The thread seems to be wandering off from where it started on the difference between the VoR and the AM, but please allow me to state what I believe would be a good set of strategies for OA. I apologise that this is a long post. I have changed the subject heading.
THE REPOSITORY PATH By all means, promote institutional mandates, provided you also promote effective training, education and enforcement policies to go with them. In that case they work and usually achieve less than perfect capture, typically 60-80%. One of the key problems is that researchers much prefer to deposit the Version-of-Record rather than an Accepted-Manuscript (even though it is well-known that readers are happy to read an AM in preference to none), and the deposit therefore fails to be open access. This is where I came in to this discussion. It is not sufficient to just impose a mandate, but you also need sophisticated tracking of publications and an attempt to induce cultural change in the practice of dissemination. This costs money, unpopular in the present financial climate. With even more vigour, promote funder mandates. With a little effort, funder mandates come in with an effective enforcement policy (the threat of no further funds), and they can impose a contractual obligation on the research prior to any thought of publication, thereby making it illegal for the researcher to sign away copyright to a publisher without preserving OA for the VoR. Funder mandates can achieve close to 100% capture, but the present examples are not perfect. Both of these are mandatory tactics, and are based on persuasion (volunteerism?) of senior management. Persuading senior management to spend more for a nebulous benefit is always a difficult task, and is not very scalable. Persuasion at the legislative level (as in the USA and NIH) is even more difficult, especially in such lean times, though if it succeeds, great! So let's pursue both tactics with vigour, recognising that they are not easy and may indeed still fail to be achieve the scholarly revolution that we all want. Stevan Harnad has often written to me that "mandates have not failed, they have not been tried". Absolutely correct, and therein lies the danger of pursuing a mandate-only policy to the exclusion of everything else. Mandates have not been tried on a large scale, and the effort of establishing them is fraught with much uncertainty, and unproven adoption rates. I continue to be interested in analysing mandates and improving them. THE JOURNAL PATH Of course there is the well-established Open Access journal road. This is more predictable in its adoption, and of course it achieves 100% OA for every article it publishes. While the growth of OA by this route is slow, it has already provided just as much or more OA as the institutional repository mandate. It is hard to argue that a balanced approach to OA cannot include the promotion of OA journals. Of course, it has been said, again by Stevan, that we should get 100% green OA first then there will be saved funds from cancelled subscriptions to pay for author-side fees. However the world is not that simple. That totally ignores how the transition will work - only the start-point and the end-point are clear. It also ignore my theory of the process: we are trying to create a scholarly revolution and all scholarly revolutions depend on people adopting a different stance on the basis of evidence, or the old guard dying out. Thus there is no reason not to applaud the reservation of funds for paying author-side fees at the present time, for genuine OA journals (not double-dipping hybrids for which I have no time). In a funder's hands such a reservation is from the total pool of money. In an institution's hands, it must usually come from a subscription cancellation policy. My own university has done something similar, by reserving some Library funding for buying per-article fees which are thus free to the researcher reader, at the cost of a reduced subscription budget. THE SOCIAL NETWORKING PATH Thirdly, let me assert that both these tactics are somewhat tired in today's Internet era. Repositories are "big computing" dinosaurs; most OA journals have not diverged much from the regular issue and peer review process. There is a third way which is proven in other areas and has been remarkable in its growth rates. I refer to social networking and what I have called the Titanium Road. The number of users of FaceBook, Mendeley, YouTube, blogs, and all the other facets of the social networking phenomena cast the efforts of repositories into the shade. Suppose we were having this discussion some years ago, and someone were to write "an email address should be mandatorily assigned to every person at birth, so they could communicate in the Internet world. It would also be mandatory to use it, and snail mail (high expense) and cell phones (low bandwidth) would be phased out." I have heard very similar sentiments expressed back then. Yet today we cannot conceive of operating without our cell phone or smart phone, nor doing without texting. Pure volunteerism simply overwhelmed the "big computing" view. In the case of Mendeley, which I use as an example though not a perfect one, when I looked it up today, it had 161 million papers from 1.7 million researchers from 35,000 institutions. Of course some of the papers were duplicates, I add. Some of the institutions are probably different forms of the name. Nevertheless, making allowances, this is indicative of what "volunteerism" can achieve. SUMMARY I therefore assert that the OA movement as a whole should not put all its eggs in one basket. It is almost certain to choose wrongly, especially if it chooses a decade-old option. We should pursue all the options, as we do not know, nor have the faintest idea, which strategy is going to be most important, or if all together will create the climate of change that is characteristic of a scholarly revolution at its tipping point. That is not to say that one person may not choose to devote themselves to one path or to the promotion of one path. That is their free right. What is not acceptable is to try to constrain other people choosing other paths, or promoting all of them. Personally, I have given up on promoting mandatory policies, because (1) All Australian universities now have repositories (2012). (2) Only one has an effective mandatory policy, and it has had it for a long time. (3) Despite continued and determined efforts, no others have shown any sign of changing. (4) The Australian research funders have only a policy of "watchful waiting". Yet my own university's volunteerism repository http://eprints.utas.edu.au/ is one of only three Australian university repositories in the top 100 of the 2012 Webometrics global survey (85th in http://repositories.webometrics.info/toprep_inst.asp). I continue to deposit stuff in it; if you want to read the essays that lead me to this position, they are available at http://eprints.utas.edu.au/11441/. I add that mandatory policies have worked in Australia for PhD theses. Nearly all these are OA or subject to short embargoes for commercial or graduate reasons. I support OA journals by choosing to publish in them, and I am trying to see what might be done to estimate and maximize the impact of social networking on OA. Am I irresponsible? I don't think so. I continue to say: OA is a scholarly revolution, and just like Galileo, the atomic theory, genetics and plate tectonics, we ignore the facts of scientific/scholarly revolutions at our own risk. Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120218/b6b10a99/attachment-0001.html
