The "Subversive Proposal" was an Internet posting by

Stevan Harnad Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist based in Montreal, Canada. Education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McG ...

on June 27 1994 (presented at the 1994 Network Services Conference in London ) calling on all authors of "esoteric" research writings to archive their articles for free for everyone online (in

anonymous FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

archives or websites). It initiated a series of online exchanges, many of which were collected and published as a book in 1995: "''Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing''". This led to the creation in 1997 of

Cogprints CogPrints is an electronic archive in which authors can self-archive papers in any area of cognitive science, including psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, and many areas of computer science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vision ...

, an

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

archive for self-archived articles in the cognitive sciences and in 1998 to the creation of the American Scientist Open Access Forum (initially called the "September98 Forum" until the founding of the

Budapest Open Access Initiative The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open S ...

which first coined the term "Open Access"). The Subversive Proposal also led to the development of the

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

EPrints EPrints is a free and open-source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It shares many of the features commonly seen in document ...

software used for creating OAI-compliant

institutional repositories An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

, and inspired

CiteSeer CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science. CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of ac ...

, a tool to locate and index the resulting

eprint In academic publishing, an eprint or e-print is a digital version of a research document (usually a journal article, but could also be a thesis, conference paper, book chapter, or a book) that is accessible online, usually as green open access, w ...

s. The proposal was updated gradually across the years, as summarized in the American Scientist Open Access Forum on its 10th anniversary. A retrospective was written by Richard Poynder. A self-critique was posted on its 15th anniversary in 2009. An online interviewThe Subversive Proposal at 20
of

was conducted by Richard Poynder on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the subversive proposal.

References

* Bosc, Hélèn
Les idées et la technique : une rétrospective de ces 15 dernières années

* Harnad, Stevan (1995): *:(2001/2003/2004
For Whom the Gate Tolls?
Published as: *:(2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. *:(2003
Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337–342.
*:(2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1 *:(2003
Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre
in: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou: Pp. 77–103. * Okerson, Ann Shumelda & O'Donnell, James J. (1995) (Eds.)
Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing
'. Washington, DC.,

Association of Research Libraries The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 127 research libraries at comprehensive, research institutions in Canada and the United States. ARL member libraries make up a large portion of the academic and research l ...

, June 1995. * Suber, Peterbr>Timeline of the Open Access Movement
(February 2009; archived copy from 2016)

External links

Official Site
Global Open Access Forum
Official Site {{Open access navbox History of the Internet Open access (publishing) Communication Academic publishing Research Online archives

References

Further reading

External links