[GOAL] Re: Bold predictions for 2012

[Stevan Harnad]

My friend and comrade-at-arms, the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale, finds that Gold OA publishing is growing too slowly. (He's right.)

Arthur also finds that both Green OA self-archiving, and Green OA self-archiving mandates (ID/OA) are growing too slowly. (He's right.)

Arthur predicts that more and more researchers will spontaneously begin to use enhanced, interoperable, interactive electronic resources (much the way they now already use word-processing, email and the web instead of typing and paper) so that the writing, storing and record-keeping of their own articles, and exchanging them with one another, will become so rich and interdigitated and natural that it will be functionally equivalent to having deposited them in an institutional OA repository, free for all.

He calls this the "Titanium Road" to OA (though it sounds rather like a technologically supercharged version of the Green Road to me!).

And surely he is right that something along those lines is as optimal and inevitable as OA itself.

The question is: Will its use grow any faster, of its own accord, than Gold or Green OA have done?

Arthur's betting that it will -- and I of course wish he were right!

But after 20 years, I have given up completely on researcher voluntarism, even when it is overwhelmingly in their own best interests. 

It was voluntarism that I assumed would bring us universal OA "virtually overnight" way back in 1994.

Technology has been doing nothing but making it easier and easier, and more and more rewarding, for researchers to provide OA, year upon year, ever since.

Yet the ever simpler and more powerful technology has never succeeded in inducing researchers -- or, rather, has not induced anywhere near enough researchers (for it has always induced some of them) -- to make their work OA in anywhere near sufficient numbers to reach that fabled OA "tipping point" that everyone keeps talking about year upon year.

So I will make no predictions for 2012, except to say that if it's a pipe-dream that voluntarism will ever kick in among researchers of its own accord, there is still the hope that their funders and institutions will come to their senses and make OA compulsory, by mandating it, as a condition for being employed and paid to conduct and report research in the online era -- which ought long ago to have become the OA era.

It is now a matter of tried, tested and demonstrated empirical -- and hence historical --  fact that OA mandates, if adopted, *do* accelerate the growth of OA for the research output of the funder or institution that mandated it -- soon approaching 100%, when it's the optimal mandate (ID/OA, Liege model, as the sole mechanism of submission for research performance assessment).

So the open empirical question now is whether adopting OA mandates will succeed in kicking in among researchers' funders and institutions in sufficient numbers -- in the way that providing OA spontaneously failed to do among researchers themselves.

Fortunately, the number of funders and institutions worldwide that need to be convinced of the benefits of mandating OA is an order of magnitude smaller than the number of researchers that need to provide OA.

And a number of sizeable mandating initiatives among funders at the national level have already successfully led to mandate adoption (notably among all the major national funders in the UK, and some at the EU level: see ROAMAP), with the biggest of all (COMPETES) now under deliberation in the US.

And at the global institutional level, there is now Bernard Rentier's and Alma Swan's EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), established to help guide the universal providers of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines -- namely,  universities and research institutions -- in designing OA policies worldwide.

So whereas there is no basis for crowing about "tipping points," there is reason to hope that we may not have to keep waiting for technology to put us over the top spontaneously via Arthur's "Titanium Road" -- though technology's help in providing OA and enhancing its benefits is always welcome (and being actively incorporated into the EPrints and DSpace repository software as well as into the implementation of OA mandates almost as fast as it is developed).

Stevan Harnad
Superannuated Archivangelist


On 2011-12-18, at 4:12 PM, Arthur Sale wrote:

> Richard, you asked what we’d like to see in 2012.
>  
> I’d like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to those that already exist.  Who wouldn’t?  I’d also like to see more ID/OA mandated institutional repositories. Again who wouldn’t?  But I don’t see either strategy as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a scholarly revolution becomes unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are too cerebral, too argumentative, too technological, and they require at present unnatural actions on the part of researchers.
>  
> What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for example like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera. It used to be a collection of paper, but the social media tools like Mendeley now allow this to be electronic, and like the silent transition from typewriters to the admittedly superior word processing software, I predict we will see a silent transition to online in-the-cloud corpus collections. Making this open access is technologically trivial, and I have named this the Titanium Road to open access: light-weight, strong, robust and recognises what people actually do.
>  
> If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year that we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal transfer of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to their ‘ownership’ and carry out minimal due diligence in their ‘purchase’ in return for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by dispensing copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week goes by when I do not see someone post to a list “Can anyone send me a copy of Xxx by Yyy in journal Zzz?” and it appears they almost always are satisfied by their later posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of scholarly articles has to change, and this might be the year that we begin to see cracks open up.
>  
> Finally, let me make my last prediction – that 2012 might see us begin to address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being a major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The English-speaking world and the European language speaking world have been happy to live with English as the lingua franca (what a strange misnomer!), but the Asian-speaking world is not likely to be so accommodating. We shall have to begin to treat open access as a matter involving automatic translation, at first maybe just for metadata, but later for the whole article.
>  
> Richard, you said you’d like to see short posts dominate this list, so I’ve been brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the previous four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable issues. I hope I have been controversial enough to get some responses.
>  
> Arthur Sale
> University of Tasmania, Australia
>  
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