[GOAL] Re: Some discussion points for the UK OA initiative

Mon May 7 17:43:01 BST 2012

Stevan -
As always succinct points.  Comments inline.
Best
Keith

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Keith G Jeffery      Director International Relations       STFC
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-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 07 May 2012 14:55
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [GOAL] Some discussion points for the UK OA initiative

The UK's continuing leadership and initiative in opening access to research is wonderful and only to be applauded, supported and encouraged.
[Keith Jeffery] thanks for recognising that there are many 'warriors' in UK working away at it.

To help make the initiative focused and effective, I would suggest that the following four questions should be given some thought.

If "UK public access to UK publicly funded research" is to be the guiding principle, and the two ways of providing it are either the Green OA self-archiving of articles published for free in subscription journals (GRNOA) or the publishing of articles in Gold OA journals for a fee (GLDOA):

1. GLOBALISM. Is the objective really just UK public access to UK research? Is the purpose of publishing research not to have it taken up, built upon, used and applied in further research and applications globally, and reciprocally, to the benefit of the public that funded the research? (And aren't UK OA mandates likely to inspire complementary, reciprocal OA mandates globally?)

[Keith Jeffery] 
[Keith Jeffery] the objective is global access of course but there is leverage in the 'UK public access to UK publicly funded research' argument.  This is counteracted by the government tax-take from UK-based publishers and the potential damage to learned societies who rely on publishing for part of their income.  The problem is reciprocity so like gamblers at a card table it is 'who blinks first'.  I believe UK (funders) will go ahead anyway despite the reciprocity concerns.  There is a certain kudos (moral high ground) in making the research outputs available openly and toll-free.  There are also the well-rehearsed advantages for the author of higher citations as well as for the community in potentially faster research cycles, higher quality due to wider scrutiny etc. As a safety-net, if other countries do not reciprocate, open could be closed.

2. RECIPROCITY. Does paying unilaterally for GLDOA for UK research -- making UK research freely accessible globally, but with the UK still having to pay subscriptions to access non-UK research -- make sense?  Is GRNOA, which  does not entail double payment, not more likely to  inspire global reciprocity? And would  global GRNOA not lead to GLDOA thereafter anyway?

[Keith Jeffery] 
[Keith Jeffery] (lack of) reciprocity is a fear among some in UK.  I detect that we have lost the Green is better than Gold argument in UK, not least because the powerful biomedical community stampeded into Gold (but let us see what the Finch committee comes up with).  However, they can coexist (as recognised by the RCUK funders) and I suspect the publishers will not convert wholly to Gold for a very long while and meantime maybe the higher (than subscription) costs of Gold for highly productive institutions will reduce submissions to Gold channels and encourage green (or more likely a completely different publishing model along the lines of liquid publications with specialised reviewing mechanisms for which sustainable models are not yet in place).  I do not believe Global Green would lead to Global Gold.  The motivations and business models behind each are too dissimilar - as are the likely end-games.

3. BOOKS. What about books resulting from UK publicly funded research? Would it not be a better idea for the time being to merely recommend rather than require that books  be made OA, rather than risk resistance from authors who are happy to give away their journal articles but not their books?

[Keith Jeffery] 
[Keith Jeffery] I think we need (generalising somewhat) to distinguish monographs (with an academic and non-remuneration intention) from textbooks (with an educational and remuneration intention).  For me the former are candidates for mandated green OA.  Currently monographs are excluded from the RCUK position.

4. DATA. What about authors who do not wish to make their research data freely accessible to all immediately, having gathered it for the purpose of analyzing and data-mining it themselves? Would it not be a better idea for the time being to merely recommend rather than require that data be made OA as soon as possible, rather than risk resistance from authors who are happy to give away their journal articles but not their data?

[Keith Jeffery] 
[Keith Jeffery] you are right to raise this.  Different communities / domains of research have different practices with embargo periods on data to allow the project leader / team to have publication precedence.  So we have publishers wanting embargos for articles and communities wanting embargos for data (and probably also associated software which may raise issues concerning confidentiality / patenting).  The UK funding councils are pushing for the same conditions on data as on publications but the document is not yet finalised. One solution would be to make data available openly but to have agreements that any researcher working on the data other than the original project team should (a) notify of intent to publish (b) ideally co-publish with the original team  or (c) minimally cite the original team publication and dataset/software.  It is all a matter of research ethics.  The present competitive research world does not encourage such ethics.  Again the Finch committee output will be interesting.  The whole area of research data from publicly-funded research has been caught up with the open 'data.gov' (public service information, semantic web, linked open data) agenda.  While  the two certainly are related, I am not convinced the semantic web / LOD browsing over data to find the nearest hospital or local government office - or crime statistics in your neighbourhood or league table ratings of local schools -  is the same as managing terabytes (or more) of research data with specialised and complex software.

Best
Keith

Stevan Harnad

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