[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Sour Grapes in the SSP Scholarly Scullery

[Andrew A. Adams]

Joseph Esposito wrote:
> I think it is also incorrect, or at least misleading, to say that 60%
> of articles are OA now.  The figure is closer to 100%.  Articles
> appear everywhere:  on author's blogs, in institutional repositories,
> on sites dedicated to particular topics--not to mention the
> availability as email attachments.  What's missing is an easy way to
> find things and to know that what you find is the version you are
> looking for. If that happens, there would be no Green OA at all.



I'm afraid Joseph is mistaken. I have often spent a significant amount of 
time trying to find an article, even to the extent of emailing the authors 
asking if they have an electronic off-print they can send me or an open 
access version to which they can send me a link. While I can sometimes find a 
version on a web page other than a repository, it's quite rare outside 
computer science. In at least one case the response to a request for an OA 
version was a pointer to the toll-access publisher page. In that case the 
author did not even understand the request. As an interdisciplinary 
researcher I range over a lot of disciplines and often am looking quite far 
back (I recently traced a set of theories in psychology back to their origins 
in the 60s and 70s, for example) and even for older articles there is a lot 
that is not available to me, and I work at a university with a reasonably 
well-funded library.

Chaos is NOT the answer. Scholars are NOT universally voluntarily providing 
access to their work. Persuading institutions to require their scholars to 
provide access via their repositories. I still have seen no other suggestion 
for which the mathematics works. Disciplines are too ill-defined for the most 
part for the arXiv approach to work, and disciplines and institutions are the 
only points of leverage that I can see, since attempt to directly persuade 
all researchers individually have failed to even get the idea of open access 
through to some (see the above example about being pointed to the toll access 
portal when asking for an open access version).

-- 
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/