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

Tue Oct 9 16:39:23 BST 2012

On one point - publishers' insistence on (c) transfer - there certainly are
facts available.  The most recent study of which I am aware is Cox & Cox,
Scholarly Publishing Practice 3 (2008).  They surveyed 400 publishers
including most leading journal publishers, and received 203 usable
responses.  According to further analysis by Laura Cox, 181 of these
publishers represented 753,037 articles (74.7% of ISI's world total for that
year).

In their 2008 study, they found just over 50% of publishers asking for
copyright transfer in the first instance (this had declined steadily from
over 80% in 2003 and over 60% in 2005);  of these, a further 20% would
provide a 'licence to publish' as an alternative if requested by the author.
At the same time, the number offering a licence in the first instance had
grown to around 20% by 2008.  So that's nearly 90%, by my reckoning, who
either don't ask for (c) in the first place, or will provide a licence
instead on request.

They also found that over 40% (by number of articles) made the finally
published version open to text mining.  In addition, 80% or more allowed
self-archiving to a personal or departmental website, 60% to an
institutional website and over 40% to a subject repository (though authors
often don't know that they are allowed to do this).  In most cases this
applied to the submitted and/or accepted version; self-archiving of the
final published version was much less likely to be permitted (though it
appears to be what authors really want).

I understand ALPSP are currently repeating the study, so we may soon know if
these trends have continued - I'd be amazed if they have not.

Sally

Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
Email:  sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

  _____  

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Ross Mounce
Sent: 09 October 2012 15:51
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: JISC-REPOSITORIES at jiscmail.ac.uk
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Europe PubMed as a home for all RCUK research outputs?

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-m
ining.aspx

-- 
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
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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