[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price

[Ross Mounce]

>
> Further down in this blogpost I commend the Nature Scientific Reports
> options. For further details and explanation of why I consider author
> choice to be optimal, see the blogpost.
>

Author choice is absolutely fine if the author(s) 100% fully-funded the
research they are reporting on. Although even then I would hope they would
choose CC BY to maximise the re-use of their work.

But this is not the case for the vast majority of papers published in STM
(and perhaps even in HSS?). I strongly think the funder should be the one
to choose, guide or even mandate the license by which the article is made
available. This way the funder can maximise the dissemination potential and
return-on-investment. Funders like RCUK have realised they need to do and
so have mandated the CC BY license for all gold OA published research from
1st April this year. Good for them - the reasons for this are clear to me.
I think more and more research funders will follow this mandate in the
coming months and years.

It is a privilege to be able to do research with public or charity
money.  I already get paid to do research. I do *not* need or want further
payment for 'royalties' from further licencing for re-use of academic
research I write. By blocking re-use of my research with modules such as ND
I understand I would clearly be limiting the potential re-use value of my
work.

That many authors who publish in NPG Scientific Reports choose such an
extremely restrictive license as CC BY-NC-ND shows to me that these authors
don't particularly understand the negative consequences of their actions.
Authors who choose to publish in NPG Scientific Reports are a
self-selecting group anyhow and may not represent a 'general' sense of
author behaviour - I would not ever choose to publish in this journal.
There are many different publication outlets available. That authors choose
Scientific Reports and not a similar megajournal such as PLOS ONE, suggests
to me that this self-selecting group may be a more conservative type that
are seeking to identify their work with the NPG 'brand'  which in some
circles equates with prestige.

Put another way, if PLOS ONE offered this choice (not that they will, it
would not be good for science to offer this choice) I doubt the results
would be the same - people who publish in PLOS ONE tend to understand the
reasons behind the need for open access & re-use without permission a bit
more.


Best,

Ross

-- 
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
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
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20130206/3c483feb/attachment.html