[GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List

[Graham Triggs]

On 13 December 2013 13:14, Sally Morris <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>wrote:

>  The few responses to my original posting have all focused on whether the
> 'credo' of the BBB declarations is or is not fundamental to the underlying
> concept of OA.  I find it interesting that no one has commented at all on
> the two main points I was trying to make (perhaps not clearly enough):
>
> 1)    The focus of OA seems to be, to a considerable extent, the
> destruction of the publishing industry:  note the hostile language of, for
> example, Peter M-R's 'occupying power'
>

If you are talking about Open Access - as defined by BOAI - rather than
public access, then no. I don't agree with you. To a large extent, "real"
Open Access has come about in conjunction with, and driven by, the
publishing industry - whether that is for-profit or non-profit players.

The focus of some people who align themselves as being part of the open
access movement - but don't necessarily demand Open Access in the defined
sense - could be argued is the destruction of the publishing industry.

Peter can state his own opinion, but I don't see him as necessarily being
that anti-publisher. He is anti-restricted access, he is anti-giving up
ownership. There are plenty of commercially operated publishers that
provide compatible terms - generally for an upfront APC, instead of a
toll-access subscription.

2)    It still seems curious to me (as to Beall) that scholars have to be
> forced, by mandates, to comply with a behaviour which is considered be
> self-evidently beneficial to them
>

You could arguably say that access provided by repositories is not so
self-evidently beneficial. Many won't hit access barriers, due to
institutional subscriptions, so they have no need to seek out a repository
alternative when the version of record is readily available. They aren't
conferring any extra rights for text mining, re-use, etc. And they simply
aren't that visible to them, so they don't necessarily see who and how they
benefit. They may not even realise the repository exists where they can put
their content.

Imho, it's easier to demonstrate the benefit of Open Access publishing, and
maybe more might be willing to choose that route. Except they see the cost
of possibly not publishing with the "leading" journal. They see the cost of
having to pay an APC. And it's not even as simple as saying "make funds
available to pay the APCs", because authors don't necessarily know that the
funds are available, that they can claim, or how to. Wellcome Trust has
already been down the route of simply making funds available to pay APCs,
and it didn't make much difference to the take up - it took working with
publishers to automatically route submissions that were associated with
Wellcome funding to go via the Open Access route.

So certainly more education, but possibly still a little coercion may
always be required.

G
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