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--></style><title>[SCHOLCOMM] Re: Martin Hall's Defence of the UK
Finch Comm</title></head><body>
<div>If respositories take on the functions of managing peer review
and providing value-added services like copyediting, then by
definition they will become part of the publishing industry, just as
university presses are. A case then needs to be made that this kind of
publishing can be run more efficiently and cost effectively by
repository publishers than by regular commercial publishers.
What often happens, of course--and this is true for the accounting of
costs for university presses--is that many subsidies are provided by
the parent universities that are not officially recognized on the
balance sheet. Just to give one example, at Penn State Press it was
cheaper for us to have copyeditors on staff than to use free-lancers,
but only because the University covered the cost of all benefits and
did not charge this cost to the Press's operating expenses. Of
course, as mission-driven organizations, university presses do not
have to be concerned about generating profits, but that "cost"
may be the only real difference between a repository-run publishing
operation and a commercial one. When it is as high as Elsevier's is
claimed to be, that can be significant, admittedly.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Sandy Thatcher</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At 4:01 PM +0000 11/12/12, Frederick Friend wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I read Martin Hall's defence of the
Finch Group Recommendations very carefully, because one curious
feature of this episode in the development of open access in the UK is
the way in which previously staunch defenders of open access through
repositories who were members of the Finch Group have signed up to a
Report which only allocates roles in preservation and data storage to
repositories, removing the role of access to published research
reports they previously shared with journals. The key objection Martin
Hall has to an open access policy based around repositories is
"their main limitations are that they do not - and cannot -
contain everything.<font face="Calibri"> In particular, they cannot
contain the 'version of record' when this is protected by a
copyright that has been ceded to a publisher, and the publisher
requires payment to view the paper, either via a journal subscription
paid by an individual or an institution, or by means of a
'pay-to-view' charge via a commercial website." In response it can
be argued that repositories have never claimed to contain all versions
of record, but that is not to say that they could not do so. Behind
Martin Hall's statement is a view of scholarly communication which
allocates responsibility for the "version of record" uniquely to
publishers. There is nothing that a publisher does to an author's
manuscript in respect of peer-review or copy-editing than could not be
done by a repository out-sourcing such services probably at less cost
than the cost of an average publisher's APC. (N.B. Such a solution
may appear radical but it is common in other areas.) Martin Hall's
statement also indicates an acceptance of the situation in which all
rights are transferred from an author to a publisher. Neither Martin
Hall nor the Finch Group as a whole have suggested the very feasible
solution of funders requiring authors to retain certain rights for
public benefit while still giving a publisher the right to publish.
Such a recommendation from the Finch Group would have removed the
limitation for repositories to provide text- and data-mining services
which Martin sees as a reason not to support the deposit of journal
articles in repositories.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Calibri">If the argument for
not supporting repository development is weak, the argument for
supporting a preference for gold open access is even weaker. (N.B.
what follows should not be read as opposing all open access journal
publication, merely the perverse policy to make journals the primary
route to open access.) The argument put forward in the Finch Report is
not only that repositories cannot provide a high-quality sustainable
service but also that even if they could, a publisher-led approach is
desirable. No evidence is put forward to support this key point in the
Finch Report. The case for a transition to gold open access is not
evidence-based but based upon a perceived threat to the publishing
industry from any policy which gives a substantial role to
repositories as an alternative source of supply of research articles.
The case for "sustainability" presented in the Finch Report is a
case for sustainability of the publishing industry, including the use
of profits from journals to sustain the activities of academic
societies. Is there any other industry able to obtain that level of
subsidised protection from a government which - in hard economic times
- is willing to pay many millions of pounds in author publication
charges to the industry receiving the protection in order to provide
that protection? The UK Government payments will ensure open access to
a proportion of UK research outputs but will place a heavy and
unnecessary burden upon the research budget for only a partial
solution to the provision of open access. In relation to the cost of
gold open access the Finch Report rightly mentions the importance of
the extent to which other countries adopt the same policy as the UK,
but the optimism on this point in the Report is clearly misplaced and
represents a huge gamble not only with taxpayer funds but also with
the UK researchers' relationship with their peers in other
countries.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>There are many other points to be made as
comments upon Martin Hall's article and upon the Finch Report,
including the points made by Stevan Harnad below. As a result of
reading Martin's article and re-reading the Finch Report I am no
further forward in understanding how the open access advocates on the
Finch Group could have signed up to the Report, even though they may
have been out-voted by the publisher and society members. I was
involved in much of the work cited in the Finch Report, work which can
be used as evidence of the background to the issues, but nowhere have
I been involved in or come across independent evidence which could be
used to justify the twin key recommendations of a preference for gold
open access and a limitation upon the role of repositories in
providing open access to publicly-funded research
outputs.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Fred Friend</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Honorary Director Scholarly Communication
UCL</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><a
href="http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk"
>http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk</a> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><b>From:</b> <a
href="mailto:amsciforum@gmail.com">Stevan Harnad</a></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><b>Sent:</b> Saturday, November 10, 2012
12:55 PM</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><b>To:</b> <a
href="mailto:goal@eprints.org">Global Open Access List (Successor of
AmSci)</a></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><b>Subject:</b> [GOAL] Martin Hall's
Defence of the UK Finch Committee Recommendations: Green or Gold? Open
Access After Finch</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Martin Hall: "Green or Gold? Open
Access After Finch" <a
href="http://uksg.metapress.com/content/e062u112h295h114/fulltext.html"
>http://uksg.metapress.com/content/e062u112h295h114/fulltext.html</a><br
>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font size="+1">Fuller hyperlinked
version of this posting:</font> <a
href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/956-guid.html"
>http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/956-guid.html</a><br
>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The substance of Martin Hall's defence of
the Finch recommendation that the UK should (double-)pay for Gold
instead of strengthening its mandate for Green is that (1) Gold
provides the publisher's version of record, rather than just the
author's peer-reviewed final draft, that (2) Gold provides text-mining
rights and that (3) Gold is the way to solve the journal price
problem.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>What Hall does not even consider is
whether the publisher's version of record and text-mining rights are
worth the asking price of Gold, compared to cost-free Green. His
account (like everyone else's) is also astonishingly vague and fuzzy
about how the transition to Gold is to take place in the UK.<i> And
Hall (like Finch) completely fails to take the rest of the world into
account.</i> All the reckoning about the future of publishing is based
on the UK's policy for its 6%.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Hall quotes Peter Suber's objection but
does not answer it. The Swan/Houghton economic analyses, too, are
cited by Hall, as if in support, but in fact not heeded at all.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Stevan Harnad<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<hr></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite>_______________________________________________<br>
GOAL mailing list<br>
GOAL@eprints.org<br>
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Sanford G. Thatcher<br>
Director Emeritus, Penn State University Press<br>
8201 Edgewater Drive<br>
Frisco, TX 75034-5514<br>
e-mail: sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu<br>
Phone: (214) 705-1939<br>
Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html<br>
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sanford.thatcher<br>
<br>
"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John
Ruskin (1865)<br>
<br>
"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few
people who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)<br>
</div>
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