[GOAL] 100 Stories of Open Access Impact

Sat Oct 29 10:58:34 BST 2016

Thank you for responding Promita.

Forgive me for concluding that bepress produced this document to promote
itself and its Digital Commons product, and thus ultimately to sell more
product, rather than to help the OA community.

But let me explain why I feel it would have helped to cast the net wider.
Digital Commons is not a typical institutional repository solution. As
bepress’ Jean-Gabriel Bankier put it to me when I interviewed him in 2014,
“Digital Commons is an integrated platform to support the full spectrum of
scholarly publishing and institutional repository needs. Imagine ContentDM,
DSpace, Dryad, Figshare, ePrints, Open Journal Systems, Open Monograph
Press, and Open Conference Systems all rolled into one solution, and you
have the Digital Commons platform.”

Indeed, I believe that bepress began life as a journal publisher, and that
Digital Commons was developed as its publishing platform, not as an
institutional repository solution. For this reason, at least until
recently, Digital Common has been promoted primarily as a tool for
library-led publishing, not for IRs.

Given this, we might wonder whether the uses that institutions are making
of Digital Commons is typical (certainly so far as open access is
concerned), and we might therefore wonder how representative the stories in
the document are of open access and its impact.

As you will know, BOAI defined the target content of open access as being
“peer-reviewed journal articles” and “unreviewed preprints”.  I note that
in footnote 1 of the document (citing one of the interviews I conducted
with a user of Digital Commons) open access is redefined. I also note the
document states that of the stories in it only 21% relate to research. Of
course, it is great that Digital Commons is being used to host patents,
yearbooks, institutional documents, oral history, and creative works, but
that is not content the open access movement was created to make free.

So, my concern is that this document is about how a publishing platform
that later had institutional repository functionality added to it is being
used, not how institutional repositories *per se* are being used, or the
kind of impact that OA is having. It may well be that similar stories would
have emerged if the net had been cast wider, but we couldn’t know that
unless or until a wider survey were undertaken. My wish is that the net had
been cast wider.

That it was not cast wider is why I concluded (incorrectly apparently) that
the document is focused more on promoting bepress’ Digital Commons product
than on assisting the OA movement forward.

All that said, good luck with your project.

Richard

PS: One reason for my scepticism, by the way, was that when bepress sold
its OA journals they appear to have been put back behind a paywall:
https://svpow.com/2014/10/29/cc-by-documents-cannot-be-re-enclosed-if-their-publisher-is-acquired/#comment-90222
).

On 29 October 2016 at 00:03, Promita Chatterji <

p

chatterji at bepress.com <pchatterji at bepress.com>> wrote:

> Hi Richard -
>
>
> Thanks for your message.
>
> We did this work because people were really hungry for stories around open
> access impact, and we knew we had a significant volume of relevant data. We
> work in partnership with hundreds of institutions on their open access
> initiatives and see first-hand the impacts of their efforts. While the
> report draws on bepress data, the framework and the stories themselves
> highlight the accomplishments of institutions and their librarians that
> have advanced open access. We believe they deserve to be recognized for it.
>
>
> We enjoy working with UNESCO and very much value their work on open
> access: they have a broad and inclusive perspective that serves to move the
> community forward. We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback on the
> pre-print of the report and we hope that it inspires other institutions and
> platforms to follow suit. The community would only be helped by having
> additional stories of open access impact.
>
>
> Best,
>
> Promita
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 8:38 AM, Richard Poynder <
> richard.poynder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for posting this Promita Chatterji.
>>
>>
>> Would it be accurate to say that this is, in effect, a document promoting
>> bepress' commercial repository platform Digital Commons that UNESCO will
>> publish and distribute?
>>
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> On 28 October 2016 at 15:21, Promita Chatterji <pchatterji at bepress.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Happy Open Access Week!
>>>
>>> To end the week, we are excited to share 100 stories and a framework
>>> for describing the impact of open access
>>> <https://works.bepress.com/jean_gabriel_bankier/27/>.
>>>
>>> We look forward to hearing your stories of open access success.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Promita Chatterji
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Promita Chatterji
>>> bepress
>>> 510-665-1200 x141
>>> http://www.bepress.com
>>>
>>> bepress: the frontier of scholarly publishing since 1999
>>>
>>> Check out IR success stories on the DC Telegraph at
>>> http://blog.digitalcommons.bepress.com
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> GOAL mailing list
>>> GOAL at eprints.org
>>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Richard Poynder
>> www.richardpoynder.co.uk
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Promita Chatterji
> bepress
> 510-665-1200 x141
> http://www.bepress.com
>
> bepress: the frontier of scholarly publishing since 1999
>
> Check out IR success stories on the DC Telegraph at
> http://blog.digitalcommons.bepress.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>

-- 
Richard Poynder
www.richardpoynder.co.uk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20161029/b0413480/attachment.html 