share of the gate-receipts in return for their talent and efforts in producing the work.

But the producers of refereed research reports do not wish to have protection from "theft" of this kind; on the contrary, they wish to encourage it. They have no royalties to gain from preventing it; they have only research impact to lose from access-blockage of any kind.

5.2. Allowing Fair Use (user issue)

"Fair Use" is another worthy concern. It has to do with certain sanctioned uses of non-give-away material, such as all or parts of books, magazine articles, etc., often for teaching purposes; the producers of these works do not wish to lose their potential royalty/fee-income from these works.

The producers of refereed research reports, in contrast, wish to give their work away; hence fair-use issues are moot for this special give-away literature.

5.3. Preventing Theft of Text (piracy)

The producers of refereed research reports do not wish to prevent the theft of their texts; they wish to facilitate it as much as possible. (In the on-paper era they used to purchase and mail reprints to requesters at their own expense!)

The following digital copyright concern is relevant to all literature, both give-away and non-give-away:

5.4. Preventing Theft of Authorship (plagiarism)

No author wants any other author to claim to have been the author of his work. This concern is shared by all authors, give-away and non-give-away. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with concerns about theft-of-text, and should not be conflated with such concerns in any way: Give-away work need not be held hostage to non-give-away concerns about theft-of-text under the pretext of "protecting" it from theft-of-authorship. (Unfortunately, many journal publishers try to write and use their copyright transfer agreements for precisely this purpose, and authors need to become aware of it.)

The following digital copyright concern is relevant to the give-away literature only:

5.5. Guaranteeing Author Give-Away Rights

Apart from the protection from plagiarism and the assurance of priority that all authors seek, the only other "protection" the give-away author of refereed research reports seeks is protection of his give-away rights!

(The intuitive model for this is advertisements: what advertiser wants to lose his right to give away his ads for free, diminishing their potential impact by charging for access to them!)

Well, there is no need for the authors of refereed research to worry about exercising their give-away rights, for they can do it, legally, even under the most restrictive copyright agreement, by using the following strategy.

6. How to get around restrictive copyright legally

("Preprint+corrigenda strategy")

6.1. Self-archive the pre-refereeing preprint

Self-archiving the preprint is the critical first step. Before it has even been submitted to a journal, your intellectual property is your own, and not bound by any future copyright transfer agreement. So archive the preprints (as physicists have done for 10 years now, with over 150,000 papers, and cognitive scientists have done for 3 years now, with over 1000 papers). This is a good way to establish priority, elicit informal feedback, and keep a public record of the embryology of knowledge.

[Note that some journals have, apart from copyright policies, which are a legal matter,embargo policies," which are merely policy matters (nonlegal). Invoking the "Ingelfinger  (Embargo) Rule," 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. The Ingelfinger Rule, apart from being directly at odds with the interests of research and researchers and having no intrinsic justification whatsoever -- other than as a way of protecting journals' current revenue streams -- is not a legal matter, and unenforceable. So researchers are best advised to ignore it completely (Harnad 2000a, 2000b), exactly as the authors of the 150,000 papers in the Physics Archive have been doing for 10 years now. The "Ingelfinger Rule" is under review by journals in any case; Nature has already dropped it, and there are indications that Science may soon follow suit too.]

6.2. Submit the preprint for refereeing (revise etc.)

Nothing changes in author publication practises; nothing needs to be given up. Submit your preprint to the refereed journal of your choice, and revise it as usual in accordance with the directive of the Editor and the advice of the referees.

6.3. At acceptance, try to fix the copyright transfer agreement to allo
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