The Self-Archiving Alternative

Abstract

Line Roberts et al., in "Building A "GenBank" of the Published Literature" (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a), Sequeira et al., in "PubMed Central decides to decentralize" (http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/pubmed.html) announce a new policy from PubMedCentral (PMC). PMC already accepts contents from publishers who are only willing to free them 6-12 months after publication. Now PMC is ready to accept just the metadata from those publishers, linking to their toll-gated websites, if they agree to give away their contents on their own websites 6-12 months after publication. Free access to refereed research a year after publication is better then no access, but it's too little, too late. The details of the self-archiving alternative for freeing the entire refereed corpus now (including questions of copyright and embargo) are fully described in Harnad (2001) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm.