Martin, thanks for your comments.
Graham, in response to Stevan's comments, I agree with his statement but not with the stated reason:
If an article is licensed under a free license, e.g. the Creative Commons license as used by PLoS, BMC, et al., then it makes little practical difference whether the journal or the author holds the copyright. Either way, the article is free, irrevocably.
Getting the article online is not the only useful action one can make with the article copyright. Permission barriers, not just access barriers, are important. I discuss this at some length in a recent post on my blog 1; Peter Suber's comments on that post 2 are a good companion.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Stevan. To have seen this coming for over 10 years, and see how far we still are from the goal, even though the infrastructure is there and it takes so little of a researcher's time, must be terrifically frustrating. But, in my most humble opinion, he has a habit of confusing priority with importance. He seems to routinely dismiss any other goals or implementations of open access, saying in effect, “That's not important; just archive already!” And he's right: self-archiving should be the priority. But that doesn't mean the other goals aren't important.
Frankly, I would find open access boring if it were only about getting scholarship online for other scholars to find. There's so much more we can do with it, and there's no good reason not to.
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