On 2012-07-12, at 11:13 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action.
Comment: I agree and disagree. May I suggest that the OA community should work in tandem with mutual respect rather than attempting to unite? There is no one-size-fits all. Here are some reasons. I would argue that it is the communities of scholars, publishers, and librarians, working both separately and together, that need to take action. Physics has provided us with one model, first with arXiv and now with SCOAP3. Medicine has given us another, with the PubMedCentral International initiative. Economics has RePEC, an interesting initiative that builds on institutional repositories to build a discipline-focused service. Timothy Gowers and colleagues are leading the way in the field of mathematics. In Canada, librarians and publishers have come together in the Synergies project which has helped many scholarly journals to develop an online presence and made open access an easier choice. In Canada and many other countries, academic publishing is not a profitable venture, and so scholarly journals have been subsidized by the government. I think it was Leslie Chan & Jean-Claude Guedon who helped the funder, SSHRC, develop an Aid to Open Access Journals program. Latin American countries are somewhat similar in this respect (scholarly publishing is not about the profits); I would argue that this is one of the reasons why this region has been able to go straight for gold. The situation is very different where the for-profit companies are at home and have more ability to lobby effectively, such as the UK and the US. Here, it is probably necessary to start with green. Strong open access policies are important - as Harnad pointed out, these need to be green, involve immediate deposit even if access is delayed, and accomodate the "almost-OA" researcher-mediated sharing. We should continue to push on these lines. However, I would also argue that ultimately what needs to happen is a careful, thoughtful transition of revenue from toll to open access. The Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity is doing good work in this area and is worthy of support. There are so many open access initiatives today that are worthy of support I can only apologize for the many that I am omitting. One way to think about open access (which a few of us in the Directory of Open Access Books discussion are agreeing on) is that the real opposite of open access is closed access - the works that we cannot read at all, because they are not available or so costly that we cannot afford to read them at all. my two bits, Heather Morrison, MLIS Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/ The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
