[GOAL] Re: The OA Interviews: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver

[Peter Murray-Rust]

I think JC identifies the key point:

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon <
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> wrote:

> **
> Gold OA will not get in the way of Green OA if it is explained correctly;
> and forfeiting gold OA will do more harm to the OA movement than the harm
> gold OA could ever and putatively make to green OA.
>
> If, among OA advocates, we could get this behind us, we could achieve four
> important results:
>
> 1. We would be far more united, and, therefore, more powerful;
>

Yes. But JC does not go far enough. Here's my diagnosis and a fairy-tale


   - The OA movement is fragmented, with no clear unified objective. We (if
   I can count myself a member of anything) resemble the People's Front of
   Judea and the Judean People's Front (Monty Python). Every time I am
   lectured on why one approach is the only one I lose energy and the movement
   - if it is a movement - loses credibility. Until we get a unified body that
   fights for our rights we are ineffective.
   - Most people (especially librarians) are scared stiff of publishers and
   their lawyers.
   - There is a huge pot of public money (tens of billions in sciences) and
   it's easier to pay off the publishers than standing against them. There is
   no price control on publishing - publishers charge what they can get away
   with.
   - The contract between publishers and academics has completely broken
   down. The Finch report, the Hargreaves process have not thrown up a single
   constructive suggestion from toll-access publishers
   - senior people in universities don't care enough about the problem to
   challenge publishers. It's easier to put up student fees to pay the ransom.
   And many have accepted the Faustian bargain. (Here's an awful example of an
   LSE academic who "published" a paper
   http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/11/scholarly-publishing-broken-guerrilla-self-publishing/only
to have to wait TWO YEARS while th epubklishers typeset it. And her
   boss would rather NO ONE read it as long as LSE got the glory.
   - Young people are disillusioned and frightened.

So here's my fairy tale. It more likely to happen than universal green OA
mandates. It's more likely to happen than a useful amount of Gold OA. It is
technically trivial (My software can do it).

Fairy Tale:

   - The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the
   world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice).
   - They bring along a few techies (I'd go).
   - They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their
   faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting
   them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software).
   - They reformat them to non-PDF.
   - They put them up on their university website.
   - They prepare to fight the challenge from the publishers.

and

   - they win the law suit. Because it's inconceivable that a judge (except
   in Texas) will find for the publishers.
   - Other universities will take the model and do it.

Total cost perhaps 1 million per university. It's cheaper than running our
currently empty repositories. It's cheaper than hybrid fees.

There's only one thing missing:

COURAGE.



-- 
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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