[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Peter Murray-Rust]

HansP
>>We simply have to find a better solution than an(!) "organization". In
this context, I am also frightened by PMR's advocacy of "regulation".
Peter, do you really think that expanded (and ever-expanding)
regulation is to the advantage of *research*? Even if we agree on
predators being around - OA as well as non-OA publishers! - we should
not endanger the freedom and innovative power of science just for the
sake of battling those.
For a start I'm talking about things like clear licences, clear
undertakings to authors, readers and funders. At present publishers can
create whatever they like - it's often self contradictory and inpoerable.
There is huge amounts of fuzz and fudge about what "Open Access" means
operationally.

If we are paying 3000+ dollars for the pubication and reading of an article
don't we have rights?? Or do we trust the publishers absolutely because
they are good chaps and fundamentally on the side of academia?? I don't
believe either.

As an example, hybrid gold is meant to offest subscriptions fees. Is there
any objective evidence that this is happening? Or do we trust the
publishers because of their wonderful track record?
On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Richard Poynder <
ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk> wrote:

> For sure, there is no easy solution. But should the research community give
> up because the task seems difficult?
>
> Exactly. We have neglected this for 10 years so it's a complete mess. It
won't get better unless we DO something. At the least we need clear factula
information about practices.


> Moreover, this need not be about forming commissions of eminent
> researchers.
> There has been some discussion of the issues and challenges here:
>
> http://svpow.com/2012/12/06/crowdsourcing-a-database-of-predatory-oa-journal
> s/<http://svpow.com/2012/12/06/crowdsourcing-a-database-of-predatory-oa-journals/>.
> Note that the proposal is to use a crowd-sourced solution, not a
> top-down organisation. In this scenario the role of any organisation would
> perhaps simply be to provide whatever funding was needed to create and
> manage the necessary platform, and to give the initiative some legitimacy.
>
> You will see that a number of people have proposed that the task should
> come
> under the aegis of DOAJ.
>
> And bear in mind that doing nothing leaves the status quo in place, which
> is
> a situation in which a lone librarian decides for the entire research
> community what journals are good, and what journals are bad. Is that really
> satisfactory?
>

And a lone graduate student compiles a list of Open Access practtices.



-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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