[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
Jean-Claude Guédon
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca
Thu Jul 12 22:15:02 BST 2012
I think we are going somewhere here.
Could we manage, with the help of some foundation, manage to bring
together a number of top university administrators from all over the
world (minimum 20) to hash out exactly what could be done in a
coordinated fashion?
Moving en masse to a mandate would create a real momentum that could no
longer be ignored.
Who wants to work on this? I do!
Jean-Claude
Le jeudi 12 juillet 2012 à 10:15 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter
> Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
> Rather than asking universities, unrealistically, to risk a lawsuit,
> needlessly (even though I agree completely with PM-R that it would be
> lost), as in PM-R's "fairy tail," why not, realistically, do almost
> the same thing:
>
>
>
> * The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of
> institutions) in the world meet for 2 days
> * They agree that they will mandate that copies of all
> the papers their faculty are deposited in their
> institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance
> for publication
> * They adopt the optimal mandate: ID/OA, together with
> the email-eprint-request "Almost-OA" Button for
> embargoed deposits.
> * Other universities will take the model and do it.
>
> This is called Green Gratis OA self-archiving. No one is proposing to
> "forfeit" either Gold OA or Libre OA (re-use rights), just to accord
> priority to the more important and urgent, and also easier and more
> reachable goal of mandating Green Gratis OA first, because it is
> within reach and already underway.
>
>
> The Libre OA and Gold OA will follow the universal mandating of Green
> Gratis OA as surely as the publishers' lawsuit would lose if PM-R's
> fairy tale came true.
>
>
> But next to nothing at all will happen if we keep on failing to reach
> first for the reachable, and keep insisting instead on the
> unreachable.
>
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
> 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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