Another timely and insightful posting from Fred Friend.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Frederick Friend</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk">ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk</a>></span><br>
Date: Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 6:04 PM<br>Subject: A response to the perception that OA through repositories is not an alternative to comprehensive OA through journal publication<br>To: <a href="mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">JISC-REPOSITORIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a><br>
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<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><b><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">A RESPONSE TO
THE PERCEPTION THAT OA THROUGH REPOSITORIES IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO
COMPREHENSIVE OA THROUGH JOURNAL PUBLICATION </font></b></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">It is time for supporters of OA through repositories to
respond to the unfair comparisons being made between repositories and OA
journals as a long-term route to open access. The comparisons appear to be made
in terms of sustainability of the two routes to open access, the quality of
content available through the two routes, and the push for a comprehensive
solution. What follows is not written from an anti-publisher nor an anti-OA
journal viewpoint, but is intended to make a case for a fair and even-handed
approach. </font></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt"><span><span><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt"><strong>1.</strong></font><span><font face="Times New Roman"><font style="FONT-SIZE:7pt">
</font></font></span></span></span><strong><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">SUSTAINABILITY</font></strong></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">The view that the journal route to OA is more
sustainable than the repository route to OA flies in the face of objective
studies of costs of various research communication models, which conclude that
repository deposit and access provide a more cost-effective route to OA than
publication in journals. How can a more expensive solution be more sustainable
than a cheaper option in the long-term? Even supporters of open access journals
seem to accept that additional funding is required for open access journals
converted from subscription journals, and this view has been accepted by the UK
Government in the announcement of an extra £10 million to support open access on
the journal model. Can the supporters of open access journals please come clean
and say for how many years such an extra sum will be required before OA journals
become sustainable? How is such a subsidy to be justified to the UK taxpayer
when a cheaper OA alternative is available? </font></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">The hope that open access journals will be cheaper and
therefore more sustainable than repositories appears to be based upon a hope of
low author publication charges. Some open access publishers certainly set low
publication charges, but the journals with low charges are by and large not
those journals in which authors choose to publish as first choice. The most
important journals are owned by publishers with a reputation for charging high
subscription prices and those publishers are likely to continue a high-price
policy into the OA era in order to maintain their profits or surpluses. In
theory competition for authors should lower the cost of author publication
charges but in practice the power in the author-publisher relationship lies with
the publishers of the most important journals. Authors are more desperate to
publish in such journals than the publishers are to secure authors.</font></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">Suggestions have been made that the repository route to
OA is unsustainable but no evidence has been produced to support that
contention. The large repositories – such as arXiv – have been in operation for
many years and have proved themselves to be sustainable. The institutional
repositories are smaller and have not been around as long as the big subject
repositories, but many of the institutions running repositories have been around
for hundreds of years. The large research institutions have enough income and
enough commitment to making their research output available to ensure that their
repositories are sustainable. So where does this view that repositories are
unsustainable come from? </font><span><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt"> </font></span></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt"><span><span><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt"><strong>2.</strong></font><span><font face="Times New Roman"><font style="FONT-SIZE:7pt">
</font></font></span></span></span><strong><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">QUALITY</font></strong></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">A second criticism of the repository route to OA has
been that repository content is of low quality. Do authors not find this
criticism insulting and ask why the final draft of their journal article should
be considered of low quality when the version published in a journal with only
minor changes to the final draft is considered to be of the highest quality?
Peer review and copy-editing are valuable but rarely make a dramatic difference
to the quality of the article. And there is no reason in principle why peer
review and an equivalent to copy-editing should not be applied to the author’s
final version deposited in a repository. After all a journal’s peer reviewers
are unpaid members of the academic community and copy-editing is similar to
skills many researchers already employ in using the raw materials of research.
The perception of the quality of repository content could be improved through a
system of kite-marks linking the repository item to previous work by the author
and the research assessment grading of the author’s department. </font></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">More fundamentally the criticism of repositories as
allegedly containing low-quality content appears to be based upon a way of
working which goes back to the paper era. Electronic systems have made
copy-editing less of a drudge, and intelligent electronic systems can help to
identify possible errors of substance. No longer can publishers claim to have a
monopoly on quality control for research outputs. </font></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt"><span><span><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt"><strong>3.</strong></font><span><font face="Times New Roman"><font style="FONT-SIZE:7pt">
</font></font></span></span></span><strong><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">COMPREHENSIVENESS</font></strong></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">There seems to be a view that open access journals
provide the only route to a comprehensive OA world and that repositories can
never be comprehensive in their holdings of research content. This view appears
to be based upon a view that all countries will follow the UK Government’s lead
and require publication in open access journals. Fortunately for the future of
open access there is no sign that the OA journal model will be followed by all
researchers in all countries in the world. A single world-wide model is highly
unlikely to be supported by so many disparate research communities, even though
they collaborate much more than they used to. </font></p>
<p style="LINE-HEIGHT:13pt;MARGIN:0cm 0cm 10pt" class="MsoNormal"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">By contrast the large subject repositories have been
remarkably successful in securing comprehensive collections of research articles
in their disciplines. Institutional repositories are newer and not comprehensive
at present, but a growing number of institutions are introducing deposit
policies for their researchers and have the potential to make 100% of their
research outputs available on open access. If any OA model has the potential to
become adopted world-wide it is the repository model rather than the OA journal
model, although both will co-exist for a long time.</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN:0cm 0cm 0pt"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">Fred Friend</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN:0cm 0cm 0pt"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN:0cm 0cm 0pt"><a href="http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt">http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk</font></font></a><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt"> </font></p>
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