On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, George Lundberg wrote:
> I would like to call the attention of this list serve group to an
> internet site called
>http://www.freemedicaljournals.com>> There you can find a list of a large (and rapidly growing) number of
> actually free on-line medical journals. There is a burgeoning feast
> that should obviate/alleviate a great deal of the famed S Harnad angst
> about delay/repression/profit/etc
>> George Lundberg
> Editor in Chief
> Medscape http://www.medscape.com/
I am delighted to hear from George Lundberg about the
freemedicaljournals site, which announces:
"Within the next three years,
the most important medical
journals will be available
online, free and in full-text.
The access to free scientific
knowledge will have a major
impact on medical practice and
attract Internet visitors to
these journals. Journals that
restrict access to their Web
sites will lose popularity.
"The Free Medical Journals Site
is dedicated to the promotion
of free access to medical
journals over the Internet."
http://www.freemedicaljournals.com lists nearly 400 biomedical journals
whose full-text contents are being made available free on-line.
A few of these are not free immediately, but only 6 months after
publication; others are not free in their entirety (including, alas,
the journal I edit, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, whose articles are
free, but commentaries and responses are not); and still others were
free, but are no longer free (e.g., JAMA).
But these developments are very welcome indeed!
All "S Harnad angst" will be obviated:
(1) when not only the full-text contents of 400 of the biomedical
journals, but the full-text contents of every last biomedical
journal are freed online
(2) when not only the contents of every last biomedical journal,
but the contents of every journal in every discipline are freed
online
(3) when they are all freed immediately, and not after a 6 month
embargo
(4) and when they are all freed forever.
Until that happy day is upon us, we can earnestly applaud such
developments without flagging in the slightest in our efforts to free
this entire literature, forever, through self-archiving, now:
http://www.eprints.org
P.S. "S Harnad Angst" is not about "repression/profit/etc." but about
needless barriers to research impact, barriers that it is at last
within the reach of researchers to eliminate, now, forever, without
waiting for any other party to come around to doing it for them.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
Once this corpus is free at last, vendors are free to continue selling
for a fee whatever deluxe versions of it there might still be a market
for, on-paper or on-line.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad at princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
You may join the list at the site above.
Discussion can be posted to:
september98-forum at amsci-forum.amsci.org
