Lo-fun and hi-fun

"I have recently been talking to some major (and minor) publishers about what they could do in regard of open access, given the increasing demand, even if converting to ‘gold’ open access models is not realistic for them, in their view. I suggested that they should make human-readable copies of articles freely accessible immediately upon publication. Access to human-readable articles would of course not satisfy everybody, but it would satisfy the ‘green’ OA crowd, if I assume Stevan Harnad is their prime spokesperson. He dismisses machine-readability and reuse as distractions from his strategy of ‘green’ open access, and he even supports embargoes, as long as articles are self-archived in institutional repositories, which is his primary goal. Human-readable final published versions directly upon publication would be an improvement on that. It would also likely satisfy the occasional reader from the general public, who wishes to be able to access a few scientific articles.

How could those publishers possibly agree to this? Well, I told them, they could reconsider their view that there is a fundamental difference between the published version of an article and the final, peer reviewed and accepted author manuscript (their justification for allowing the author-manuscript to be self-archived). There may well be, of course, and there often is, but it is not likely to be a material difference in the eyes of most readers. Instead of making much (more than there usually is) of any differences in content, they could distinguish between low-functionality versions and high-functionality ones of the final published article, the ‘lo-fun’ version just suitable for human reading (the print-on-paper analogue), and the ‘hi-fun’ version suitable for machine-reading, text- and data-mining, endowed with all the enrichment, semantic and otherwise, that the technology of today makes possible. The ‘lo-fun’ version could then be made freely available immediately upon publication, on the assumption that it would not likely undermine subscriptions, and the ‘hi-fun’ version could be had on subscription. Librarians would of course not be satisfied with such a ‘solution’...."