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We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.

"Cognizing" (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state. Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition. Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its network of cognizers, digital databases and software agents, all accessible anytime, anywhere, has become our “Cognitive Commons,” in which distributed cognizers and cognitive technology can interoperate globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity inconceivable through local individual cognition alone. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature.

Les auteurs discutent le lien entre visibilité, accès et impact de la recherche afin de montrer l'intérêt de l'auto-archivage. Ils présentent l'historique et les étapes du mouvement pour le libre accès (Open Access). Enfin, ils indiquent les possibilités et limites de développement de l'auto-archivage, en particulier dans l'objectif d'accroître la visibilité internationale des publications francophones en psychologie.

Il y a toutes les raisons de croire que nos têtes locutrices et leurs esprits intercommunicateurs seront incomparablement plus féconds une fois que ces cycles itératifs paresseux qui, à l’ère “ gutenbergienne ”, ont permis la création et l’accumulation des connaissances humaines, auront retrouvé dans la galaxie “ post-gutenbergienne ”, grâce à l’écriture céleste, la vitesse de pensée de l’âge de pierre. Tout tient à la synchronisation. Et ce n’est qu’une question de temps pour qu’on en recueille les fruits.

Using neural nets to simulate learning and the genetic algorithm to simulate evolution in a toy world of mushrooms and mushroom-foragers, we place two ways of acquiring categories into direct competition with one another: In (1) "sensorimotor toil," new categories are acquired through real-time, feedback-corrected, trial and error experience in sorting them. In (2) "symbolic theft," new categories are acquired by hearsay from propositions - boolean combinations of symbols describing them. In competition, symbolic theft always beats sensorimotor toil. We hypothesize that this is the basis of the adaptive advantage of language. Entry-level categories must still be learned by toil, however, to avoid an infinite regress (the "symbol grounding problem"). Changes in the internal representations of categories must take place during the course of learning by toil. These changes can be analyzed in terms of the compression of within-category similarities and the expansion of between-category differences. These allow regions of similarity space to be separated, bounded and named, and then the names can be combined and recombined to describe new categories, grounded recursively in the old ones. Such compression/expansion effects, called "categorical perception" (CP), have previously been reported with categories acquired by sensorimotor toil; we show that they can also arise from symbolic theft alone. The picture of natural language and its origins that emerges from this analysis is that of a powerful hybrid symbolic/sensorimotor capacity, infinitely superior to its purely sensorimotor precursors, but still grounded in and dependent on them. It can spare us from untold time and effort learning things the hard way, through direct experience, but it remain anchored in and translatable into the language of experience. En utilisant des réseaux de neurones formels pour simuler l’apprentissage, il s’agit de mettre en compétition directe deux manières d’acquérir des connaissances fort

Interviews and analysis of an experimental course involving online hypermail discussion between students and instructor.

Interview about future of journals, http://archipel.uqam.ca/186/1/harnad99.ejforum.html

We report a series of studies designed to determine whether effects similar to those observed in the innate categorical perception (CP) of color and phonemes are induced during category learning. In Experiment 1 no evidence is found for such effects when stimuli vary unidimensionally. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate a within-category compression effect but no between-category separation effect for stimuli varying in two dimensions. Compression only is also shown in Experiment 4, which uses pictures of actual objects. MDS analyses of these data illustrate how within-category compression effects without separation effects are sufficient for categorization, and also show that learning changes the dimensional structure of similarity space. Results are compared with those from other studies exploring similar phenomena, and with neural network simulations, and the paper closes with suggestsions for the direction of future research on these phenomena.

The publishers of learned paper journals have contemplated or already implemented the following hybrid scenario for the transition from paper to electronic publishing: Produce both versions, paper and electronic, and offer paper-plus-electronic subscriptions for slightly more than paper-only, and electronic-only subscriptions for slightly less. This allows supply and demand to decide which version is preferred, and offers a seamless transition to electronic-only if and when its time comes. Variants of this scenario include site-licensing or pay-per-view in place of subscriptions, but without exception all these scenarios continue to regard learned articles as a trade commodity, to be sold to readers and protected from "theft" by copyright laws. This trade model entails and has always entailed, a conflict of interest between the publisher and the nontrade researcher/author. In the Gutenberg era, when print-on-paper was the only option, the conflict was rightly resolved in favour of the publisher, whose real costs and a fair profit could only be recovered by restricting access to those who paid (whereas the author would have preferred that everyone everywhere have access for free). We have dubbed this the "Faustian Bargain" (which is rather like advertisers being forced to make potential clients pay to see their adverts!). The PostGutenberg era of "Scholarly Skywriting" -- networked electronic publication, free for all -- has at last made it possible for nontrade authors (those who ask and receive no royalties, and whose readership is a small population of fellow researchers) to free themselves from the Faustian Bargain. They can archive their unrefereed preprints on the Net and can substitute for them the refereed, published reprint after peer review, editing, and mark-up. This is the gist of our "Subversive Proposal." The only problem is that the cost of implementing peer review, editing and mark-up is still being borne by paper journal publishers, who continue to c

In innate Categorical Perception (CP) (e.g., colour perception), similarity space is "warped," with regions of increased within-category similarity (compression) and regions of reduced between-category similarity (separation) enh ancing the category boundaries and making categorisation reliable and all-or-none rather than graded. We show that category learning can likewise warp similarity space, resolving uncertainty near category boundaries. Two Hard and two Easy texture learning tasks were compared: As predicted, there were fewer successful Learners with the Hard task, and only the successful Learners of the Hard task exhibited CP. In a second experiment, the Easy task was made Hard by making the corrective feedback during learn ing only 90% reliable; this too generated CP. The results are discussed in relation to supervised, unsupervised and dual-mode models of category learning and representation.The world is full of things that vary in their similarity and interconfusability.O rganisms must somehow resolve this confusion, sorting and acting upon things adaptively. It might be important, for example, to learn which kinds of mushrooms are poisonous and which are safe to eat, minimising the confusion between them (Greco, Cangelosi & Harnad 1997).

We report simulations with backpropagation networks trained to discriminate and then categorize a set of stimuli. The findings suggest a possible mechanism for categorical perception based on altering interstimulus similarity.

The Turing Test is just a methodological constraint forcing us to scale up to an organisms' full functional capacity. This is still just an epistemic matter, not an ontic one. Even a candidate in which we have successfully reverse-engineered all human capacities is not guaranteed to have a mind. The right level of convergence, however, is total robotic capacity; symbolic capacity alone (the standard Turing Test) is underdetermined, whereas full neurosimilitude is overdetermined.

The rapid growth of scholarly information resources available in electronic form and their organisation by digital libraries is proving fertile ground for the development of sophisticated new services, of which citation linking will be one indispensable example. Many new projects, partnerships and commercial agreements have been announced to build citation linking applications. This paper describes the Open Citation (OpCit) project, which will focus on linking papers held in freely accessible eprint archives such as the Los Alamos physics archives and the other distributed archives, and which will build on the work of the Open Archives initiative to make the data held in such archives available to compliant services. The paper emphasises the work of the project in the context of emerging digital library information environments, explores how a range of new linking tools might be combined and identifies ways in which different linking applications might converge. Some early results of linked pages from the OpCit project are reported.

When certain formal symbol systems (e.g., computer programs) are implemented as dynamic physical symbol systems (e.g., when they are run on a computer) their activity can be interpreted at higher levels (e.g., binary code can be interpreted as LISP, LISP code can be interpreted as English, and English can be interpreted as a meaningful conversation). These higher levels of interpretability are called "virtual" systems. If such a virtual system is interpretable as if it had a mind, is such a "virtual mind" real? This is the question addressed in this "virtual" symposium, originally conducted electronically among four cognitive scientists: Donald Perlis, a computer scientist, argues that according to the computationalist thesis, virtual minds are real and hence Searle's Chinese Room Argument fails, because if Searle memorized and executed a program that could pass the Turing Test in Chinese he would have a second, virtual, Chinese-understanding mind of which he was unaware (as in multiple personality). Stevan Harnad, a psychologist, argues that Searle's Argument is valid, virtual minds are just hermeneutic overinterpretations, and symbols must be grounded in the real world of objects, not just the virtual world of interpretations. Computer scientist Patrick Hayes argues that Searle's Argument fails, but because Searle does not really implement the program: A real implementation must not be homuncular but mindless and mechanical, like a computer. Only then can it give rise to a mind at the virtual level. Philosopher Ned Block suggests that there is no reason a mindful implementation would not be a real one.

Critique of Computationalism as merely projecting hermeneutics (i.e., meaning originating from the mind of an external interpreter) onto otherwise intrinsically meaningless symbols. Projecting an interpretation onto a symbol system results in its being reflected back, in a spuriously self-confirming way.

Critique of two critiques of connectionism.

Some of the features of animal and human categorical perception (CP) for color, pitch and speech are exhibited by neural net simulations of CP with one-dimensional inputs: When a backprop net is trained to discriminate and then categorize a set of stimuli, the second task is accomplished by "warping" the similarity space (compressing within-category distances and expanding between-category distances). This natural side-effect also occurs in humans and animals. Such CP categories, consisting of named, bounded regions of similarity space, may be the ground level out of which higher-order categories are constructed; nets are one possible candidate for the mechanism that learns the sensorimotor invariants that connect arbitrary names (elementary symbols?) to the nonarbitrary shapes of objects. This paper examines how and why such compression/expansion effects occur in neural nets.

An evolutionary scenario for the evolution of language, beginning with handedness, gesture and pantomime, then propositions and speech, resulting in an all-purpose symbol system capable of expressing any proposition.

Our sense that we do something deliberately may be an afterthought that arises after our brains have already triggered our action unconsciously. Consciousness itself may be a similar illusory afterthought, with no direct causal role. In any case, Methodological epiphenomenalism, together with the Turing Test, seem to be be the best strategy for cognitive modelling.

HARNAD: Let me just ask a question which everyone else who has been faithfully attending these sessions is surely burning to ask: If some rules you have described constitute universal constraints on all languages, yet they are not learned, nor are they somehow logically necessary a priori, how did language get that way? CHOMSKY: Well, it seems to me that would be like asking the question how does the heart get that way? I mean we don't learn to have a heart, we don't learn to have arms rather than wings. What is interesting to me is that the question should be asked. It seems to be a natural question, everyone asks it. And we should ask, why people ask it.