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

Tue Oct 9 17:23:57 BST 2012

I don't see why ALPSP's ability to recoup the cost of  this research should be undermined by open distribution of pirate copies - shame on you!  However, I did summarise their findings, and combine them with other data, in a paper for the Publishing Research Consortium (http://www.publishingresearch.net/author_rights.htm)

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

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From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Ross Mounce
Sent: 09 October 2012 16:59
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Europe PubMed as a home for all RCUK research outputs?

Thank you Sally. 

These are exactly the kind of evidence-based contributions we should be striving for in our discussions, in my opinion.

I found Cox & Cox 2008 here: http://test.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200 <http://test.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200&did=47&aid=24781&st=&oaid=-1> &did=47&aid=24781&st=&oaid=-1

but regrettably it is only available for 'free' to ALPSP Members.

It would seem that I would have to pay £250/$480/€330 as a non-member to read this report!  If anyone could furnish me with a PDF copy I'd be much obliged.

Best,

Ross

On 9 October 2012 16:39, Sally Morris <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:

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-mining.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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-- 
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Ross Mounce
PhD Student & Open Knowledge Foundation 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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