[GOAL] Re: Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 4:46 AM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 3:19 AM, Richard Poynder
> <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk> wrote:
> > To the intense joy of OA advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has
> > withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act.
>

I find no joy in progressing from the presently unacceptable position to a
worse one and then back to square one.

The only "progress" is to discover even more clearly that publishers are
institutionally anti-academic and anti-reader so that the few of us who
fight for basic rights have clearer evidence. I take no joy in the total
silence of organised academia - not a squeak of comment and support from
any major university or library leader.


> >
> 2. Boycotting authors cannot, need not and will not stop publishing in
> or reviewing for their best journals: It is neither necessary nor
> realistic. There are easier and better ways to make those journals'
> contents freely accessible.
>
> 3. Researchers cannot, need not and will not stop serving on the
> editorial boards of their best journals. It is neither necessary nor
> realistic. There are easier and better ways to make those journals'
> contents freely accessible.
>

Tell me how to do it for the American Chemical Society.  The issue has been
fought for 10 years with zero progress. Simply restating "press for Green"
makes no difference.

>
> 7. Hence only one course of action is realistic, feasible and makes
> sense: It will remedy the accessibility problem completely and it will
> eventually drive down journal expenses and prices as well as induce a
> conversion to Gold OA publishing at an affordable rate.
>
> 8. That course of action is for universities and research funders to
> mandate Green OA self-archiving.
>

Unless I am told different I assume the following about "Green".
 * there is no ,legal basis for it that can be used to force a publisher
such as the ACS to become green
 * there is no contractual agreement between any publishers and "the
academic system". Publishers have not committed formally to providing Green
indefinitely. Green practice is formally rescindable by the publisher.
(Maybe the boycott hass show this might be a poor decision, but large
institutions are out of touch and make many bad decisions. I doubt that the
universities, unlike the NIH, would have enough courage to challenge an
ex-green publisher effecively)

>
> 9. Once Green OA self-archiving becomes universal because it is
> universally mandated, the research accessibility is solved.
>

I strongly believe that will never happen. Some publishers like ACS will
resist to the end. An organisation which 2 years ago lost 40 million USD in
pointless lawsuits will die rather than be forced to change. I also believe
that if Greenness started to reach a significant proportion of publications
the publishers would rescind it, put other restrictions in its use or
marginalise it through other practices. So, for me, the idea that we get
100% green, the publishers drop prices and we then redesign the publishing
system is unrealistic. (It might have some hope if Institutional
Repositories actually provided some added value rather than being
impossible to navigate, hopeless to search automatically, and highly
laborious to populate. If Universities actually built a BETTER system we
might have some progress - the 2000+ person years spent on IRs is of no
value to me and my colleagues.



> 10. Once the research accessibility problem is solved, journal
> affordability is no longer a life-or-death matter: libraries can
> cancel journals because their contents are freely accessible to their
> users by some other means.
>
> 11. Once post-Green-OA cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable
> for meeting publishing costs, publishers will downsize to just the
> cost of peer review alone, offloading access provision and archiving
> onto institutional OA repositories, and converting to Gold OA
> publishing.
>
> 12. Universities will then have the funds to pay the much lower costs
> of peer review alone out of their windfall subscription cancelation
> savings.
>
> (It is this optimal and inevitable outcome for research and
> researchers that the publishers' lobby is doing its best to forestall
> as long as it possibly can. But it's entirely up to the research
> community how long they allow them to do it. As long as they do, it
> amounts to allowing the flea on its tail to wag the research/dog…)
>

And the research community shows zero sign of any progress and I therefore
challenge the word "inevitable" - I take an opposite view. We've had 10
years of advocacy for Green deposition. I challenge this list to answer the
following question:

* Provide me with a list of all the chemistry articles in IRs. (I can do it
myself for parts of Pubmed - the parts I am legally allowed to access).

I predict that no-one can answer it. Even if they can I predict that the
percentage of current articles is less than 5% and probably less than 1%.

P.



-- 
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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