Elsevier, which publishes a lot of science journals but not many philosophy journals, has apparently sent the University of Calgary a "take-down notice" regarding articles on web pages owned by the university. This goes beyond Elsevier's recent efforts to have copyrighted content removed from repositories like Academia.edu.
In case you haven't followed these developments, here's how it works: While Elsevier and other publishers often allow authors to post final drafts of their papers on the Web, they prohibit the posting of final, published versions—i.e., of the version that you would get if you downloaded it from the journal's web site. People routinely violate these prohibitions. Elsevier's lawyers then send "take-down" notices to the owners of the relevant web sites, demanding that the owners remove the copyrighted material. (I've linked some articles below with more details; by linking to them, I don't mean to endorse everything they say.)
From Elsevier's perspective, having final drafts available for free and published versions behind a paywall is an excellent arrangement. Posting the drafts gives everyone access to the content and therefore increases the number of people who might want to cite an article. But it order to cite a particular page, you need access the the published version, since only the published version contains the relevant page numbers.
Elsevier's policy, however, leaves lots of academics frustrated because it limits the reach and impact of their own work and makes it harder for them to access and cite work other people's work. How should academics respond to this sort of problem?
Many academics have called for a shift to independent, open-access journals, but this is not an easy thing to accomplish. In the comments on the blog post above, paleontologist Mike Taylor offers a potentially easier solution: Adopt a convention of numbering the sections (and subsections) of papers and then cite other papers by section (e.g., Freschi 2014, §3.2) rather than by page number. Taylor claims that this is the convention in mathematics. Since section numbers don't change from the final draft to the published version, lack of access to the published version wouldn't matter.
Suppose philosophers started citing each other by section number. How might publishers respond? Well, they could impose "house styles" that prohibit numbering your sections and insist that citations be by page number. Science & Engineering Ethics, published by Springer, seems to prohibit numbered sections in their house style: When I had a piece accepted there, the copy editors removed the numbers from my sections and replaced references to section numbers (e.g., "in Section 2, I will…") with references to section titles. Imposing these requirements would deter people from relying on publicly accessible drafts of papers published in those journals: If you cited a part of the paper by section number, it would make it hard for people looking at the published version to know which section you meant. You could still cite such a paper by section number and hope people would track down the publicly available final draft, but it would be inconvenient.
However, I think this would somewhat shift the market power in the academics' favor. Suppose that some publishers—call them "Friendly Publishers"—made it feasible to cite papers by section number, whereas other "Unfriendly Publishers" made it difficult or inconvenient to do so. If philosophers had a preference for citing papers by section number, then each of us would have an incentive to publish with Friendly Publishers. That incentive wouldn't be strong enough to prevent, e.g., early-career philosophers from publishing with Unfriendly Publishers, but it would tilt the playing field toward Friendly Publishers.
What do you think? Should we be numbering our sections and citing each other by section number?
Related articles
Leave a Reply