NOTA ACLARATORIA
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I have the pleasure to get in touch with you in order to denounce one of the most relevant human right violations suffered by scientific researchers in peripheral countries, the right to communicate and be informed, guaranteed by their respective National Constitutions. The need to break the absolute isolation and incommunication that the research institutions are experiencing --with respect to tariffed bibliographic and hemerographic Databases existent in the Web-- is becoming every day more pressing and unavoidable.
The urging importance that these Databases have for the excelence of our research performance and for any country that wants to privilege scientific research activities as a platform for its economic and cultural takeoff (such were the cases of Ireland and Finland) is something superfluous to be emphasized in this letter. We find ourselves in circumstances similar to those experienced by the most backward European countries during the Renaissance, when Guttenberg discovered the print, obliged to continue reading parchment, papyrus and clay tablets. Moreover, the amazing electronic incommunication in which we are involved has increased because the number of tariffed Databases existing in the Web has enlarged in the recent times.
On the contrary, in the opposite extreme of this irrational behavior, governments of peripheral countries are searching by all means to break the financial incommunication that their countries experience with the institutions of international credit. We believe that this contradiction between both behaviors is a hipocresy and a double discourse. This contradiction in political practices and this hipocresy in discourses, that no crisis could justify, offend our scientific researchers, encourages the exodus of younger generations of researchers, and frighten away any chance that young scholars living in the first world would like to return to their countries of origin. This reality of diaspora, that the economists do not compute in the balance of payments and in the external indebtment incurred by peripheral countries suggest new questions ¿how much the creditor countries owe us for our export of intelligence? First world countries ask for the payment of royalties, copyrights and tariffed subscriptions but are unable to retribute the intelligence exported by peripheral countries.
Some private universities are subscribed to some of those Databases, and this unequal situation increases even more the qualitative gap between public and private institutions. In order to back their argument, for students and researchers only remains the possibility to break the secret keys and hack those Databases, with all the personal and institutional risks implied.
Moreover, the contradiction and the hipocresy could be partially repaired if the parasitic and superfluous expenses be punished, and the budget reassigned. On the contrary, research institutions permanently suffer discharges in their budgets and incur in sumptuary expenses that could be assigned for the goals already mentioned. These public research institutions have sistematically boycotted the subscription to those Databases, such as J-Store, Pro-Quest, Electronic Reference Library, Elsevier, Carfax, Sage, Kluwer, Blackwell, II Mulino, Swets Backsets Service, Frank Cass, Chadwyck-Healy, Bell Howell, Gale´s Ready Reference Shelf, Project Muse and HAPI, among many other Databases existent in the world.
However, governments in these countries persist in giving priority to the resolution of the financial incommunication with the institutions of international credit, without any consideration whatsoever to the scientific and cultural incommunication we are experiencing, condemning us to practice a peripheral science unable to compete with the vanguard research practiced in the scientific institutions of First World countries.
The Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH)
The Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH) should be a non-profit organization of scholars committed to making the world's scholar literature freely accessible to the public around the world, for the benefit of the social sciences and the humanities, and the public good. We are working for the establishment of international online public libraries of social sciences and the humanites that will archive and distribute the complete contents of published scholar articles and reviews, and foster the development of new ways to search, interlink and integrate the information that is currently partitioned into millions of separate reviews and reports and segregated into thousands of different journals, each with its own restrictions on access, in a similar way to what has been done by the Public Library of Science (PLoS). As a step toward these goals, I am circulating the following open letter to urge publishers to allow the articles and reviews that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of social sciences and the humanites. Our initiative is prompting significant and welcome steps by many scientific publishers towards freer access to published research. We must make every effort to give our full support to those journals that adopt the policy proposed in the open letter. We plan to establish a non-profit scientific publisher under the banner of Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH) operated for the benefit of both the social sciences and the humanities, and will begin advocating the publication exclusively in those journals that fully realize the principles of this movement. With your participation, vision and energy we can establish a new model for scientific publishing. Please join us in this effort.
OPEN LETTER
The Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH) initiative begins with the circulation of the following open letter, urging publishers to allow the articles and reviews that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of social sciences and the humanities. If you support this initiative, we ask you to sign the following open letter.
We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in the social sciences and the humanities in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form, similar to what is being done in the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Establishment of this public library would vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity, and catalyze integration of the disparate communities of knowledge and ideas in social sciences and the humanities. We recognize that the publishers of journals in the social sciences and the humanities have a legitimate right to a fair financial return for their role in scholar communication. We believe, however, that the permanent, archival record of scholarly research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled exclusively by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library. To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, we pledge that, beginning in September, 2002, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research articles and reviews that they have published, through online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.
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