Stevan – my answers are in the text. From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: May 18, 2016 6:30 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Prophylactic Against Elsevier Predation
And then, if Science-Metrix & 1science succeeds in helping librarians harvest back the output that university researchers have deposited elsewhere in the web than their own university's repository, Elsevier can buy Science-Metrix & 1science as it bought Mendeley, SSRN and PURE and tighten yet again the stranglehold on our research output that they should never have had in the first place. -->So your suggestion for us is what? Close the company now and all the staff join a university and we would finally achieve the level of nobility and disinterestedness that all good humans should aim for? La noblesse publique! Or is it to develop a product that is so stupid that no one will buy it, to close the shop, then repeat same until we have been consigned to oblivion? Are you suggesting that companies leave everything that is university-related to universities? And that we also leave everything governmental to government employees? Perhaps we should also leave customers to barter among themselves? Yes, I know, the world would be so happy without these greedy entrepreneurs, there would be no profit taking, and we would obtain a perfect distribution of wealth. Dream on. Like most of the people who completed a Ph.D. I seriously considered going into academia but for a variety of reason life decided differently. So what do we do when we have a drive to change the world? We find a job at Google that you seem to admire so much that you always promote as a solution for every ill created by companies just equally greedy but who are not advertising businesses. We need a world more complex than the choice between being noble academics or being employed at virtuous Google. I know I’m not noble, but I feel no shame getting my hand dirty working in a private corporation. We also play a part in making this world work. Evil certainly is present in business, but it is not entirely absent from academia even if academia has way more checks and balances to keep this low. The economics of small firms is tough, real tough, I know something about it after 15 years running Science-Metrix. We are squeezed by large entities that have economies of scale that make us extremely inefficient in comparison. I am so constantly aware of it that one day I’d like to call upon Thomas Piketty to jointly write a book showing that rate of scale return in countries is persistently greater than that associated with creativity and flexibility and this leads “naturally” to concentration in industry. Also, as small firms, we are also frequently competing against noble academics who triple dip with their salaries, their research grants and generating some non-taxable research income to top it all up. Of course, we are the greedy ones, we the entrepreneurs, in contrast to these disinterested academics for whom money doesn’t count and for whom profiteering is such a filth. In case there is a doubt here, yes I am sarcastic. Like many entrepreneurs, I work nearly every day of the week, from dusk to long after dawn and my son ask my wife when we’ll have a normal life. I didn’t start 1science to sell it up to Elsevier, but I would think one could understand if one day I ran out of steam I ended up doing so. Many entrepreneurs are like farmers, the only money they have is in the value of their enterprise, so selling is not a shame, it’s a pension scheme. With all my admiration for what Science-Metrix & 1science do, it's nothing that a few bright graduate students in computer science could not do as a JISC project, and afterwards the software is available to all universities. As foolish as a Fool's-Gold membership consortium of universities is, a consortium to support and sustain the skills and tools needed to repatriate universities' research as well as its processing would be wise thing to form. The research funders would stand to benefit from supporting it too. --> Now obviously you don’t have much admiration for our work if your sense that the work done by the 20 employees at 1science and the 25 at Science-Metrix can be done by a few bright students in computer science. We are a diverse team of proud professionals. I have three degrees in science, technology and society, studying innovation and science policy as core interest. Surely that must have a bit of value whilst driving a team that develops products that seek to provide benefits to users and create overall public returns on investments. Plus my twenty years on the work market including the last fifteen running a successful business which despite being so relatively minuscule is seen as such as a threat by companies that have revenues more than 1000 times greater and profits even more ridiculously greater. I think I know what I’m doing and no offence to students I value experience a tad. No offence also to computer scientists that I really admire and with whom I truly love working, they work even better when connected with people with different skillsets. This is one of the things that companies do well, naturally, without bickering, that is, bring people with very different skillsets to work together on a common project. What about the experience of our product manager, and the professional developers, and the people who work in marketing – yes marketing, because if no one knows about your software, even if it’s offered for free, no one will use it. Providing successful innovations is not only about technics. I have visited more than one hundred universities in the last year to see if our ideas were right and to adjust the course of action of the company constantly while following a textbook lean startup model, and I did that with the help of seasoned sales persons. That’s right, probably considered as low life forms by some as they generate revenues, salespeople are key to helping clients get what they need. Salespeople are extremely important in innovations, they oblige the entrepreneurial entity to be in touch with the needs of the clients, to listen to them, to adjust products so they are useful to end users. The successful salesperson converts entrepreneurial hubris into modesty. She pushes the team with new ideas, relentlessly, all the time. So much so in fact that the development team wants to get rid of her as she unremittingly push forward and forward, in the way that clients want which means developers never have a few cushy hours. With the backing of the Science-Metrix team, and also benefitting from the wisdom of my long time business partner Grégoire Côté, we also count on more than 100 years of collective in-depth knowledge of bibliographic data, big data, and of the traps and challenges of delivering high quality data, and actionable outputs based on robust bibliometrics. Surely that’s useful when working hand-in-hand in a close feedback loop with computer scientists. Academia is unbeatable in knowledge production, but it is no heaven in terms of its capacity to develop complex products in a nimble manner, with high velocity, and especially over a long time period with continuous improvements. And no, before I’m being accused of this, I don’t mean to say it never succeeds, it does, and it sometimes fail, my point is this is far from a fail safe solution or one that also generates the greatest social returns on public investments. Counting on academia alone for innovative product development is not sufficient. I think it’s fair to give a chance to entrepreneurs also and to see their contributions as being more than that of greedy automatons that spew companies just for the sake of earning a quick buck by selling them off. Research access-provision, archiving and processing simply do not have to be outsourced by universities. It's just a perverse Gutenberg legacy -- the predatory publisher stranglehold -- that makes it seem even seem faintly worthy of considering for a microsecond. (This has nothing to do with the question of whether digital warehousing is cheaper to do in-hourse or in some commercial cloud. I have no idea whatsoever about the economics of that. Nor about whether it's more economical to outsource email services. I'm talking about custodianship over -- and access to -- universities' own research output.) è You are right, they do not have to be outsourced, but universities do not always have very good accounting systems in place and it’s not because things appear to be cheaper in academia that they truly are. Things often appear cheap when you consider that the salary of individuals who are in the top 5 percent income bracket should not be counted in the cost of your product. And then there is the question of whether it is the mission of universities to become product developers. I am constantly ambivalent about that one, and the drive of conservative governments who don’t understand that the greatest contribution of universities by far is to provide society with very smart people who can tackle very complex problems and who have a huge capacity to adapt and to evolve – I’m speaking of students who leave universities and become grownups. Paradoxically, your prescription to create a hermit university kingdom runs somewhat parallel to the utilitarian drift of public policies that want to convert universities in Blackberries creating machines. Buying some of the solutions from evil companies, both small firms whose raison d’être you feel is only to be acquired and these big conglomerate earning 38% or whatever insane profit as some people always point out, and in spite of all these profits being made, can still make sense from an economic point of view. I’m bringing this back – at the system level, large firms are extremely efficient because of their large scale, and even in the presence of indecent, non-sufficiently taxed profits, they often are in a position to offer a solution that is more socially optimal than having thousands of academics working inefficiently on a small scale in an unsynchronized manner. I’m not defending that model as the right one for everything, I just think we should keep a cool head and respect the value of plurality. And for those who wonder, I truly love Stevan and I’m happy that a very small parts of my taxes is going towards paying for his salary (and, reflectively that a small part of my taxes is paying for me and my team as more than 90% our work is paid by public taxes). I am happy to live in a world where we can afford to have independent thinkers whose job is not jeopardized by the mere fact of having socially progressive ideas and challenging the status quo. Stevan and I have many things in common, one of them is that we like having a little argument every now and then. I truly hope I don’t sound condescending here, if I do it is because of my eternal youth and maladresse. Stevan, keep poking with your sharp mind, I have been missing you on GOAL recently, it gets far too gentile when you are too busy with your other causes. Respectfully Éric Stevan Harnad On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 5:53 PM, Éric Archambault <eric.archamba...@science-metrix.com<mailto:eric.archamba...@science-metrix.com>> wrote: Eric At 1science, we have developed a robust solution to address some of the problems you are mentioning. In contrast to the optimistic view of the repositories that Stevan has, in our efforts to locate all the contents which is available in green and gold (including hybrid), we are finding that most of the IRs have only about 5-8% of the papers published by authors at the universities hosting these repositories. Another contrast, the latest data we have compiled at 1science shows that we are fast approaching 60% of the papers indexed the Thomson Reuters Web of Science which can be found in gratis OA form somewhere on the internet. Given the law of large numbers, on average, there is a gap of more than 50% between what is available somewhere on the net, and what is available in local IR. It’s clear tat a solution that fills that gap quickly can remove a huge pain point in the filling of IR with full-text (or links to full-text) and proper metadata. We have developed a product called oaFoldr which basically repatriates these papers to the IRs. Our privileged model is to feed the IRs with good quality metadata (and when institutions are subscribing to the Web of Science, we can install the WoS API and populate the repository with very high quality metadata and this removes a lot of the pain of entering data manually) and then place URLs that points to locations (other IR, publishers’ websites, arXiv, Scielo, PMC,…) where a gratis OA version is located. This turns empty IRs into institutional knowledge hubs. Of course, many librarians are also actively examining these links and copying a physical version of the paper in the IR (where possible considering licencing and rights issues). If the uptake is good for this product (which we think it will as we developed this solution because we kept hearing from tens of university librarians that something of the kind was really needed), IRs are going to be way more populated, way faster, and librarians and researchers will be able to spend more time archiving and self-archiving pre-prints and post-prints that do not exist anywhere else. For libraries to spend time looking at what is uniquely missing makes sense, this is an exercise in search engine optimization as the Bing and Google bots will see unique content. This solution will help move universities towards 100% OA availability at the institutional level. Take Caltech – they already have a stunningly good IR but using 1science’s data it’ll be every better – we can find close to 80% of Caltech’s paper in Gratis OA somewhere on the internet. Of course, this solution is not a silver bullet and some problems will remain but it will help creating a more robust, distributed architecture. Éric Eric Archambault, Ph.D. President and CEO | Président-directeur général Science-Metrix & 1science [http://1science.com/images/LinkedIn_sign.png]<https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericarchambault> T. 1.514.495.6505 x.111<tel:1.514.495.6505%20x.111> C. 1.514.518.0823<tel:1.514.518.0823> F. 1.514.495.6523<tel:1.514.495.6523> [http://1science.com/images/Logo_SM_horizontal_small.png]<http://www.science-metrix.com/> [http://1science.com/images/1science.png] <http://www.1science.com/> From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>] On Behalf Of Eric F. Van de Velde Sent: May 18, 2016 4:39 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Prophylactic Against Elsevier Predation Stevan: Yes, distributed management of Institutional Repositories spread the costs and immunize them against a take-over. That is why advocated for them as early as the 1999 UPS meeting in Santa Fe. But, it is now also increasingly clear that this distributed management comes with significant downsides. Any successes of the OA movement have been in recruiting content for IRs and in enacting OA mandates. Unfortunately, the network of IRs federated through OAI-PMH is simply not good enough for professional-level research. If IRs fail at this task, they'll simply disappear into obscurity. Distributed management does not immunize IRs against becoming irrelevant. Each IR is managed to accommodate idiosyncratic local concerns and not the broader interests of the world. There is no consistent access to the full text (many records contain only metadata). Many records just contain bad scans. Many IRs prohibit/discourage data mining. With globally inconsistent metadata, it is impossible to search and find anything with consistent reliability. Moreover, in its institutionalized form, the supposedly-cheap IR has become rather expensive. The distributed nature has led to a paralysis in development. To put it bluntly: Today's institutional repositories are run with software of the early 2000s and managed with the cataloging mindset of the 1980s. Frankly, I have no solution to offer. The crowdsourced alternatives like figshare, academia.edu<http://academia.edu>, etc. look increasingly better in comparison. --Eric. http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com Twitter: @evdvelde E-mail: eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com<mailto:eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com> On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 5:26 AM, Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com<mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com>> wrote: The worldwide distributed network of Green Institutional Repositories<http://roar.eprints.org> is by far the best prophylactic against Elsevier predation. I hope universities and research funders will be awake enough to realize this rather than falling for quick "solutions" that continue to hold their research output hostage to the increasingly predatory publishing industry. "We have nothing to lose but our chains..." On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 4:53 AM, Paul Walk <paul.w...@bath.edu<mailto:paul.w...@bath.edu>> wrote: "The software may change, but you can't sell off a distributed network of independent repositories.” I agree, and I think that this is the crucial point. The software doesn’t matter (well, it does matter, but it doesn’t affect this principle). It’s about the distribution of *control*. We are truly fortunate to have a global, distributed infrastructure of institutional repositories which are (mostly) under institutional control. This is quite an unusual arrangement these days - and I think we should regard it as precious and inherently powerful in its denial of the possibility of “ownership” by one party. We should do what we can to both hang on to this infrastructure, and to exploit it more fully, in pursuit of a better scholarly communications system. Paul > On 17 May 2016, at 22:06, Leslie Carr > <l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk<mailto:l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote: > > The software may change, but you can't sell off a distributed network of > independent repositories. > > Prof Leslie Carr > Web Science institute > #⃣ webscience #⃣ openaccess > > On 17 May 2016, at 21:35, Joachim SCHOPFEL > <joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr<mailto:joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr><mailto:joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr<mailto:joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr>>> > wrote: > > Uh - "the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide > is not for sale"? Not so sure - the green institutional repositories can be > replaced by other solutions, can't they ? Better solutions, more > functionalities, more added value, more efficient, better connected to > databases and gold/hybrid journals etc. > > ----- Mail d'origine ----- > De: Stevan Harnad > <amscifo...@gmail.com<mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com><mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com<mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com>>> > À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) > <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org><mailto:goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>>> > Envoyé: Tue, 17 May 2016 17:03:18 +0200 (CEST) > Objet: Re: [GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier > > Shame on SSRN. > > Of course we know exactly why Elsevier acquired SSRN (and Mendeley): > > It's to retain their stranglehold over a domain (peer-reviewed > scholarly/scientific research publishing) in which they are no longer needed, > and in which they would not even have been able to gain as much as a foothold > if it had been born digital, instead of being inherited as a legacy from an > obsolete Gutenberg era. > > I don't know about Arxiv (needless centralization and its concentrated > expenses are always vulnerabe to faux-benign take-overs) but what's sure is > that the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide > is not for sale, and that is their strength... > > Stevan Harnad > > > > On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 8:03 AM, Bo-Christer Björk > <bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi><mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>>> > wrote: > > This is an interesting news item which should interest the > readers of this list. Let's hope arXiv is not for sale. > > Bo-Christer Björk > > > > -------- Forwarded Message -------- > Subject: > Message from Mike Jensen, SSRN Chairman > Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 07:40:29 -0400 (EDT) > From: Michael C. Jensen > <ad...@ssrn.com<mailto:ad...@ssrn.com>><mailto:ad...@ssrn.com<mailto:ad...@ssrn.com>> > Reply-To: > > supp...@ssrn.com<mailto:supp...@ssrn.com><mailto:supp...@ssrn.com<mailto:supp...@ssrn.com>> > To: > bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi><mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>> > > > > [http://papers.ssrn.com/Organizations/images/ihp_ssrnlogo.png]<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://www.ssrn.com> > [http://static.ssrn.com/Images/Header/socialnew.gif] > > > Dear SSRN Authors, > > > SSRN announced today that it has changed ownership. SSRN is > joining Mendeley<https://www.mendeley.com/?signout> and > Elsevier<https://www.elsevier.com> > to coordinate our development and delivery of new products and > services, and we look forward to our new access to data, products, > and additional resources that this change facilitates. (See Gregg > Gordon’s Elsevier > Connect<https://www.elsevier.com/connect/ssrn-the-leading-social-science-and-humanities-repository-and-online-community-joins-elsevier> > post) > > > Like SSRN, Mendeley and Elsevier are focused on creating tools > that enhance researcher workflow and productivity. SSRN has been > at the forefront of on-line sharing of working papers. We are > committed to continue our innovation and this change will enable > that to happen more quickly. SSRN will benefit from access to the > vast new data and resources available, including Mendeley’s > reference management and personal library management tools, their > new researcher profile capabilities, and social networking > features. Importantly, we will also have new access for SSRN > members to authoritative performance measurement tools such as > those powered by Scopus<https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus> and > Newsflo<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://www.newsflo.net> > (a global media tracking tool). In addition, SSRN, Mendeley and > Elsevier together can cooperatively build bridges to close the > divide between the previously separate worlds and workflows of > working papers and published papers. > > > We realize that this change may create some concerns about the > intentions of a legacy publisher acquiring an open-access working > paper repository. I shared this concern. But after much discussion > about this matter and others in determining if Mendeley and > Elsevier would be a good home for SSRN, I am convinced that they > would be good stewards of our mission. And our copyright policies > are not in conflict -- our policy has always been to host only > papers that do not infringe on copyrights. I expect we will have > some conflicts as we align our interests, but I believe those will > be surmountable. > > > Until recently I was convinced that the SSRN community was best > served being a stand-alone entity. But in evaluating our future in > the evolving landscape, I came to believe that SSRN would benefit > from being more interconnected and with the resources available > from a larger organization. For example, there is scale in systems > administration and security, and SSRN can provide more value to > users with access to more data and resources. > > > On a personal note, it has been an honor to be involved over the > past 25 years in the founding and growth of the SSRN website and > the incredible community of authors, researchers and institutions > that has made this all possible. I consider it one of my great > accomplishments in life. The community would not have been > successful without the commitment of so many of you who have > contributed in so many ways. I am proud of the community we have > created, and I invite you to continue your involvement and support > in this effort. > > > The staff at SSRN are all staying (including Gregg Gordon, CEO and > myself), the Rochester office is still in place, it will still be > free to upload and download papers, and we remain committed to > “Tomorrow’s Research Today”. I look forward to and am committed to > a successful transition and to another great 25 years for the SSRN > community that rivals the first. > > > Michael C. Jensen > > Founder & Chairman, SSRN > > > > ________________________________ > > Search > the SSRN > eLibrary<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://papers.ssrn.com/> > | Browse > SSRN > <http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayJournalBrowse.cfm> > | Top > Papers<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/topten/topTenPapers.cfm> > > _______________________________________________ > > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org><mailto:GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org>> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal > > > > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org><mailto:GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org>> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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