The "Subversive Proposal" was an Internet posting by Stevan Harnad on June 27, 1994[1][2] (presented at the 1994 Network Services Conference in London[3]) 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.
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.
An online interview[9] of Stevan Harnad was conducted by Richard Poynder on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the subversive proposal.