[GOAL] Re: Gold OA infrastructure

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

I agree with Fred's comments below. In effect, the Finch report tries to
pit Gold vs. Green despite the fact that these two road to OA complement
each other. It has turned out to be also a clever and destructive
divisive move against the OA community.

One element that has hampered the Green road has not been mentioned
strongly enough in the past. It is that filling repositories through
mandates is still not enough. The Liège model which links internal
evaluation to the actual presence of documents in the repository is the
gold (pun intended) standard here. But being visible and being
accessible still does not ensure being used by researchers. Repositories
must also become indispensable in any research heuristic strategy, and
that, they have not yet achieved.

To achieve this "must consult" status, it takes more than OAI-PMH and
Google. It takes an ability for repositories to create value
independently of the value created around journals by impact factors,
and even competing with it. The trend toward article-level metrics
pushed by PLoS and others is very good in this regard. Repositories
could network to create forms of article-level metrics that would
converge with other article-level metrics stemming from the Gold corner
of OA. In this manner, the evaluation of scientific research could take
a new and healthier turn.

If we take a city's commercial centre as a metaphor, researchers go to
the streets where the Gucci Gucci stores stand. That is where good
company is supposed to be found. After all, they all wear Hermès
scarves... And Hermès, we all know, has a high impact... Well, some
exceedingly good places also exist elsewhere. They are not even stores;
they are openly accessible counters, and the offering is for the taking,
but they are not on the right street and they do not benefit from
advertising in glossy-paper magazines. 

We have to move these open access counters to the main street, or,
alternatively, make their street look like a main street. For this, you
need symbolic value. The present standard for symbolic value is the
impact factor. It is a sham, a horrendous sham (can anyone justify three
decimals?). Building alternative metrics around depositories (and
depository-like collections of gold OA journals) will contribute to
achieving this goal. More still may be needed, but this is a first,
clear, and precise objective, the goal being to place value-creation
back in the hands of the research communities, and not in the hands of
Thomson-Reuters (Web of Science) or Elsevier (Scopus). The OpenAire
network sponsored by the European Union is a good place to start this
kind of work and there are strong OA personalities in its midst.

Meanwhile, working hard on other governments not to be tricked like the
UK government is obviously another front to be opened; there again, I
fully agree with Fred.

Jean-Claude Guédon



Le mardi 04 juin 2013 à 11:28 +0000, Friend, Fred a écrit :
> The wide range of activities reported on the gold oa blog illustrate
> the priority now given to APC-funded gold OA by Government and other
> Establishment agencies in the UK, and the second-class status being
> given to repositories and other green OA developments by those same
> agencies. After many protests following the Finch Report, the role of
> repositories has been given greater recognition in the policies of
> RCUK and HEFCE, but this welcome recognition cannot disguise the fact
> that within the UK Establishment repositories are now not to be
> encouraged. Both gold and green OA are the twin sisters born of the
> Budapest Open Access Initiative, and across the globe they have been
> allowed to grow unhindered, indeed actively supported by many
> governments and official bodies. And so it was it in the UK until the
> summer of 2012, when powerful lobbying by vested interests achieved
> their aim of banishing the green sister to the back of the political
> house.
> 
>  
> 
> One result of the second-class status now granted to green OA is that
> there are now few UK projects to support the development of
> repositories. So much could be done to illustrate the sustainability
> of the repository route to OA, or to develop new services based upon
> repository content, but such developments no longer find favour with
> agencies committed to gold OA. Fortunately, while the UK Government
> and Government-funded agencies are content to leave repositories in
> their partially-developed state and pour taxpayer funds
> into APC-funded gold OA, many UK universities remain as committed to
> their institutional repositories as they were before the Finch Report.
> The problem they face is that while they are expected to prioritise
> funding for APCs, few universities can afford to fund the developments
> which would show the true value of repositories as the most
> cost-effective route to OA for publicly-funded research outputs.
> Fortunately the UK Government's misguided policy in prioritising
> APC-funded gold OA at the cost of supporting green OA is unlikely to
> be followed by other governments wishing to maintain balanced
> policies.
> 
>  
> 
> Fred Friend
> 
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
> 
> http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk
> 
>        
> 
> 
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> 
> From: Neil Jacobs [n.jacobs at jisc.ac.uk]
> Sent: 03 June 2013 15:49
> To: SPARC-OAForum at arl.org
> Subject: [sparc-oaforum] Gold OA infrastructure
> 
> 
> 
> Colleagues
> 
> There is a series of insightful blog posts on Gold OA infrastructure
> here:
> 
> www.goldoa.org.uk
> 
> There will be a meeting of international experts on this topic
> tomorrow.  We’d welcome any comments on these ideas via the blog,
> which will inform the direction taken by people like CrossRef,
> COUNTER, international publishers, NISO, etc.
> 
> Many thanks
> 
> Neil
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

-- 

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20130604/dd70d57b/attachment-0001.html