[GOAL] Re: Europe PubMed as a home for all RCUK research outputs?

[Ross Mounce]

Dear Stevan,

I'm disappointed that you continue to make wild assertions without backing
them up with good evidence. I, like many readers of this list (perhaps?)
suggest you're not doing your credibility any favours here...

A grating example:

Moreover, most fields don't need CC-BY (and certainly not as urgently as
> they need access).
>

[citation needed!!!]

Who (aside from you) says that most fields "don't need CC-BY"?
You're the only person I know saying this.

*I* argue that we clearly *would* benefit greatly from CC-BY research as
this explicitly enables content mining approaches such as textmining that
may otherwise be impeded by less open licences.

It has been estimated that over 50 million academic articles have been
published (Jinha, 2010) and the volume of publications is increasing
rapidly year on year. The only rational way we’ll be able to make full use
of all this research both NOW and in the future, is if we are allowed to
use machines to help us make sense of this vast and growing literature. I
should add that it's not just scientific fields that would benefit from
these approaches. Humanities research could greatly benefit too from
techniques such as sentiment analysis of in-text citations across thousands
of papers and other such analyses as applied to a whole variety of
hypotheses to be tested. These techniques (and CC-BY) aren't a Panacea but
they would have some strong benefits for a wide variety of research, if
only people in those fields a) knew how to use those techniques and b) were
*allowed* to use the techniques. (see McDonald & Kelly, 2012 JISC report on
'The Value and Benefits of Text Mining' for more detail)

For an example of the kind of papers we *could* write if we actually used
all the literature in this manner see Kell (2009) and its impressive
reference list making use of 2469 previously published papers. CC-BY
enables this kind of scope and ambition without the need for commercially
provided information retrieval systems that are often of dubious data
quality.


Repositories cannot attach CC-BY licenses because most publishers still
> insist on copyright transfer. (Global Green OA will put an end to this, but
> not if it waits for CC-BY first.)
>

I agree with the first half of the sentence BUT the second half your
assertion:  "most publishers still insist on copyright transfer" - where's
the evidence for this? I want hard numbers. If there are ~25 or ~28
thousand active peer-reviewed journals (figures regularly touted, I won't
vouch for their accuracy it'll do) and vastly fewer publishers of these,
data can be sought to test this claim. For now I'm very unconvinced. I know
of many many publishers that allow the author to retain copyright. It is
unclear to me what the predominate system is with respect to this *contra *your
assertion.


Finally:


> Green mandates don't exclude Gold: they simply allow but do not *require* Gold,
> nor paying for Gold.
>

Likewise RCUK policy as I understand it does not exclude Green, nor paying
for the associated costs of Green OA like institutional repositories,
staff, repo development and maintenance costs. Gold is preferred but Green
is allowed. Glad we've made that clear...






Jinha, A. E. 2010. Article 50 million: an estimate of the number of
scholarly articles in existence. Learned Publishing 23:258-263.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20100308

Kell, D. 2009. Iron behaving badly: inappropriate iron chelation as a major
contributor to the aetiology of vascular and other progressive inflammatory
and degenerative diseases. BMC Medical Genomics 2:2+.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1755-8794-2-2

McDonald, D & Kelly, U 2012. The Value and Benefits of Text Mining. JISC
Report
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/value-and-benefits-of-text-mining.aspx






-- 
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Ross Mounce
PhD Student & Panton Fellow
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07
http://about.me/rossmounce
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