Where the article I wrote for PMC was once available to anyone with web
access, it no longer is. Period.
I have already had several colleagues complain to me of embarrassment
when, on trying to look at my article -- or, worse, trying to show off my
article to a third party -- they discovered that they could no longer see it.
It's unreasonable to ask these folks to subscribe to PMC for the
privilege of seeing my article once. It's not just unreasonable, it's
unrealistic. And it's just as unrealistic to expect any kind of quick
turnaround in getting the small institutions at which many of these
schoalrs work to subscribe to Muse.
If a colleague wanted to hand an article I wrote for teh Henry James
Review to someone else, even *if* they did not subscribe to HJR and their
institution did not subscribe to Muse *or* HJR, they could still, quite
easily, get a copy of that issue -- through interlibrary loan, through
another library (I could even mail them an offprint!).
It is much more difficult for them to get access to my PMC article.
All of the good points Michael makes about Muse are apt, but they do not
address the core point: they would all *still* be true if most people
could see the article.
The central point, to summarize, and as Lisa Brawley put it earlier: most
people can no longer get to the article I wrote for PMC. This is an
unacceptable revision to the original terms under which I supplied my
work to PMC in the first place (under which my article would be
"published on PMC," which at the time literally meant that it would be
freely available throughout the world wide web).
And let me reiterate a point that may be buried in what I have written
above: the lack of a print coutnerpart for PMC makes it far less
accessible than the other journals on Muse -- radically less, I would
argue.
Just to drive the point home -- neither I nor the great majority of my
friends and colleagues can see my article at all any more. I am sure you
can understand why I would find this intensely frustrating.
-- dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu David Golumbia