[GOAL] What is the GOAL?

[Heather Morrison]

Surely everyone on this list is aiming for the goal of global open access! But what do we think this means? Thanks to Jeroen for posting recently his wish list. In this post, I will point out how very different my perspective on open access is from Jeroen's, even though I think Jeroen and I are both fully in favour of global open access and transformative rather than traditional approaches. The purpose of this post is to suggest that the open access movement has now reached a point where it is useful to have such discussions about the specifics of where we think we should be heading. In addition to differences in individuals' perspectives, it seems quite likely that there will be disciplinary differences as well.

Jeroen's post can be found here:
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2015-April/003154.html

Following is Jeroen's wish list items followed by my perspectives. 

Jeroen - fully Open Access
Heather: yes, of course!

Jeroen - online only
Heather - OA works can be online only, but should not be restricted in this manner

Jeroen - CC-BY license
Heather - NO!!! the CC-BY license is a major strategic error of the open access movement. Allowing downstream commercial use to anyone opens up the possibility of re-enclosure. The temptation towards perpetual copyright for profit-taking should not be underestimated. Scholarly publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry (as well as a community effort relying largely on a gift economy), with some players earning profits in the millions (a billion for Elsevier), in the 40% profit range. There are other reasons to hesitate to use this license, but this is the one that OA advocates need to wake up and pay attention to.

I have written about this in my Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html
and I will be speaking on this topic next week in Washington at the Allen Press' Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing Seminar:
http://allenpress.com/events/2015seminar

Jeroen - authors retain copyright
Heather - this doesn't really mean very much. With the subscription publishers' trend towards license-to-publish, author copyright retention is the norm, but the licenses themselves can be virtually identical to full copyright transfer.

Jeroen - maximum APC of 500 USD (or perhaps a lifetime membership model like that at PeerJ)
 - APC waivers for those who apply (e.g. from LMI countries)
Heather - robust system of OA publishing that does not rely on APCs. Firmly opposed to using research funds for APCs. Cancel the high-priced bundles of the big commercial scholarly publishers first, then use the savings to pay for OA. 

Jeroen - really international profile of editors/board (far beyond US/UK/CA/AU/NL/DE/CH/NZ/FR)
Heather - this makes more sense in some areas than others. There is universal knowledge (think physics principles) and local knowledge (consider Québec politics). There are advantages to regionally based publishing. These include the financial advantages of paying local rates in one's own currency and generating local jobs, and the community advantages of working with people you have a reasonable expectation of getting to know, who are based at institutions you know something about. I think that journal "white lists" are best handled locally. There is Qualis in Brazil (I gather), although this might need some cleaning up. In Canada we have a scholarly journal publishing subsidy program which involves peer review at the journal level. 

Jeroen - no issues: continuous publishing
- in principle no size restrictions
Heather: agreed. 

Jeroen- using ORCID and DOI of course
Heather: NOT signing up for an ORCID. On purpose!! ORCID and DOI may have their usefulness, but neither is essential to open access. 

Jeroen- peer review along PLOS One idea: only check for (methodological) soundness (and whether it is no obvious garbage or plagiarism), avoiding costly system of multiple cascading submissions/rejections
Heather: this is most attractive for larger publishers with multiple journals, i.e. authors should submit once and then the filter of top journal can be applied or not.  Another approach is transferring reviews. 

Jeroen - post pub open non anonymous peer review, so the community decides what is the worth of published papers
Heather - an interesting experiment, this may work better for some communities than others

Jeroen - peer review reports themselves are citable and have DOIs
Heather - possibly interesting, but it is not clear whether all peer reviewers will be honest without blind peer review. The author of an article you are reviewing could show up someday on a hiring committee, tenure and promotion committee, or fund proposal review committee. 

Jeroen- making (small) updates to articles possible (i.e. creating an updated version)
 - making it easy to link to additional material (data, video, code etc.) shared via external platforms like Zenodo or Figshare
Heather - agreed, but preferred additional platforms are institutional and disciplinary archives. 

Jeroen - no IF advertising
- open for text mining
Heather - sort of agreed, although changing reliance on IF needs to happen at tenure and promotion committees. There is no point is asking journals not to advertise something that makes them look good.

Jeroen - providing a suite of article level metrics
Heather - a) optional and b) dead set against article level metrics being used for evaluation purposes. Why? Most importantly, metrics are the wrong approach altogether. Truly pioneering work (e.g. Mendel on genetics) is often not appreciated when it is first published. Then, too, altmetrics have not been tested. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that altmetrics based on social media will tend to reflect and amplify social biases (e.g. the works of articles that seem to be written by men would be more likely to be tweeted than those that seem to be written by women), effects of popularity (unless we all agree that the most important research topic of the future is internet cats?), and subject to deliberate manipulation. For example, consider how companies that prefer to deny climate change science could hire people to distort social media to increase the "alt-merit" of their preferred research and researchers. 

Jeroen - using e.g. LOCKSS or Portico for digital preservation
Heather - preservation is the responsibility of archives and libraries; pushing this to journals unnecessarily increases the costs of publication. I am opposed for this reason. 

Jeroen -  indexing at least by Google Scholar and DOAJ, at a later stage also Scopus, Web of Science and others
Heather - where indexing is important will depend on the discipline. NOT Scopus, because they are owned by Elsevier and I am boycotting Elsevier. Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science are all indexes owned and controlled by large corporations. I argue that we need public indexes controlled by scholars. 

Jeroen - optionally a pre-print archive (but could rely on SSRN as well)
Heather - open access archiving is primary, should be mandatory, and should be the sole focus of almost all open access policies (the only exception being internal policies of publishers, which will naturally focus on publishing). Pre-prints, post-prints and research data should all be in institutional repositories and copied (easily and seamlessly) to disciplinary repositories wherever this makes sense (or vice versa; the point is the more copies the better to ensure ongoing open access and preservation.

Finally, there are somewhere around a million scholars around the world, and others besides scholars who should be part of this discussion. I don't think it is up to either Jeroen or I, or both of us together, to decide on the future of open access and/or scholarly communication. This should be a broader conversation.

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca