[GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa

Wed Apr 25 12:18:59 BST 2018

The thing is, Chris, that payments, be they APCs or subscription 
charges, are for the 'service' of publisher-mediated peer review (plus 
'prestige ribbons') and access to publisher-mediated peer-reviewed (and 
'ribboned') articles. They are not for publishing one's research results 
per se. That can be done at no cost or at very low, often negligible, 
cost. For instance via 'preprint' facilities or other repositories. I 
realise that for many a researcher having 'ribbons' pinned on their 
articles is important for career advancement and possibly also for 
reputation, but that is where the real problem lies. As long as the 
scholarly culture expects and demands publisher-mediated peer review and 
the 'prestige ribbons' associated with that, there will be a cost beyond 
the generally (very, or negligibly) low cost of just making one's 
articles publicly and freely available – open – to be reviewed, 
commented on, assessed, etc. by the community at large. The process of 
proper scientific discourse, in other words. That's where 
scicomm/scholcomm should be headed. I hope you agree.

Best,

Jan

Jan Velterop

Velterop at protonmail.com

On 25/04/2018 12:17, Chris Zielinski wrote:
>
> Richard,
>
> In this context, you may be interested in a post I recently submitted 
> to the Healthcare Information for All (HIFA) list in the context of a 
> HIFA discussion of this topic:
>
> ---------- Original Message ----------
> To: HIFA - Healthcare Information For All <HIFA at dgroups.org>
> Date: 18 April 2018 at 19:33
> Subject: Re: [hifa] Open Access Author Processing Charges (3)
>
> In the bad old days before Open Access (OA), a developing country 
> author wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal and, if the paper 
> was good enough, the generous people at the journal organized peer 
> review, redid/redesigned the tables and most of the graphics, and 
> maybe even did some language editing - at no cost to the author. Then 
> they published the journal, charging for access to the paper version 
> and pay-walling any online version. From the author's perspective, 
> thus, there was no barrier to publication, although there were cost 
> barriers to reading the paper subsequently, which was particularly 
> onerous in poorer countries. So the situation in developing countries 
> was good for authors - who simply had to write well - and bad for 
> librarians and readers, who had to find the money to buy the content.
>
> Now that Open Access is making serious inroads, we are finding the 
> situation reversed - librarians and readers bask in an avalanche of 
> cost-free online papers, while authors are scrambling to find the 
> resources to pay for publication.From the commentary on this list it 
> is clear that authors in developing countries are being restrained 
> from publishing by the "Article Processing Charge" (APC).
>
> Zoe Mullan, Editor of The Lancet Global Health makes the point that 
> "we assume that this cost will be borne by the funding body". This 
> seems to be rather more likely in industrialized countries than in 
> developing ones.
>
> Basic research is much more frequently carried out in industrialized 
> countries and supported by the sort of international funding that pays 
> for papers. But the kind of health research that is essential in 
> developing countries - health services and health systems research - 
> is generally undertaken by local institutions and universities. This 
> is a reason for serious concern, as the economic model of OA appears 
> to be blocking the most important local research. I would add that 
> this research needs to be published internationally, not just locally, 
> in order to attract opinions, input and (in some cases) validation and 
> consensus from the global health community.
>
> Many OA journals have special rates, flexibilities and waivers for 
> writers from developing countries. It is also true that about a 
> quarter of the OA journals do not charge an APC at all - I presume 
> they pay for their work by sales of their print editions in 
> industrialized countries, thus enabling those in other countries free 
> access to the online version.
>
> Incidentally, this is not just an issue for developing country writers 
> - I am a non-institutional writer in an industrialized country, 
> writing papers which are not based on funded research, and it is a 
> real hardship to find APC money to pay for my papers.
>
> Best,
>
> Chris
>
>
> Chris Zielinski
> chris at chriszielinski.com
> Blogs: http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and 
> http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
> Research publications: http://www.researchgate.net
>
>> On 25 April 2018 at 08:47 Richard Poynder 
>> <richard.poynder at cantab.net> wrote:
>>
>> To try and get a sense of how open access looks from different parts 
>> of the world, particularly as the strategy of engineering a global 
>> “flip” of subscription journals to a pay-to-publish gold OA model 
>> gains more traction, I am interested in talking to open access 
>> advocates in different parts of the world, ideally by means of 
>> matched interviews.
>>
>> Earlier this month, for instance, I published a Q&A with Jeff 
>> MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and Chief Digital 
>> Scholarship Officer. 
>> (https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from.html).
>>
>> Yesterday, I published a matched Q&A covering the same themes with 
>> Mahmoud Khalifa, a librarian at the Library of Congress Cairo Office, 
>> and DOAJ Ambassador for the Middle East and Persian Gulf. This 
>> interview can be read here: 
>> https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from_24.html
>>
>> I have also been asking those I interview to comment on the answers 
>> given by their matched interviewee. Mahmoud Khalifa’s response to the 
>> MacKie-Mason Q&A is incorporated in this post: 
>> https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-mahmoud.html
>>
>> I am open to suggestions for further matched interviews.
>>
>> Richard Poynder
>>
>
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>
>
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