[BOAI] Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
Françoise Salager-Meyer
francoise.sm at gmail.com
Sat Oct 31 14:21:38 GMT 2009
>I agree that the only solution is aN INSTITUTIONAL MANDATE. My question is:
In view of the fact that all researchers want to
publish in top-notch jornals (the 5.000 core
journals), isnt' there an incompatibility between
the pre-print publishing of peer-reviewed papers
and the subsequent publishing of the papers in
one such journal? Will the publisher agree that
the pre-print be published?
I have a problem, for example, with the
commercial publisher Peter Lang. It does NOT
allow me to put in my institutional repository
the papers (post-print) that have been published
in Peter Lang books.
Elsevier acccepts the post-print publication
under the conditon that one does not use the
Elsevier logo.
Can anymore please answer the pre-print question:
will a commercial publisher accept that one put
on one's institution IR the pre-prints of the
papers to be later published in their journals?
Thankx a lot.
Françoise Salager-Meyer (Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida. Venezuela)
I am about to give a lecture on Open Access in
developing countries and I would very much like
to have a reply to my question!
****
>On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Noel, Robert E. <rnoel at indiana.edu> wrote:
>
>> Does it make that much difference how universities, scholars, and readers
>> arrive at Open Access?
>
>How they do it does not matter if they do arrive at OA. But it makes
>every difference if they don't.
>
>> the price of "Nuclear Physics B" (Elsevier)
>>has been going down in recent years
>> and many users of that literature regard that as a positive thing
>
>Lower journal prices does not mean OA.
>
>> It makes me think that open access is not the primary goal,
>> but that a specific path to open access is the primary goal
>
>No, OA is the primary goal and lowering journal subscription prices is
>not a path toward that goal. (And journal boycott threats, even if
>motivated by OA rather than journal pricing, are ineffectual, as the
>PLoS boycott has shown.)
>
>Robert Noel is conflating the journal affordability problem and the
>research accessibility problem.
>
>Stevan Harnad
>
>
>On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Noel, Robert E. <rnoel at indiana.edu> wrote:
>> Does it make that much difference how
>>universities, scholars, and readers arrive at
>>Open Access? I'm a little puzzled by the
>>lengths to which Steven Harnad goes to advance
>>a specific path, while very deliberately
>>excluding other cogent, seemingly sensible
>>ideas. I have not talked to Jackson about
>>"Getting Yourself out of the Business"; perhaps
>>he read the "Wrong Advice" message below and
>>now agrees with Mr. Harnad, I don't know.
>>
>> It seems the efforts of Berkeley's
>>mathematician Rob Kirby (launched SPARC
>>endorsed "Algebraic and Geometric Topology",
>>and "Geometry and Topology") were largely
>>seeded by the spirit of Jackson's strategy as
>>opposed to any other strategy. Kirby has been
>>concerned about commercial publishers' journal
>>prices and took action that seems to me to have
>>been constructive action (see Notices of the
>>AMS, 2004, "Fleeced"). The message of that
>>opinion piece again seems to me to be related
>>to Jackson's points, and not so much to the
>>Harnad solution. In what ways are the actions
>>of Prof. Bruynooghe and JLP's editorial board
>>roughly a decade ago a failure? The
>>resignation of that Board was motivated by
>>"Getting yourself out of the Business".
>> Similarly, the price of "Nuclear Physics B"
>>(Elsevier) has been going down in recent years
>>and many users of that literature regard that
>>as a positive thing. Many variables have
>>driven that drop in price, and it's
>>presumptuous to think that none of them have to
>>do with Jackson's points.
> >
>> Anyway, others have devoted much more time and
>>energy to this topic than I have, but I'm
>>skeptical of recommendations that bluntly
>>reject other strategies from the outset. It
>>makes me think that open access is not the
>>primary goal, but that a specific path to open
>>access is the primary goal, and that access
>>itself is a convenient result, but still an
>>afterthought. It's tantamount to engineers and
>>scientists recommending to policy makers that
>>solar and wind energy are viable alternatives
>>that will reduce a country's dependence on oil,
>>but research into biofuels, maglev trains, and
>>clean coal is utter nonsense, and reducing
>>individual energy consumption by changing
>>lifestyles is a sham, and in fact
>>counterproductive.
> >
>> Does anyone on the planet have this much
>>foresight as to how civilization should
>>communicate and share information?
>>
>> Bob Noel
>> Swain Hall Library
>> Indiana University
>> Bloomington, IN 47405
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: boai-forum-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk
>>[mailto:boai-forum-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk] On
>>Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 8:35 AM
>> To: American Scientist Open Access Forum
>> Cc: SPARC Open Access Forum
>> Subject: [BOAI] Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
>>
>> [Apologies for Cross-Posting: Hyperlinked version is at:
>> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/641-guid.html ]
>>
>> With every good intention, Jason Baird Jackson -- in "Getting Yourself
>> Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps"
>>
>>http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2009/10/12/getting-yourself-out-of-the-business-in-five-easy-steps/
>> is giving the wrong advice on Open Access, recommending a strategy
>> that has not only been tried and has failed and been superseded
>> already, but a strategy that, with some reflection, could have been
>> seen to be wrong-headed without even having to be tried:
>>
>> * Choose not to submit scholarly journal articles or other works to
>> publications owned by for-profit firms.
>> * Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or
>> article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a
>> for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial
>> publisher.
>> * Do not seek or accept the editorship of a journal owned or under the
>> control of a commercial publisher.
>> * Do not take on the role of series editor for a book series being
>> published by a for-profit publisher.
>> * Turn down invitations to join the editorial boards of commercially
>> published journals or book series.
>>
>> In the year 2000, 34,000 biological researchers worldwide signed a
>> boycott threat to stop publishing in and refereeing for their journals
>> if those journals did not provide (what we would now call) Open Access
>> (OA) to their articles. http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html
>>
>> Their boycott threat was ignored by the publishers of the journals, of
>> course, because it was obvious to them if not to the researchers that
>> the researchers had no viable alternative. And of course the
>> researchers did not make good on their boycott threat when their
>> journals failed to comply.
>>
>> The (likewise well-intentioned) activists who had launched the boycott
>> threat then turned to another strategy: They launched the excellent
>> PLoS journals (now celebrating their 5th anniversary) to prove that
>> there could be viable OA journals of the highest quality. The
>> experiment was a great success, and many more OA journals have since
>> spawned, some of them (such as the BMC -- now Springer -- journals) of
>> a quality comparable to conventional journals, some not.
>>
>> But what also became apparent from the (now 9-year) exercise was that
>> providing OA by creating new journals, persuading authors to publish
>> in them instead of in their established journals, with their
>> track-records for quality, and finding the funds to pay for the author
>> publication fees that many of the OA journals had to charge (since
>> they could no longer make ends meet with subscriptions) was a very
>> slow and uncertain process.
>>
>> There are at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals published annually
> > today, including a core of perhaps 5000 journals that constitute the
>> top 20% of the journals in each field, the ones that most authors want
>> to publish in, and most users want to access and use (and cite).
>>
>> There are now about 5000 OA journals too, likewise about 20%, but most
>> -- unlike the PLoS journals (and perhaps the BMC/Springer and Hindawi
>> journals) -- are far from being among the top 20% of journals. Hence
>> most researchers in 2009 face much the same problem that the
>> signatories of the 2000 PLoS boycott threat faced in 2000: For most
>> researchers, it would mean a considerable sacrifice to renounce their
>> preferred journals and publish instead in an OA journal: either (more
> > often) OA journals with comparable quality standards do not exist, or
>> their publication charges are a deterrent.
>>
>> Yet ever since 2000 (and earlier) there has been no need for either
>> threats or sacrifice by researchers in order to have OA to all of the
>> planet's peer-reviewed research output. For those same researchers who
>> were signing boycott threats that they could not carry out could
>> instead have used those keystrokes to make their own peer-reviewed
>> research OA, by depositing their final, peer-reviewed drafts in OA
>> repositories as soon as they were accepted for publication, to make
>> them freely accessible online to all would-be users webwide, rather
>> than just to those whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the
>> journals in which they were published.
>>
>> Researchers could have made all their research OA spontaneously since
>> at least 1994. They could have done it OAI-compliantly (interoperably)
>> since at least 2000.
>>
>> But most researchers did not make their own research OA in 1994, nor
>> in 2000, and even now in 2009, they seem to prefer petitioning
>> publishers for it, rather than providing it for themselves.
>>
>> There is a solution (and researchers themselves have already revealed
>> exactly what it was when they were surveyed). That solution is not
>> more petitions and more waiting for publishers or journals to change
>> their policies or their economics. It is for researchers' institutions
>> and funders to mandate that their researchers provide OA to their own
>> refereed research by depositing their final, peer-reviewed drafts in
>> OA repositories as soon as they are accepted for publication, to make
>> them freely accessible online to all would-be users webwide, rather
>> than just to those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the
>> journals in which they were published.
>>
>> I would like to suggest that Jason Jackson (and other well-meaning OA
>> advocates) could do incomparably more for global OA by lobbying their
>> own institutions (and funders) to adopt OA mandates than by launching
>> more proposals to boycott publishers who decline to do what
>> researchers can already do for themselves. (And meanwhile, they should
>> deposit their articles spontaneously, even without a mandate.)
>>
>> OA Week 2009 would be a good time for the worldwide research community
>> to come to this realization at long last, and reach for the solution
>> that has been within its grasp all along.
>>
>> Stevan Harnad
>>
>>
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