Correcting Stevan Harnad's Misrepresentation

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Sigh.  Stevan Harnad wrote:

> I kept resisting the posting of a message that amounts to 
> "nyah, nyah" but this is too rich: 25 Green OA self-archiving 
> mandates by funders worldwide, including NIH, 6/7 of RCUK and 
> ERC, and 25 institutional mandates, including Harvard, Stanford 
> and CERN, and Joe and Jan think the future of green is bleak?"

JE:  I have never said the future of OA is bleak.  I have said 
precisely the opposite, that OA is inevitable.  And Harnad knows 
this, but insists on misrepresenting my position.  I say he knows 
this because he wrote a long and vitriolic response to an article 
of mine several years ago; that article has been cited on this 
list before ("The Devil You Don't Know," http://firstmonday.org). 
In that piece I asserted that "Open Access is the future." 
Consider how bizarre this is:  Harnad writes a long attack on an 
article that mostly agrees with him.

What I have said is that OA in itself is unimportant and that it 
inevitably will drive up costs.  The Harvard faculty can mandate 
OA for itself (and, as far as I know, it is within the faculty's 
right to do so), but it won't make people read more thoughtfully. 
The NIH can mandate OA for materials based on research it 
underwites (and why not?  They paid for it), but it won't improve 
the quality of the material.  I think it is highly doubtful (but 
neither proven nor provable) that the OA articles mandated by the 
Wellcome Trust (for research it has funded, etc., etc.) will 
yield more citations or higher impacts than had the material been 
toll access.  OA doesn't make us smarter, it does not improve the 
economy of the United Kingdom (one of Harnad's claims of a couple 
years ago, if I understood the argument correctly), and it does 
not "democratize" knowledge or research, except in Lake 
Woebegone, where all the children are above average.

Thus, even as OA is becoming increasingly widespread, the 
rationale for supporting it becomes weaker and weaker.  This is 
the house of cards:  not OA itself, but the reasons to support 
it.

What is really needed in the research community is not open 
access but "open access follow-through."  But this follow-through 
applies whether documents are OA or toll access.  And that is why 
OA is not that important.  Harnad is solving the wrong problem.

Joe Esposito