Stevan Harnad Posts the "Subversive Proposal" for Open Access Publishing

On June 27, 1994 cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad presented at the 1994 Network Services Conference in London and posted on the Internet what he called the Subversive Proposal, calling on all authors of "esoteric" research writings to archive their articles for free for everyone online (in anonymous FTP archives or websites). This proposal initiated a series of online exchanges, many of which were collected and published as a book in 1995, edited by A S. Okerson & J. J. O'Donnell entitled Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1995).  The 1995 book led to the creation in 1997 of Cogprints, an open access archive for self-archived articles in the cognitive sciences, and in 1998 to the creation of the American Scientist Open Access Forum. That forum was initially called the "September98 Forum" until the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) released a statement of principles relating to open access to research literature to the public on February 14, 2002. In that process BOAI coined the term "Open Access".