Found today: a free archive of cognitive science articles. I think I've seen it before, but never really appreciated what it was. I don't recall whether my library links to it. More information on self-archiving is here.
Yeah, I've often wondered about that too. The FAQ for this site (if you didn't read it) is informative, but pretty damn heavy-handed, to the point where if there were serious negative consequences for participation I'm not totally sure that they'd tell you. The archive is still small, so I guess the creators are really motivated to get submissions.
An interesting thing is that many authors put pdfs of their articles on their own webpages. That's a source I often check if it turns out the library doesn't subscribe. I don't see how it's different from sending out reprints, which authors are definitely allowed to do. The lines around legitimate distribution of your published academic work are narrow and weird and run in unintuitive places; for instance, if you assign your own work as course reading, students are permitted to go to the library and photocopy it themselves, but (at least according to an undergrad prof of mine) you're not allowed to make photocopies and hand them out to students.
I'd like to see us cut out the middleman, myself; as Jonathan Baron (http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/mt/) has pointed out, the parts of the journal process that are really crucial for science are the writing part, which nobody gets paid to do, and the peer review part, which nobody gets paid to do. The cost of printing and mailing is a fine justification for charging at least some money for journal subscriptions, but do we still need that?
What if we had something like IMDb for psychology? People could upload their studies, maybe with version numbers attached, and other registered users could rate the quality of the article and its impact and blah blah blah, and leave comments. You'd have to have a lot of faith in the reviewers to keep personal disputes out of it, but we have that problem with the peer review system anyway. It would be like reading BBS articles and responses every day! I would get NOTHING DONE! But it would be psychology-related so it would be okay!
I think the thing about who makes the photocopies is for a slightly different reason. It actually doesn't matter whether it's your own work or not - individuals are always allowed to make photocopies for their own use, but a class tutor is not allowed to make a batch of copies and hand them out. It's pretty daft really, but I can see how this is an extension of sensible provisions in copyright law (personal use good; distributing work bad).
The only thing that might be different if you assign your own paper is if you actually own the copyright, and then you can do what you like with it, but I think a lot of journals don't allow authors to keep copyright.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 02:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 04:45 pm (UTC)An interesting thing is that many authors put pdfs of their articles on their own webpages. That's a source I often check if it turns out the library doesn't subscribe. I don't see how it's different from sending out reprints, which authors are definitely allowed to do. The lines around legitimate distribution of your published academic work are narrow and weird and run in unintuitive places; for instance, if you assign your own work as course reading, students are permitted to go to the library and photocopy it themselves, but (at least according to an undergrad prof of mine) you're not allowed to make photocopies and hand them out to students.
I'd like to see us cut out the middleman, myself; as Jonathan Baron (http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/mt/) has pointed out, the parts of the journal process that are really crucial for science are the writing part, which nobody gets paid to do, and the peer review part, which nobody gets paid to do. The cost of printing and mailing is a fine justification for charging at least some money for journal subscriptions, but do we still need that?
What if we had something like IMDb for psychology? People could upload their studies, maybe with version numbers attached, and other registered users could rate the quality of the article and its impact and blah blah blah, and leave comments. You'd have to have a lot of faith in the reviewers to keep personal disputes out of it, but we have that problem with the peer review system anyway. It would be like reading BBS articles and responses every day! I would get NOTHING DONE! But it would be psychology-related so it would be okay!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 11:25 pm (UTC)The only thing that might be different if you assign your own paper is if you actually own the copyright, and then you can do what you like with it, but I think a lot of journals don't allow authors to keep copyright.