Subversive Proposal
Open-knowledge reference entry
The "Subversive Proposal" was an Internet posting by Stevan Harnad on June 27, 1994 (presented at the 1994 Network Services Conference in London) calling on all authors of "esoteric" research writings to archive their articles for free for everyone online (in anonymous FTP archives or websites). It initiated a series of online exchanges, many of which were collected and published as a book in 1995: Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. This 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 (initially called the "September98 Forum" until the founding of the Budapest Open Access Initiative which coined the term "open access"). The Subversive Proposal also led to the development of the GNU EPrints software used for creating OAI-compliant open access institutional repositories, and inspired CiteSeer, a tool to locate and index the resulting eprints.
The proposal was updated gradually across the years, as summarized in the American Scientist Open Access Forum on its 10th anniversary.
A retrospective was written by Richard Poynder.
A self-critique
was posted on its 15th anniversary in 2009. An online interview of Stevan Harnad was conducted by Richard Poynder on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the subversive proposal.
References
Bosc, Hélène Les idées et la technique : une rétrospective de ces 15 dernières années
Further reading
Harnad, Stevan (1995):
(2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as:
(2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access.
“Subversive Proposal” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Subversive, Proposal and Open-knowledge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Subversive Proposal” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Subversive, Proposal and Open-knowledge provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7632449. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1995, 1997 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Subversive Proposal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.