[GOAL] Re: Interview with Professor Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, Manchester

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 1:32 PM, Richard Poynder <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk
> wrote:

> Martin Hall was a member of the committee that published the controversial
> Finch Report on OA in the UK.
>

*TRAINS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT*

Martin Hall's Q&A reminds me of the (Dostoevsky?) novel in which two
strangers meet on a train, get into a conversation, discover that they have
a lot in common, and talk animatedly for hours, until they arrive at a
station where one of them says something that immediately makes the other
realize that not only do they have next to nothing in common, but that what
had seemed like consensus throughout the conversation was all based on
systematic misunderstandings from the very first word onward!

Martin Hall and I do not mean the same thing by Open Access (OA) -- let
alone Green OA -- nor the problem OA is intended to solve, nor how to solve
it, nor how important and urgent it is to solve it, nor why; nor do we
agree about the relative importance and urgency of access to the version of
record, or of re-use, or of copyright retention, or over-publication, or
minimizing embargoes, or publication reform, or Gold OA. Nor do we agree
about the UK's optimal role in the global OA movement.

Martin thinks " 'green' is a messy category " Let's see if a simple
definition helps: Authors deposit the refereed final draft of their
articles in a repository immediately upon acceptance for publication and
make it immediately OA (un-embargoed). That is Green OA.

A Green OA mandate, however, has to live within a constraint, namely, the
fact that although 60% of journals already endorse immediate OA today, 40%
still demand an embargo of various lengths before the deposit is made OA.
The compromise -- called the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access or ID/OA
Mandate -- is to require immediate deposit and to urge (but not require)
immediate OA.

Once ID/OA is universally mandated by all institutions and funders
worldwide, the rest of what we hope for will take care of itself quite
naturally, of its own accord (with the help of the repositories' automated
email-eprint-request Button, the increasingly palpable benefits of OA, and
human nature).

If we instead over-reach, with Martin and Finch, pre-emptively, for far
less urgent and important and above all less reachable desiderata -- such
as the version of record, re-use rights, copyright retention,
over-publication control, minimizing embargoes, publication reform, or Gold
OA -- instead of adopting focused, effective an unambiguous ID/OA mandate,
we have many more years of wandering in the desert before us.

Nor do Martin and I agree about the UK's optimal role in the global OA
movement, which (for me) is to adopt a practical, effective, scalable
mandate model, suitable for emulation by the rest of the world, rather than
a costly local solution that the rest of the world cannot and will not
emulate (and is unlikely to succeed in the UK either).

The UK Select Committee got it right in 2004: UK funders and institutions
should *all* mandate Green OA (UK's only about 40% there, and most of the
mandates are not ID/OA) and subsidize Gold OA only on an experimental
basis.

Let's not drop the ball in 2012, but speed its motion. That and only that
will re-affirm the UK's leadership in the movement for global OA.

Stevan Harnad

****
>
> ** **
>
> Some excerpts:****
>
> ** **
>
> *** On green OA:****
>
> ** **
>
> “[I]t’s important to recognize that there are a number of varieties of
> green OA … green means different things to different people; for some, it’s
> an argument that all research outputs should be free at the point of use as
> a matter of principle, while for others, it’s the availability of the last
> version over which the author holds copyright, before surrendering
> copyright to a publisher.****
>
> ** **
>
> “It’s also important to watch out for the context in which green is
> evoked. In some arguments, green is advocated as the alternative to
> subscription publishing. But for others, the argument is made to have green
> in conjunction with a ‘national licence’, a policy that, if implemented,
> would perpetuate for-profit subscription publishing.****
>
> ** **
>
> “My preference would be to drop ‘gold’ and ‘green’, and rather
> differentiate between, on the one hand, full and upfront APCs and, on the
> other-hand, subscriptions, licences and other forms of pay-walls that
> restrict access.****
>
> ** **
>
> …****
>
> ** **
>
> “Green OA is not a transitional strategy … an approach that does not push
> towards full, up-front APCs will not result in genuine open access, where
> the version of record is free, under a CC-BY licence, at the point of use.”
> ****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> *** On the possible “collateral damage” that the Finch recommendations
> could inflict:****
>
> ** **
>
> “[T]here are risks here. The Finch Group had a specific brief and there
> were bound to be areas that we could not cover. A lot more work needs to be
> done on the future of the scholarly monograph — and this is particularly
> important for the Humanities.****
>
> ** **
>
> “Independent researchers are finding it more and more difficult to
> publish, and ways need to be found that provide appropriate access to funds
> for independent researchers, for full APCs. And some of the specialized
> societies that currently publish subscription journals are going to find
> the transition hard. These are real concerns that need attention.”****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> *** On whether the Finch Report should have cautioned against the use of
> hybrid OA:****
>
> ** **
>
> “Good point. I don’t see the use for hybrid models if policies push for
> full, upfront APCs.”****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> *** On whether the UK research councils (RCUK) look set to plough their
> own furrow, ignoring the Finch recommendations despite the fact that the UK
> government has accepted them all:****
>
> ** **
>
> “It was not up to the Finch Group to tell the Research Councils what to
> do, and we did not do so. Similarly, the government’s response to the Finch
> Report allows the Research Councils full and appropriate latitude in
> setting their conditions for the receipt of grant funding. All these
> furrows are running in the same direction.”****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> *** On what the OA policy of the Higher Education Funding Council for
> England (HEFCE) is likely to be in the wake of the Finch Report, the
> recently-announced EC Communication on OA, and the publication of RCUK’s OA
> policy:****
>
> ** **
>
> “It will be important to see exactly what HEFCE means by ‘green’. For the
> purposes of the 2020 Research Excellence Framework (or its equivalent),
> HEFCE could merely require that the author’s last version is made available
> via a repository (a condition that can, of course, be met at present).****
>
> ** **
>
> “Alternatively, they may require open access to a version of record, which
> will be a big push towards full and upfront APCs. HEFCE (in contrast with
> the Research Councils) is also going to have to work out what to require
> for research outputs that can (and must) be submisable, but which are for
> research not supported with public funds. The details will be important
> here.”****
>
> ** **
>
> More here:
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-oa-interviews-martin-hall-vice.html
> ****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
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