E-Letter responses to:

compviewpoint: The Editors SCIENCE'S RESPONSE: Is a Government Archive the Best Option? Science 2001; 291: 2318b-2319b [Summary] [Full text]

E-Letters: Submit a response to this article

Published E-Letter responses:

The Copyright Laws Are Important

James W. Farr   (9 May 2008)

Public Library of Science Response

Michael Eisen   (29 May 2001)

Need for Discussions

Murali Rangarajan   (18 April 2001)

Scientific Society Publishers

Lawrence P. Reynolds   (11 April 2001)

Strategy, Tactics, and Ethics

Peter Singer   (9 April 2001)

AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late

Stevan Harnad   (2 April 2001)

The Copyright Laws Are Important 9 May 2008
James W. Farr, Scientist Self-employed Respond to this E-Letter: Re: The Copyright Laws Are Important	The copyright laws governing the use or distribution of scientific research that is catalogued or owned publicly in the U.S. are much less stringent than those governing privately run bodies holding research. I’m sure that other countries have different laws. The copyright laws should at least be scrutinized carefully before changing any rules governing the storing of scientific research in libraries. James W. Farr
Public Library of Science Response 29 May 2001
Michael Eisen, Scientistst Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Public Library of Science Response	In their response to our essay, the Editors of Science make a number of arguments for retaining private control of the scientific literature. They also criticize, as exerting undue pressure, the efforts of more than 16,000 people from 140 countries who have signed a letter arguing for public libraries, and pledging to work only with those publishers who will participate in building such libraries. We don’t see any reason to defend the rights of scientists to act according to their convictions in matters as important as publication and distribution of their work. But we would like to respond to the Editors’ comments about creation of a public archive with several observations: 1. We commend the Editors for their plan to make original research reports published in Science available for free, after a year, at their own Web site. But it is important to note that this does not help with searches of large collections of reports that could be so important to scientific progress, nor does it allow the scientific community to incorporate Science’s archives into more innovative, integrated online resources. 2. The editors argue that we should all put our faith in publishers’ private consortia, like High Wire Press (HWP), rather than in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). We respect HWP and hope it prospers, but it represents only some publishers, and that seems unlikely to change. Nor is it clear that HWP, other groups like it, or individual publishers will have the enduring stability and integrity of the NLM or other governmental or nonprofit organizations. Will HWP exist in 5 years? The NLM, with a long history of support from publishers and libraries, is one highly appropriate public repository for our international heritage of scientific publication, every bit as much for digital records as for printed matter. 3. It is ironic that the Editors charge the NLM or PubMedCentral with monopolistic ambitions, since it is journal publishers, including the publishers of Science, who currently exercise a permanent monopoly over the distribution and use of every research article they print. At present, no one can compete with Science, J. Virology, or JBC, to provide the archival reports that happen to have been published in these journals’ pages, by offering easier access, better quality control, or better utility. One journal’s archives cannot substitute for another's, so the multiplicity of journals does not undermine this monopoly control over access. The surest guarantee against censorship, doctoring the literature, or abuse of power is to avoid having any part of the archive of scientific research owned or permanently controlled by any single entity, whether a government, a scientific society, a publisher, or a publishing cartel. 4. The Editors worry about the technical difficulties and costs of contributing to a public library. We believe these concerns have been greatly exaggerated by those who want to retain private control over the scientific literature. Those who are already participating in public archives---for example, in physics---know that, and have been speaking up. 5. We recognize the important financial support that journals provide to scientific societies. Societies will continue to be supporters of many admirable activities, as the Science Editors note. It is less clear that an appropriately high proportion of the income from scientific publishing ever reaches the societies; this proportion varies tremendously among scientific journals. In any case the concerns of many people associated with societies have been allayed by seeing how little the delayed release of the literature does to affect income. PNAS and Molecular Biology of the Cell--journals that are less reliant on “news” for their sales, and which would therefore be expected to face even greater risk from early free access--have been providing their contents for free within 2 months of publication; after a year, neither has lost subscribers. It seems very unlikely that biomedical scientists would cancel their subscriptions to Science or their favorite specialty journals based on the knowledge that the primary research reports can be read for free 6 months after publication! Most scientists want to hear about the work even before it is published; that is one major reason why they attend conferences and research seminars. If Science can make its material freely available on its own Web site after a year, why not have access to it through a public library as well? 6. Possible abuse of the literature by disreputable entrepreneurs is raised as another reason not to have a public archive. There is really no reason to think this problem would be increased by public libraries. Right now copies of old Science papers could be doctored or repackaged by such people, but what would be the motivation for such mischief, and who would be the audience? Working scientists will always go first to reliable sources, like the National Library of Medicine, High Wire Press, or the journals themselves. There’s no evidence of this kind of problem from the experience of physicists posting more than 100,000 papers on the free, public eprint arXiv website. 7. The Editors of Science are concerned about a possible loss of visits to their Web sites. A possible solution to this concern has emerged with a proposal from PubMedCentral (PMC): Publishers can provide copies of their papers to PMC to allow indexing, archiving, and full-text searching, but readers would be directed to the publisher’s site to view and download the reports identified by the search. If such agreements could be made practical and universal, some of the issues we have raised would be addressed. This proposal also provides a good test of the publishers’ real intentions. The Editors of Science comment about our proposal: “We admire the goal, and suspect that evolutionary forces may be moving us toward it.” We hope that a thoughtful consideration of our proposal and the growing support for the Public Library of Science initiative from scientists around the world will persuade the AAAS and the Editors of Science to help lead the way to unrestricted distribution of the scientific literature. Signed: Michael Ashburner , University of Cambridge Patrick O. Brown, Stanford University Mary Case, Association of Research Libraries Michael B. Eisen, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley Chaitan Khosla, Stanford University Roel Nusse, Stanford University Matthew Scott, Stanford University Harold Varmus, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Barbara J. Wold, Caltech
Need for Discussions 18 April 2001
Murali Rangarajan, Graduate Student Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Need for Discussions	I believe that the knowledge base generated by scientists is neither their own property, nor that of the societies or the journals that publish them. It is an unwritten and unstated commitment that we scientists undertake - sharing our discoveries with our peers and public. The knowledge base rightfully belongs to the public, and the scientific community has every right to ask for access to the published literature. I have not seen a fundamental opposition to this idea yet. So, the debate is only in the modalities of how to make the archived literature available to the public. As a graduate student who has had his share of difficulties in accessing published literature, I wish to place some of my observations and suggestions for consideration here. (1) When to place the archived literature for free access? Whether it is 2 months, 6 months, or a year after publication is something the publishers and the scientific community have to decide. There are some legitimate economic considerations here. One cannot dismiss the concerns of the publishers about a drop in subscription and economic returns. Also, it has to be understood that, given the highly varying demands for different journals, we may have to agree to different journals retaining "control" over their published materials for different periods of time. It is not an easy task to arrive at a fair proposition that satisfies all the parties concerned. However, I believe the essential first step is for the publishers to educate their readers on the economic factors involved, as demanded by the response (1) of Public Library of Science (PLS) to the editorial published in the Science magazine. (2) Where should the archives be located? I do not agree to any form of monopoly over access to any scientific literature, and in this regard, I agree with the PLS response (1). If PubMed Central (PMC) is just an example of where the materials could be hosted, so is HighWire Press (HWP), and so is any such site. To facilitate easy availability of the literature and to prevent a monopoly, it is instructive to consider more than one provider. However, there is a practical limitation of how many such sites can be sustained. In this context, it is rather appealing to decentralize and drop the idea of one site for all the literature. However, the policy Science magazine has decided to follow in hosting their own archives is probably less user-friendly. A middle ground could to be struck somewhere. (3) The Science editors raised an issue that "unlimited redistribution of content could lead to misuse of content and loss of quality control." It is incomprehensible how free availability of archived literature can cause misuse of content. If any, it will facilitate easy detection of any misuse such as plagiarism. The argument of lack of quality control is equally vague. The quality of publications is not going to be affected in that they would still continue to be peer-reviewed. If any, such a free availability would enhance the quality of research in general, for we would be better informed both to pursue new frontiers of research and to critically examine what is being published. (4) It is a legitimate argument that such a process should not be restricted to biomedical sciences. Nor should it be "first" attempted in biomedical sciences and then "extended" to include all other branches of science. I hope there will be sincere efforts from people of all branches of science in finding a way to bring the idea of free and easy availability of archived literature to the public to fruition. Finally, although everyone has to make strong cases for their interests, there is a higher purpose in the whole initiative, which is to bring the vast body of scientific literature to the public. I hope that such exclusive actions as boycotting journals that do not comply with certain requirements will not be necessary in forging a consensus to achieve the goal. Rather, there have to be extensive and sincere discussions identifying the major issues involved, with the goal of finding a consensual solution. w References 1. Public Library of Science, http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/plosScience.htm
Scientific Society Publishers 11 April 2001
Lawrence P. Reynolds, Chair, Publications Committee of the Society for the Study of Reproduction Cell Biology Center, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Scientific Society Publishers	A group called The Public Library of Science (PLS) has circulated a letter proposing a boycott, beginning in September 2001, of journals that do not provide "unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports ... within six months of their initial publication date" (www.publiclibraryofscience.org/plosLetter.htm [a link is available through Science's main discussion page associated with this dEbate topic]). Thus, the PLS and its proponents are attempting to blackmail scientific publishers, many of which are nonprofit scientific societies, into releasing their content under the time frame dictated by PLS. This is offensive and certainly seems counterproductive. The PLS is also a proponent of the PubMed Central initiative of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which proposes to establish "a freely accessible repository of life science research literature." The proponents of PubMed Central also support the proposed PLS boycott [see the Viewpoint in Science by R. J. Roberts et al. in this same issue, "Building a 'GenBank' of the published literature"]. As a member and now chair of the Publications Committee of the Society for the Study of Reproduction (SSR, which publishes Biology of Reproduction On-line with Stanford University's HighWire Press), these and related issues have long been of concern to me. I was a vocal critic of the original e-Biomed proposal by Harold Varmus (then director of the National Institutes of Health; Varmus also is a member of the PLS Open Letter Advocacy Group and a co-author of the Roberts et al. Viewpoint), and I believe much of the current efforts, at least concerning PubMed Central, are a result of his perhaps noble but nonetheless misguided efforts. Being pragmatic, my initial concern with the PubMed Central initiative is that it is unnecessary and in fact redundant. Many journals already provide free on-line access to their back issues. For example, HighWire Press provides free on-line access to nearly 250,000 articles within 6 to 24 months after publication, depending on the policy of the specific journal (see http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl). Although I don't know how widespread this policy is, I do know that some journals, such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, now provide immediate and free on-line access to their content for scientists from economically developing countries. Why would we need duplicate this access with PubMed Central, and who would pay to maintain such a system? More bothersome are the efforts of those at PLS, PubMed Central, and other organizations to usurp the place of nonprofit scientific societies such as SSR. An important mission of such societies is to ensure that their membership is able to publish in high-quality publications within their own research areas. This comes down primarily to an issue of control and not one of "free access" or "ease of access," as so stated in a recent response from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (publishers of the Journal of Biological Chemistry) to the PLS boycott (see Public Affairs at the ASBMB Web site, www.faseb.org/asbmb/ [a link is also available through Science's main discussion page associated with this dEbate topic]. If control over scientific publishing is not the primary issue, why would supporters of PLS and PubMed Central wish to impose their release schedule on all scientific publishers? In fact, the PLS letter goes farther than simply imposing a time frame for release of content; it also lists a requirement for "unrestricted free distribution rights ... through PubMed Central and similar online public resources." The Science editors discuss the implications of this seemingly simple statement as well as other important issues in their Viewpoint. For example, who will determine which "similar online public resources" qualify and thus would allow a journal to escape the boycott? Some for-profit organizations are attempting to garner additional authors, which would enhance their profits, under the guise of "free access." For example, BioMed Central, which is a for-profit online publisher, advertises on their home page: "BioMed Central publishes peer reviewed research across all areas of biology and medicine, with immediate, barrier-free access for all." Yet their site is full of advertisements, and they are clearly for profit. I would argue that they have little interest in free access but rather wish only to ensure their own profitability. My belief is that scientific publishing belongs in the hands of scientists and that the best way to ensure this is with journals published by nonprofit scientific societies. How better to decide such critical issues as what and when and how to publish, who should serve as editor-in-chief and editorial board members, how articles are reviewed, and who reviews them? In fact, it is exactly for these reasons that scientific societies began to publish their journals in the first place, not because they were motivated by profits. I do not wish to see this control wrested from scientific societies and placed into the hands of a select few. No matter how well intentioned these efforts by the PLS and their supporters, the final result will be that they will dictate to my discipline and others how and what we publish. I urge scientists, therefore, not to support the PLS boycott but rather to continue to support the efforts of their society's publications.
Strategy, Tactics, and Ethics 9 April 2001
Peter Singer, Sun Life Chair and Director University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Strategy, Tactics, and Ethics	The current debate on open access to scientific literature is focused on strategy and tactics. The dominant questions include the following: Where (that is, whose Web site) should open-access articles be posted? When should they be posted (e.g., after 6 months or 1 year)? Who should control the archive (e.g., the government or publishers or both)? Will a boycott (e.g. Public Library of Science Initiative) or self-archiving (e.g., Open Archives Initiative) or some other approach take us there? These questions of strategy and tactics are important. However, underlying them are some fundamental ethical questions related to scientific publishing that have not been adequately addressed: What should be the role of scientific publishing in fairly judging the quality of scientific contributions? What should be its role in supporting public accountability of science? What should be its role in ameliorating inequities of access to scientific information between developed and developing countries? Of course the answers to these “social purpose” questions need adequate business models to support and sustain them. However, if we focused discussion among various stakeholders (publishers, scientists, governments, NGOs, media organizations, and others) on doing what was right, and then on how to do it, we might ultimately get further than by focusing initially on strategy and tactics. Competing interests: Peter Singer is Associate Editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a member of the British Medical Journal's ethics committee, and subject adviser for medical ethics for BioMedCentral. Bibliography Medical journals are Dead. Long live medical journals, http://www.cma.ca/cmaj/vol-162/issue-4/0517.htm When shall we be free? http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/singer.html The Global Alliance for Health Information http://clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/2000110006v1
AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late 2 April 2001
Stevan Harnad, Professor Southampton University, UK Respond to this E-Letter: Re: AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late	"We admire the goal [of PubMed Central], and suspect that evolutionary forces may be moving us toward it," say the editors of Science. "We have decided to make our own back research reports and articles freely available after 12 months--at our own Web site--later this year." ......The goal is to free all of the refereed scientific and scholarly literature online for everyone, forever, from the obsolete and unnecessary access-blocking tolls of the Gutenberg era. This literature has in any case always been an author give-away, written for research impact, not for income from the sale of the text. In the PostGutenberg Galaxy it has at last come into its own. The release of the contents of Science after a delay of 12 months is too little, too late. "To begin a conversation among scholars with a threat of economic boycott is unfortunate." ......True. But this is not the beginning of the conversation, which was already well underway with the Bachrach et al. Science Policy Forum in Science in 1998 by S. Bachrach et al. (4 Sept., p. 1459), followed by the 1999 original National Institutes of Health proposal by Harold Varmus (http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm) on which the former Editor of Science, Floyd Bloom, had already written an editorial (9 July 1999, p. 197). Bloom's editorial was rather similar to the one I am replying to here, a reply that is rather similar to the one I made to the prior editorial (http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm) "[T]he archive [Roberts et al.] advocate...should include all scientific papers...Content should be free...PubMed Central (PMC) is given as the model [of such an archive]...We believe other alternatives exist that can meet most of these goals faster and more effectively without putting nonprofit scholarly publishing at risk." ......As for the "risk to nonprofit scholarly publishing," we are only speaking of refereed journals. And, if the only way to free their contents online were to restructure journal publishing in some way, would the benefits to research and researchers from freeing the refereed journal literature necessarily be outweighed by the (putative) difficulties the changes might create for the journal publishers? There are problems, however, with the proposal by Roberts et al. as described in their Viewpoint that appeared in this same issue (p. 2318). Although a free online version of the entire refereed corpus would undoubtedly be beneficial to the world scientific and scholarly community, this proposal does ask both publishers and authors to give something up in exchange: Publishers are asked to give up their contents online, and authors are asked to give up those publishers who decline to do so. If these sacrifices are necessary to gain the benefit of a free refereed literature, then we can weigh them, along with the likelihood that the parties involved will be willing or even able to make the sacrifices. But are the sacrifices really necessary? There is an alternative way to free the entire refereed literature without asking anyone to give up anything, and that is through author self-archiving. The strategy has already been tested and demonstrated to work by physicists. They have already freed 30 to 40% of their literature in this way. All that is needed is for physicists to accelerate their own rate of self-archiving (which, at its current linear growth rate, would take another decade to free 100% of its refereed literature) and for this strategy to be adopted by all the other disciplines. Physics self-archiving began as centralized (in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archive and its 14 mirror sites worldwide). What can now accelerate and extend the self-archiving initiative to all the other disciplines is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which has designed a standard for metadata tagging and harvesting that makes distributed interoperable archives possible at the individual university and research institution level. Interoperability means research papers can all be harvested into a global "virtual" archive, the archives' full contents seamlessly searchable and accessible for free from any researcher's desktop. Institutions can now create OAI-compliant Eprint Archives using free, open-source software . The responsibility and the incentive and the initiative for self-archiving can then be distributed worldwide at the university level, where its cost per paper becomes negligible, and its benefits in terms of increased accessibility, visibility, and research impact are appreciable (not to mention its eventual potential to relieve the institutional libraries' serials crisis). "There already are multiple-journal sites--for example, the nonprofit HighWire Press (HWP), which archives over 230 journals, including biological, physical and interdisciplinary papers. More than 200,000 articles are freely available at this site. By comparison, there are only about a dozen journals at PMC, limited currently to biology." ......Yes, and that is precisely the problem -- both with the status quo and with waiting for journal publishers to take charge of freeing the refereed literature online. "Why not begin with the already populated venue and add the integration, rather than the other way around? Why not use taxpayer dollars to promote innovative search technologies that do not require taking control of services provided by the private sector?" ......Because the problem is not that it is not integrated but that it is not free. And why should tax dollars be used to integrate a scattered set of toll-gated sites when researchers can both free and integrate the entire refereed literature (over 20,000 refereed journals) by self-archiving their own portion of it in their own institution's registered, OAI-compliant Eprint Archives? "The proposition of Roberts et al. raises problems for Science, and for other journals. First, it will reroute an economically important source of online traffic for journals that offer content and other products on their sites." ......Correct. So there is not much incentive for journals to give away their contents at this time. Author/institution self-archiving, however, may eventually have the secondary effect of forcing publishers to restructure themselves, and scale down to providing only the essentials (quality control and certification [QC/C] through refereeing), which only account for 10% of journal costs. The rest (on-paper version, on-line PDF, other "added values") can be sold as optional add-ons as long as there is a market for them. Currently, both the essentials (QC/C) and the add-ons are "wrapped" into the same product, with the result that the refereed papers are held hostage to the add-ons, which are kept behind a financial fire-wall and paid for by Subscription, Site-License, or Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls. It is from these S/L/P access-barriers that refereed research must be freed, and the arithmetic is already clear: If and when the availability of the free online version of refereed papers causes publisher S/L/P revenues to shrink (and institutional S/L/P savings to grow) to the point where there is no longer enough money to pay the essential 10% QC/C costs out of the S/L/P revenues, then they can be covered by the institutions out of 10% of their annual windfall S/L/P savings in the form of per-paper fees paid to journals for the QC/C service for their own authors' papers. In other words, there is no benefit whatsoever to research and researchers in maintaining "an economically important source of online traffic for journals" when there is clearly an alternative that can provide the QC/C and free online access too. Journals that are not interested in downsizing to this new PostGutenberg niche can elect to pull out, in which case their editorial boards, referees, authors, and titles can migrate to new journal publishers that are happy with the new niche. But this endstate is unlikely to be reached either by publisher voluntary downsizing now, or by author migration to new journals (although it would be splendid if it could). It will only be reached under pressure from the natural force of author/institution self-archiving. "[U]nlimited redistribution of content could lead to misuse of content and loss of quality control." ......How? Why? Is there any evidence for this among the 150,000 papers already archived by the physicists? And how can free online access to refereed papers have a retroactive effect on the refereeing? "[I]t may expose users to risks historically associated with monopoly suppliers. For example, recently PubMed--on which PMC will depend--unexpectedly failed to process new content for over a month, inconveniencing authors and publishers." ......Where did the notion of "monopoly supply" come into a free online literature? If the worry is about the robustness of the archive, then mirroring, distributedness, backup, and other means exist to make it as robust as one likes. Whatever it is that makes the current journal literature reliable and robust, we can be sure that it is not ipso facto that S/L/P meters are running. "Subscription and advertising revenue will be at some risk and transferring primary access to someone else's site may expose us to further losses." ......That is correct. And that is why the self-archiving initiative neither demands nor depends on journal publishers doing anything like that. "The value we add--through peer review, perspective and context-setting analysis of research, and good news coverage--requires revenue support from advertising." ......The only essential value is the peer review, discussed above. The rest are options and can and should be sold wherever and whenever there is a market for them. "Moreover, Science supports other activities of AAAS... These benefit scientists from all fields. Posting our back content on a site that primarily serves biomedical scientists would confer a benefit on one group by taking benefits away from another--creating, in effect, a transfer payment from the sciences in general to biology in particular." ......Indeed, it would. And for that reason it is unreasonable to ask or expect AAAS to do so at this time. All AAAS need do is to refrain from attempting to prevent their own authors from self-archiving their Science papers. The rest of the cards can fall where they may. (For further discussion, see http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim and http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm) "Our association is an umbrella organization, including many specialized scientific societies as affiliates. Their more focused journals must remain viable to ensure continued publishing options in highly specialized fields and for younger scientists. In most cases, academic library subscriptions provide the economic "floor" that guarantees financial sustainability. If papers from specialized journals were to become available on the PMC site, budget-conscious library directors would be tempted to cancel subscriptions. Some of the signers of the petition are scientists who belong to those very societies. Have they considered that their initiative will put PMC in competition with their own journals?" ......This rationale, and all the other ones offered here, are strained and ineffectual when it comes to self-archiving and its possible consequences. The earlier formula -- that the 10% QC/C costs can always be paid out of the 100 S/L/P savings -- covers all refereed journals. "When tax-exempt organizations go into competition with commercial entities they must pay unrelated-business income tax. When tax-supported organizations compete with commercial entities and nonprofits, the public has usually raised strong objections." ......This is so far-fetched that it does not warrant a reply. "There are also questions about whether the proposed location for PMC--the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health--is the right one. NIH already sponsors, through its extramural programs, much of the biomedical research PMC will archive. It regulates the conduct of that research, controls much of the training of the next generation of researchers, and archives primary data. It now proposes that the results of the research it funds be given over by publishers and authors to a server subject to its exclusive control. The Congress or the President can eliminate support for certain kinds of science and have done so in the past. Would PMC then be able to archive papers on those subjects? Concentrating this kind of womb-to-tomb control in a single federal agency has risks, and we should ask whether we are entirely comfortable with a state-run, centrally managed economy in biomedicine." ......This seems a convoluted, scare-mongering argument. "Proponents of this plan include scientists of high reputation...Nonetheless, we think its potential consequences require careful analysis and policy debate. We at Science are determined to participate in a constructive spirit." ......Voluntarily freeing their contents online after a 12-month delay is certainly a welcome step from AAAS, but it is too little, too late. It is understandable that neither Science nor any other publisher should find any reason for preemptively freeing its contents online at this time. All they need to do is allow their authors to take matters into their own hands, by self-archiving their refereed papers. Bibliography Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. 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