[BOAI] Re: RCUK & EC Did Not Follow Finch/Willets

[Prof. T.D. Wilson]

I'm much in favour of repositories, but I don't think they are the ideal
solution because they require too much of a culture change for academic
authors.   Researchers are accustomed to submitting to journals and they
treat repositories simply as archives, to which they may or may not submit
their papers - depending mainly on how seriously the institution requires
submission, and it seems that, at least in the UK, they are not taken very
seriously by academics.  It is some years since I looked at the situation
but, then, the dominant contributor to repositories was the University of
Southampton, unsurprisingly :-)  The University of Oxford had something in
the order of 18,000 items in its repository of which, if my memory serves
me, only six were actual journal papers, the rest were original scientific
data and source materials.  The situation may have changed since then, but
there is obviously a lot of variation from institution to institution.

An alternative way to use the money would be to support the development of
free, subsidised open publishing - not simply open access.  I think the
focus on access is one of the reasons that reports like that from the Finch
Working Party get things so wrong. "Open publishing" means no author
charges and no subscription costs - costs are met through subsidies from
collaborating institutions and/or voluntary work.  This possibility also
suffers from problems, of course: no radical solution is going to be
problem free and the strength of the publishing lobby along with (in the
UK) the increasingly common practice of universities demanding that
researchers publish only in selected, so-called 'high-quality' journals,
means that considerable business and cultural forces are set up against
this solution.  However, as publisher of Information Research (
http://informationr.net/ir/) I know that it can be done and if, for
example, those thousands of mathematicians who have revolted against the
high subscription costs of Elsevier were to collaborate in the publication
of a new mathematics journal, I suspect that it would rapidly achieve 'high
quality' status.  I do not imagine that this solution could replace
journals with very large numbers of submitted papers, but new journals
rarely have high submission rates, nor do they have high numbers of
subscribers - why any new journal needs to be published by a commercial
publisher is a mystery.  They are usually launched at the instigation of an
academic, or group of academics, and this points to another problem - the
conservative character of the academic community.

Ultimately, the fact that the technology now makes the role of the
publisher redundant is going to be recognized and open publishing will
prevail - perhaps not in what is left of my lifetime but probably within
the next 30 to 50 years - a long time to wait, perhaps, but we should
reflect upon the timescale over which the printed book developed after
Gutenberg's invention - it took about 70 years before output in the UK
reached 10 titles per million population :-)

On 19 July 2012 15:39, Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org> wrote:

>   Prof. T.D. Wilson writes
>
> > So - definitely cheaper, but not cost free.
>
>   That's why universities should cancel journal subscriptions to fund
>   green open access.
>
>
>   Cheers,
>
>   Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                                       http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
>                                                skype: thomaskrichel
>
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Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, PhD (h.c.)
Publisher and Editor in Chief: Information Research
http://informationr.net/ir/
E-mail: wilsontd at gmail.com
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