[GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

While I generally agree with Stevan Harnad's message below, I do believe
it is important to say "some open-access journals" and "some gold
open-access advocates".

Simply not to reduce the entire "gold OA"  to some, potentially harmful,
OA practices.

Jean-Claude Guédon

Le jeudi 23 août 2012 à 22:49 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :

> On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Subbiah Arunachalam
> <subbiah_a at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>         Please see the Economist debate on academic journals
>         [http://www.economist.com/economist-asks/do-fee-charging-academic-journals-offer-value-added-0?sort=2#sort-comments.
>         It has not attracted many comments from readers - a clear
>         indication that the general public (at least the segment that
>         reads high quality news channels like The Economist) is least
>         interested in, if not indifferent to, what we consider is of
>         paramount importance. All our advocacy has not reached them. I
>         think, instead of spending our time talking about refining and
>         redefining the most appropriate way to bring about universal
>         open access amongst ourselves (and that too with some amount
>         of rancour) we should devote our attention now to take the
>         message to the citizenry at large. We should promote Students
>         for OA, Alliance of Taxpayers for OA and similar initiatives
>         in a large scale. In the end, public awareness and taxpayer
>         acceptance are the keys to the success of the OA movement.
> 
> 
> CONFLATING SUBSCRIPTION FEES AND (GOLD) OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION FEES -
> AND MISSING THE POINT
> 
> The Economist is mixing up two kinds of fees: subscription fees,
> charged by journals to users' institutions in exchange for access and
> publication fees, charged by (some) journal to authors' institutions
> in exchange for providing free online access ("open access") to all
> users.
> 
> Yes, subscriptions overcharge enormously; so do open-access journals
> ("gold open access"). But there is another way for authors to provide
> free online access to their journal articles for all users whose
> institutions cannot afford subscription access: authors can
> self-archive the final, peer-reviewed draft in their open-access
> institutional repositories as soon as they are accepted for
> publication ("green open access").
> 
> Researchers' funders and institutions have begun mandating (requiring)
> green open access self-archiving, but publishers have been lobbying
> vehemently that they should instead be paid even more for "hybrid gold
> open access," which is when a journal continues to collect
> subscriptions but, in addition, sells gold open access to individual
> authors who agree to pay a publication fee (which can be from $1500 to
> $3000 or more per paper published).
> 
> But now the UK research funder (RCUK), which used to be the worldwide
> leader in open access policy has been persuaded by the publisher lobby
> (as well as gold open access advocates) to mandate Gold OA payment,
> paid for out of scarce research funds, in place of RCUK's historic
> green cost-free Green OA self-archiving.
> 
> The UK and global research community must now send RCUK a very
> powerful and concerted signal that this needless and wasteful new
> policy must be revised.
> 
> See:
> 
> Urgent Need to Revise the New RCUK Open Access Policy
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/927-.html
> 
> How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised
> (Digital Research 2012 Keynote, Oxford, September 11)
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/926-.html
> 
> How to Repair the New RCUK OA Policy
> 
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/923-.html 
> 
> 
> 
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