[GOAL] Re: Bullish Report on Elsevier, Pooh-Poohing Boycott Threats

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Alicia López Medina <alopezm at pas.uned.es> wrote:

> Mandates are needed but it is not enough if they are not accompanied by
> the change ofthe evaluation criteria of scientific production in the
> institution (ISI beeing the MOST important criteria for promotion) . It
> is perverse for the researcher to mandate self-archiving without giving
> any value to it for his/her career. Until the institution do not
> accountfor the promotion of researchers the articles in open access
> repositories, and the scientific value of the article recognition come
> from the journal where it is published, we will not see significant
> green OA progress, and that includes, therefore, a change in the ways of
> certifying science, where lays the real power of journals.

(1) The promotion value of publication comes from the quality, uptake
and impact of the published research.

(2) Research evaluation already takes into account not just the number
of publications ("publish or perish") but the number of citations (and
soon also the number of downloads and other metrics) of the published
work, as well as the track-record for quality standards of the journal
in which it is published.

(3) Open access maximizes the uptake and impact of research by making
it accessible to all its potential users, not just those that can
affprd subscription access:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

(4) Therefore open access does already maximize ISI (and other)
metrics of research usage and impact, hence gives value to the
researcher's career.

(5) The institutional immediate-deposit (ID/OA) mandate designates
institutional repository deposit as henceforth the sole means of
submitting refereed publications for performance evaluation, thereby
simplifying submissions for performance evaluation and adding an
incentive for deposit:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html

(6) Funder mandates reinforce institutional mandates and involve the
institution in the monitoring and fulfillment of the grant compliance
conditions, as well as giving them an added incentive to adopt a
mandate of their own:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html

I think there may be two erroneous premises in your comment, however.

(i) You be assuming that OA = Gold OA (i.e., preferentially publishing
in OA journals). This is incorrect. Researchers can and should
continue publishing in the established journal with the best
track-record for quality standards that their research is able to
meet. whether OA or non-OA. Green OA self-archiving mandates make the
final, refereed drafts of all those articles OA. There is no need (or
justification) to switch to a journal with lower or unknown standards,
just because it is an OA journal. The journal's track-record for
quality standards is and continues to be one of the valid metrics for
research evaluation (but not the only metric: OA itself will generate
rich new metrics, but for that, OA must first be mandated and
provided!).

(b) Citation impact ("ISI") continues to be one of the valid metrics
for research evaluation, but it too is not the only metric: OA itself
will generate rich new metrics -- but for that OA must first be
mandated and provided.

So the order of priorities is this: Mandate Green OA, making it easy
to provide and monitor. Link deposit to research evaluation. Use all
existing metrics (and test and validate them) to aid evaluation, and
as the OA corpus grows, gather, test and validate more metrics spawned
by OA itself, weighting each of them according to their importance and
signal value in each discipline.