[GOAL] Re: Please distinguish what is and is not relevant to mandating Green OA self-archiving

[Arthur Sale]

I think we are now getting into an off-target area: not open access but
archiving. It is really unfortunate that open access repositories were ever
called archives.

Heather is right. In the past print publishers of books and journals just
had to print them onto papyrus, vellum, or paper, using a non-ephemeral ink,
and rely on dissemination (and libraries) to do the preservation.
Preservation in the digital era is a different matter, having to cope with
ephemeral media and error-resistant information (the opposite of the
Gutenberg era). But this is not central open access stuff, important though
it is.

Of course, to forestall comment by someone who wants to carp, the lifetime
of research outputs does vary. In some disciplines it is of the order of a
year or two on average, in others perhaps of centuries, to use the extremes.

Arthur Sale
Tasmania, Australia

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Heather Morrison
Sent: Monday, 21 January 2013 10:11 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Please distinguish what is and is not relevant to
mandating Green OA self-archiving

On 20-Jan-13, at 2:25 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: (excerpt)

Some forms of Gold do not require any more payment than what is needed to
maintain a repository. In fact, an OA Gold journal is a repository of its
own articles.

Comment: a gold OA journal serves as a repository, however it is important
to understand that any journal, or the open access status of a journal, may
be ephemeral in nature. Journals are archived and preserved by libraries,
not by journals and publishers. This is important to understand because gold
open access without open access archives is highly vulnerable. Journals can
simply disappear, or be sold by open access publishers to toll access
publishers. For this reason I argue that open access archives are absolutely
essential to sustainable open access.

best,

Heather
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