[GOAL] Re: Squashing the brand? Re: Interview with the Scholarly Kitchen's Kent Anderson

[Jan Velterop]

Anything other than CC-BY (or CC-zero) cannot really be regarded as open access. Ajar, maybe, with the chain still on, for a peek, but strictly no touch. The idea of colours and flavours and pigeon-holing OA advocates in 'gold-OA packs' or 'green-OA' packs is best ignored. 

As regards Nature, brand value is clear. But if the brand value has indeed value, why does that value possibly vary with the licence? This kind of shadow-boxing shows that the thinking about what open access really means hasn't quite matured yet. 

Oh, and 'hybrid OA' doesn't exist. It's just OA in the company of content that's not OA, but under the same 'brand', which stands for a level of credibility of the peer-review and publication practice. The value of brands is often overrated, though.

Jan Velterop


On 8 Nov 2012, at 12:06, Steve Hitchcock wrote:

> Having feasted on Kent Anderson's anti-OA, anti-eLife and anti-PMC views, thanks to Richard Poynder's interview, the gold OA pack are now descending on Nature for having the temerity to charge a higher price for CC-BY OA than for, say, CC-BY-NC-ND
> http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cc-licenses.html
> 
> "what’s really outrageous about this: they’re explicitly charging MORE for applying/allowing a CC BY license relative to the more restrictive licenses. Applying a license to a digital work costs nothing. By charging £100-400 more for CC BY they’re really taking the piss – charging more for ABSOLUTELY NO ADDITIONAL EFFORT on their part. Horrid. Other than greed what is the justification for this?"
> http://rossmounce.co.uk/2012/11/07/gold-oa-pricewatch/
> 
> Apparently Nature has a brand value it is ready to exploit, and we haven't yet learned that it's rights we are paying for with gold OA, not OA itself.
> 
> Or perhaps we have learned that lesson, and the new game is to squash brand value. A PLOS representative apparently says at #berlin10sa "it's not about where you publish it's about who you reach". In other words, make the venue irrelevant?
> 
> @PLOSBiology The @wellcometrust values the merits of the article over the journal it is published in - Chris Bird at #berlin10sa
> 
> Another anti-OA cook had already spotted, and applauded, this strategy (see penultimate paragraph)
> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/11/06/why-did-publishers-get-so-big/
> 
> Meanwhile, the #altmetrics movement gathers steam with the idea that we can measure some new things even if we don't yet know what those things might mean. But one goal is clear: disconnect the impact calculation from the venue and reconnect it to the paper. Actually, it is about time that we moved on from the journal impact factor, but is that the simple agenda here?
> 
> I suspect this is not where Finch and its publishers, and RCUK, think they are heading with their vision of hybrid gold OA. That approach is going to price some authors out of their familiar, favourite journals; the emerging alternative is those journals may not be there for them at all, to be replaced with faceless collections like (name your publisher) OPEN.
> 
> Straws in the wind, or connected?
> 
> Steve Hitchcock
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