<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>Moving the discussion to a new title...<br><br><br><br><br>On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 9:16 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><br>
<div>What my paper missed and what may have been obvious at the time,
but which I only saw with hindsight, were the biggest problems with the
model:</div><div><br></div><div>1. There is little incentive for the
publisher to set a competitive APC. It is clear that in most cases APCs
for hybrids are higher than APCs for born-OA journals. But as the
hybrid is gaining the majority of its revenue from subscriptions why set
a lower APC - if any author wants to pay it then it is just a bonus.
Of course, this helps explains the low take-up rate for OA in most
hybrid journals - why pay a hight fee when you can get published in that
journal for free? And if you really want OA then best go to a born-OA
journal which is cheaper and may well be of comparable quality.</div><div><br></div><div>2.
There is little pressure on the publisher to reduce subscription
prices. Of course, everybody says 'we don't double dip', but this is
almost impossible to verify and from a subscriber's point of view very
difficult to police. I don't know of any institution, for example, in a
multi-year big deal who has received a rebate based on OA hybrid
content.</div><div><br></div><br clear="all">
</div></blockquote><div>There are several other concerns about "hybrid":<br>
<br>
</div><div>* the unacceptable labelling and licensing of many TA publishers.
Many hybrid papers are not identified as OA of any sort, others are
labelled with confusing words "Free content". Many do not have licences,
some have incompatible rights.<br>
</div><div>* many are linked to RightsLink which demand payment (often huge) for Open Access reuse<br>
</div><div>* many deliberately use Non-BOAI compliant licences. One
editor mailed me today and said the the publisher was urging them to use
NC-ND as it protected authors from exploitation.<br>
</div><div>* they are not easily discoverable. I mailed the Director of
Universal Access at Elsevier asking for a complete list of OA articles
and she couldn't give it to me. I had to use some complex database query
- I have no idea how reliable that was.<br>
<br>
</div><div>Leaving aside the costing of hybrid, if someone has paid for Open Access then it should be:<br>
<br>
</div>* clearly licensed on splash page, HTML, and PDFs.<br></div>* the XML should be available<br></div>* there should be a complete list of all OA articles from that publisher.<br><br></div>Currently I am indexing and extracting facts from PLoSONE and BMC on a daily basis. Each of these does exactly what I need:<br>
</div>* lists all new articles every day<br></div>* has a complete list of all articles ever published<br></div>* collaborates with scientists like me to make it easy to iterate over all the content.<br><br></div>It is easy to get the impression that TA publishers don't care about these issues. BMC and PLoS (and the OASPAs) do it properly - an honest product. <br>
<br></div>Any publisher who wishes to be respected for their OA offerings has to do the minimum of what I list here:<br></div>* CC-BY<br></div>* list of all articles<br></div>* easy machine iteration and retrieval.<br><br>
</div>Anything else is holding back progress<br clear="all"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><br>-- <br>Peter Murray-Rust<br>Reader in Molecular Informatics<br>Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<br>
University of Cambridge<br>CB2 1EW, UK<br>+44-1223-763069
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