[GOAL] Re: Google's role in sustaining the public good to research parallel to developments in open access?

[Andrew A. Adams]

Gary F. Daught wrote:
[snip]
> Second, I noticed you referred to REPOSITORY indexing services. Here I
> think we may encounter a disciplinary difference. In the humanities,
> and especially religious studies/theology, I believe the growth of
> open access has a much better shot via the JOURNALS (Gold) route. I
> don't see any problem with humanities scholars utilizing repositories
> for practical preservation and supplemental discoverability. But this
> is not going to be enough to encourage a shift to OA. Scholarly
> tradition in the humanities strongly values associating one's research
> with textual artifacts and textual communities that create a sense of
> historical continuity. They want their research to appear as articles
> in journals of reputation within their discipline, and to be preserved
> in the archives of those journals.
> 
> The first step (and this is the role I have assumed as an OA advocate
> in religious studies) is to reassure humanist scholars that open
> access journals can function just as effectively as well-known and
> well-reputed subscription-based journals have done in the
> past. Humanities scholars are also concerned with
> discoverability. Here we have been stressing that OA can do a BETTER
> job with discoverability because, among other things, we can easily
> submit their research to indexing through search engines such as
> Google. Here too, this brings me back to the original point: Google is
> great. But can/ought we continue to rely so heavily on Google (or
> Bing/Academic Search, etc.) to assure continued indexing to open
> access literature?

Gary, you seem to be falling into the trap that Green Open Access (and the 
repositories that contain the papers) are somehow replacing journals with 
unrefereed self-published papers. This is NOT the case. The Green Road to 
Open Access is about providing access to the final author's text and graphics 
(but not the layout provided by the publisher) of peer reviewed papers 
published in journals following peer review. Repositories are not primarily 
for unrefereed material (though many repositories allow such material to be 
deposited - just about all of them clearly mark the status of such papers). 
They are provided and maintained to provide access to the main necessary 
element of the refereed journal literature: the author's words and graphics.

Yes, there may well be a problem with the fetishism of humanities scholars 
whose research invovles authenticating historic texts. That doesn't apply to 
all humanities scholars of course. That has been an issue, too, for 
scientists. But the argyument is easy and clear. You just have to phrase the 
questions to scholars correctly:

"Faced as a reader with a choice between access only to the text but not the 
layout of a paper, and no access at all, which would you rather have?"

"Faced as an author with readers who have that choice, would you rather 
provide access to your text or no access at all."

That's the question and the answer for almost everyone when it's asked 
correctly, is that they would prefer at least to see the text/allow the text 
to be seen.

This is within our grasp now by mandating deposit in repositories. Once 
repositories contain 80% or 90% or more of the ongoing literature then we can 
work on imprioving searchability, findability, sustainable funding of peer 
review (and figuring out how scholarly societies can be funded without them 
placing a barrier in the way of scholarship in their field in the way of 
tolls for literature access - commercial publishers' profits are not a 
benefit to academia and so need concern academics no more than the loss of 
blacksmith's livelihoods concerned the early motorist), and other questions 
such as reuse rights without any requirement beyond attribution (*).

(*) It still rankles me that my co-author on a paper had to ask out 
publisher's permission to re-use a diagram I created for a further paper of 
his building on our work. Even though the permission was granted without 
price, it still invovled his time to see it - the barrier being that the 
publisher of his second paper required formal permission from the first 
publisher. I have tried in the past to give a license to publish not a 
transfer and missed opportunities to publish is the right place for my work 
so had to revert to publishing in the right place and giving up many of the 
rights I would like to grant to the community (I don't want to keep them, I 
just don't want them exerted by the publisher against the interests of 
science and scholarship).

-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/