Author: Stevan Harnad

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SUMMARY: The ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funded it, not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry — nor even because there is a burning public desire to read (much of) it.

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(1) All peer-reviewed research articles are written for the purpose of being accessed, used, applied and built upon by all their potential users, everywhere, not in order to generate royalty income for their author (or their publisher). (This is not true of writing in general, e.g., newspaper and magazine articles by journalists, or books. It is only true, without exception, of peer-reviewed research journal articles, and it is true in all disciplines, without exception.)

(2) Research productivity and progress, and hence researchers’ careers, salary, research funding, reputation, and prizes all depend on the usage and application of their research findings (“research impact”). This is enshrined in the academic mandate to “publish or perish,” and in the reward system of academic research.

(3) The reason the academic reward system is set up that way is that that is also how research institutions and research funders benefit from the research input they produce and fund: by maximizing its usage and impact. That is also how the cumulative research cycle itself progresses and grows, along with the benefits it provides for society, the public that funds it: In order to be used, applied, and built upon, research needs to be accessible to all its potential users (and not only to those that can afford access to the journals in which the research happens to be published.).

(4) Open Access (OA) — free online access — has been demonstrated to increase research usage and impact by 25%-250% or more. This “OA Advantage” has been found in all fields: natural sciences, biomedical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities.

(5) Hence it is true, without exception, in all fields, that the potential research benefit is there, if only the research is made OA.

(6) OA has only become possible since the onset of the online era.

(7) Research can be made OA in two ways:

— (7a) Research can be made “Gold OA” by publishing it in an OA journal that makes it free online (with some OA journals, but not all, covering their costs by charging the author-institution for publishing it rather than by charging the user-institution for accessing it; many Gold OA journals today still continue to cover their costs via subscriptions to the paper edition).

— (7b) Or research can be made “Green OA” by publishing it in a conventional, non-OA journal, but also self-archiving it in the author’s Institutional Repository, free for all.

(8) Despite its benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research, only about 15% of researchers are spontaneously self-archiving their research today (Green OA). (A somewhat lower percentage is publishing in Gold OA journals, deterred in part by the cost.)

(9) Only Green OA is entirely within the hands of the research community. Researchers’ funders and institutions cannot (hence should not) mandate Gold OA; but they can mandate Green OA, as a natural extension of their “publish or perish” mandate, to maximize research usage and impact in the online era. Institutions and funders are now actually beginning to adopt Green OA mandates especially in the UK, and also in Europe and Australia; the US is only beginning to propose Green OA mandates.

(10) Some publishers are lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates, claiming it will destroy peer review and publishing. All existing evidence is contrary to this. (In the few fields where Green OA already reached 100% some years ago, the journals are still not being canceled.) Moreover, it is quite clear that even if and when 100% Green OA should ever lead to unsustainable subscription cancellations, journals will simply convert to Gold OA and institutions will then cover their own outgoing Gold OA publishing costs by redirecting their own windfall subscription cancellation savings on incoming journal articles to cover instead the Gold OA publishing costs for their own outgoing journal article output. The net cost will also be much lower, as it will only need to pay for peer review and its certification by the journal-name, as the distributed network of OA Institutional Repositories will be the online access-providers and archivers (and the paper edition will be obsolete).

(11) One of the ways the OA movement is countering the lobbying of publishers against Green OA mandates is by forming the “Alliance for Taxpayer Access.” This lobbying group is focusing mainly on biomedicine, and the potential health benefits of tax-payer access to biomedical research. This is definitely a valid ethical and practical rationale for OA, but it is definitely not the sole rationale, nor the primary one.

(12) The primary, fundamental and universal rationale for OA and OA mandates, in all disciplines, including biomedicine, is researcher-to-researcher access, not public access (nor even educational access). The vast majority of peer-reviewed research in all disciplines is not of direct interest to the lay public (nor even to students, other than graduate students, who are already researchers). And even in biomedical research, what provides the greatest public benefit is the potential research progress (leading to eventual applications that benefit the public) that arises from maximizing researcher-to-researcher access. Direct public access of course comes with the OA territory. But it is not the sole or primary ethical justification for OA, even in biomedical research.

(13) The general ethical rationale and justification for OA is that research is funded, conducted and published in order to be used and applied, not in order to generate revenue for the journal publishing industry. In the paper era, the only way to achieve the former was by allowing access to be restricted to those researchers whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the paper edition. That was the only way the true and sizable costs of peer-reviewed research publishing could be covered at all, then.

(14) But in the online era this is no longer true. Hence it is time for the institutions and funders who employ the researchers and fund the research to mandate that the resulting journal articles be made (Green) OA, to the benefit of the entire research community, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public. (This may or may not eventually lead to a transition to Gold OA.)

(15) It is unethical for the publishing tail to be allowed to continue to wag the research dog. The dysfunctionality of the status quo is especially apparent when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions, but the situation is much the same for all scientific and technological research, and for scholarship too, inasmuch as we see and fund scholarly research as a public good, and not a subsidy to the peer-reviewed journal industry.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Proust describes Swann as lazy in his scholarly work, as one who is more interested in life itself than in reading or writing. Swann found an excuse for his laziness in “the idea that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.” Swann had “acquired the habit of finding life interesting–of marveling at the strange discoveries that there were to be made in it.” (SW, Swann In Love)

Proust often reproached himself for not sitting down at his desk and working. Proust probably used the same excuse for his laziness that Swann used–life is more interesting than books. Proust wasn’t the only writer to believe that life is more interesting than books; “from life”, said Kafka, “one can extract comparatively so many books, but from books so little, so very little, life.” (Conversations With Kafka, by G. Janouch)

For the writer maybe, but for the reader?

And can one have the will (or wherewithal) to write without first having had it to read?

So, for a writer, laziness in reading is more unpardonable (and limiting) than laziness in writing.

Proust describes Swann as lazy in his scholarly work, as one who is more interested in life itself than in reading or writing. Swann found an excuse for his laziness in “the idea that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.” Swann had “acquired the habit of finding life interesting–of marveling at the strange discoveries that there were to be made in it.” (SW, Swann In Love)

Proust often reproached himself for not sitting down at his desk and working. Proust probably used the same excuse for his laziness that Swann used–life is more interesting than books. Proust wasn’t the only writer to believe that life is more interesting than books; “from life”, said Kafka, “one can extract comparatively so many books, but from books so little, so very little, life.” (Conversations With Kafka, by G. Janouch)

For the writer maybe, but for the reader?

And can one have the will (or wherewithal) to write without first having had it to read?

So, for a writer, laziness in reading is more unpardonable (and limiting) than laziness in writing.

It is right that Dr. Kevorkian has been freed, and it was a cruel miscarriage of justice to have imprisoned him in the first place. He is part-quack, but for the most part hero, and for a just and timely cause. He is naive and irresponsible on the criteria for euthanasia (that’s the quackish part), but right and brave on the basic need for and right to euthanasia. Let us hope that the reactivation of his campaign will help rather than hinder the spread of the Netherlands, Swiss and Oregon policies.

Anon: I got to thinking, as I pinched up a word and moved it to another place in the sentence: was it the same token?  If I cut an apostrophe and paste it somewhere else, is there ANY coherent sense in which it is the same apostrophe?  Heck, if I insert a few words in a document, so that all the succeeding ones have to “shift” down, are the “shifted” ones in any sense the same?  If I do nothing at all but watch as the computer continually redraws the words in front of me, isn’t there something really, really Heraclitean about visibles on a computer screen?  Of course just about everything like that, on a much slower scale; but this is unnerving.

I’m not sure whether you are wondering about recurrence in general, or just about token-identity vs type-identity.

It seems to me that epistemically (for Borges Funes-the-Memorious reasons), and ontically (for thermodynamic reasons), no two real-time events — hence, a fortiori, no two objects figuring in those events — are identical:  (“are identical” is already a misnomer: a thing can only be identical with itself, and even that only instantaneously). If there is a delta-T– change in time — then there is, a fortiori, a change, and hence non-identity. (At time T I am me-at-time-T and at time T+1 I am me-at-time-T+1: One could make the same argument about the “same” object at different points in space, but time has already done the trick, as the same object cannot be simultaneously at two different points in space — only different parts of the same object can be…)

Maye et al. have found a neurally (and genetically) based fractal order underlying the generation of spontaneous behavior. Their finding is undoubtedly important in understanding the mechanisms generating adaptive behavior and the authors have been cautious in their interpretations within the article, but less so in discussions with the press.

One co-author writes: “the term ‘will’ would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be ‘free’ if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity – which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie.”

The findings actually have nothing to do with free will. Free will is a feeling I have (when I do something deliberately) that I am doing what I am doing because I feel like it: a feeling that my willing it is the cause of my doing it.

It is undeniably true that that is what it feels like to do something deliberately. But whether what feels like the cause — feeling — is indeed the cause of my doing is an entirely different matter, especially if we are not ready to believe in telekinesis. The real cause might, for example, be a fractal order mechanism of the kind reported by Maye et al. But that mechanism is the causal mechanism it is irrespective of whether it happens to be accompanied by (or generates) feelings. And it certainly does not explain how or why we (let alone the fruit fly) feel anything at all.

And without feeling there is no free will, just mechanisms, whether deterministic or nondeterministic.

Stevan Harnad

Harnad, S. (2003) Can a Machine Be Conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(4-5): 69-75.

Harnad, S. (2005) What Is Consciousness. New York Review of Books 52 (11).

So first you do an online-age patent search to check whether your neologism or aphorism has been logged or phored afore.

Googling “food as an appetite suppressant” only nets two mentions, neither the intended one:

“…reduces the desire to eat more food. As an appetite suppressant supplement, pinolenic acid…”

“…sprinkle nail polish remover on your food as an appetite suppressant…”

But is it discovery or dysphoria to inisist that food as an appetite suppressant was the intended insight?

Fool. If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’ld have thee beaten for being
old before thy time.

Lear. How’s that?

Fool. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Aging is morphing
into a grotesque caricature
of oneself

Are all traits, distilled,
disgusting?

Or do some percolate
into perfection?

Kriszti, ma szabadultál meg.
Nagypéntek mátol kezdve a te napod is lesz,
ahogy a Mátyás Passzió már mindig is a tiéd volt.
וְשִׁירָתָא תֻּשְׁבְּחָתָא וְנֶחֱמָתָא