[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions

[Danny Kingsley]

Hi Sally,

I think what you are referring to is one of the value-adds that publishers provide to the literature. The more publishers provide this kind of interactivity with an article, the more useful the final published version is. It also distinguishes further between the 'static' pdf in a repository and the final published version.

This is why allowing authors to put their version of work into a repository is not 'economic suicide' as John Wiley claimed when I asked him about Wiley's open access position at a talk he gave at the Australian National University late last year.

Repositories are not a replacement for the publishing process. They merely make research (both published work and otherwise invisible grey literature) available for a wider audience.

There is a move towards having material deposited in repositories be included in a format which allows full text mining. This would be welcome for many researchers but as a repository manager, obtaining the accepted version of articles (in whatever format) is difficult enough. The reality is that if publishers simply dropped their embargo periods, there would not be a tsunami of deposits into repositories. Repository managers still need the accepted version of the work, and the researcher still needs to be motivated enough to provide this version.

And regardless, if having the static text file of articles in repositories does threaten the publishing model it does beg the question of what value-add publishers are offering to their readers in an instant and interconnected paradigm.

Dr Danny Kingsley
Executive  Officer
Australian Open Access Support Group
http://aoasg.org.au 

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris
Sent: Monday, 25 February 2013 10:24 PM
To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'
Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions

I seem to recall that, in various surveys, one of the features found most useful by readers was linking to other resources (particularly reference linking).

Does this work in deposited versions of articles?  When I was working as an editor, checking (and not infrequently correcting) citations and inserting the correct DOI was a time-consuming task.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams
Sent: 25 February 2013 08:18
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions

Arthur Sale wrote:
> Hey, let's be realistic.  For most purposes text plus pictures is
adequate.
> Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all 
> that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One 
> cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and
surrounding clues.
> Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected 
> from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable.
> 
> In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, 
> architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these 
> cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats 
> that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if 
> they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are 
> objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If 
> you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only 
> hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have 
> a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional 
> repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's 
> problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a 
> significant
scope for specialized repositories.

My focus is on the papers. The text and images published in the peer reviewed journal literature. For that, but the whole of that (all subjects, all papers), I contend that institutional repositories, with deposit of the paper mandated by the institution and funders, is the quickest and simplest route to universal gratis OA. If we receive that before I  clock out I can assure you that I will be involved in the push for expanding that openness, but I have yet to see a mechanism that scales to all fields better than institutional and funder mandates for IR-deposit (plus whatever data deposit individual discplines mandate, with simple cross-deposit of papers where feasible).

For specific fields there are areas of highly structured data that could and should be put into disciplinary archives, and linked across to papers that use/refer to that data. These archives are best centrally-run by a non-profit scholarly body. Papers that reference data in that can easily be deposited locally and then the central data repository can either have the paper pushed to it or pull the meta-data and link back to the IR for the full-text (with access button request if needed by publisher embargoes).

I do not disagree on this. However, the push for central discipline-specific repositories being the mandated locus of deposit for papers does not scale to all disciplines because not all disciplines have a need of a data repository, not all disciplines have a cohesive enough body to run one and many disciplines have very fuzzy edges.

-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/


_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL at eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL at eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal