Peter - As usual a concise and brilliant summation of the scene including the problem.
Let me add one more aspect which tends to be overlooked. A new generation of researchers is entering the system. They live in the Web2.0 generation now and will evolve with whatever comes next. We are still impressed by what can be done with http, html / xml and urls; they don't imagine a world without them. They will expect immediate interaction with hyperlinked multimedia. They have little or no respect for legalities or long-established traditions. Glory is counted by 'likes' or 'friends' and - as an aside - is more quantitative and reproducible than existing 'glory' metrics (especially the dreaded impact factors and related indices). They may want peer review as it is now but seem to manage the rest of their lives using online recommendations from peers they either know or respect or both. They will certainly expect to live in a research world with wider conversation including social / economic / political commentators which links with the outputs -outcomes - impact agenda. Technologically the user interface level is likely to be semantic web / linked open data driven from below by a formal information system with very rich metadata and services linked as business processes for research discovery, analysis, manipulation, mining and communication from the researcher 'workbench'. Interaction by speech and gesture rather than mouse and keyboard will become the norm. We older academics owe it to the younger generation to leave a legacy upon which they can build the new scholarly communication environment. Such an environment cannot be built upon the Finch recommendations. That legacy is green libre - or more precisely from my point of view green libre within an overall research information management environment based on CERIF (the formal information system mentioned in the above paragraph). Our job is to convince academics worldwide of the longer term vision and hence the need for the foundation, erect the foundation, let economics, research evaluator, research manager (in universities and funders) and researcher behaviour take its course. The Finch report provides a cul-de-sac. It will come to be seen as an evolutionary branch that died. We have a nice saying in the UK civil service: 'a committee is a cul-de-sac into which good ideas are lured and quietly strangled'. Such was recently the fate of green libre. We now have to rescue the just breathing victim and revive it. Best Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keith G Jeffery Director International Relations STFC --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The contents of this email are sent in confidence for the use of the intended recipient only. If you are not one of the intended recipients do not take action on it or show it to anyone else, but return this email to the sender and delete your copy of it The STFC telecommunications systems may be monitored in accordance with the policy available from <http://dlitd.dl.ac.uk/policy/monitoring/monitoring%20statement.htm>. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: 21 June 2012 09:51 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers but from institutions and funders I agree with Jan's analysis. There is now mounting evidence that it costs about 100 USD to publish an adequate qualilty open peer-reviewed scientific paper. In total. My evidence: * IUCr publishes 3000 OA papers a year (Acta Cryst E), IN FULLY SEMANTIC FORM for 150USD which gives a useful "profit". They do this because they have engaged the authors who willingly do much of the work for them. Authors do it because IUCr has built the authoring system and it's far better than anything the main publishers have come up with. * It costs 7 USD to put a paper in arXiv * PeerJ charges 99 USD for an open peer-reviewed paper. I believe this figure makes sense. Nature "has to charge" 10000 USD for an open-access paper because it is selling glory. Glory commands whatever price people are willing to pay. Many publishers charge huge amounts for OA because they have an effective monopoly of the subdiscipline and because they are also selling glory. Anyone can author and publish a scientific paper without a "publisher". Every student's thesis is a peer-reviewed piece of science. I know some universities opt out of the process by getting student to publish in closed access journals and then simply collecting the papers. These unievrsities are part of the problem. Many scientists (particularly in CompSci) run peer-reviewed workshops for dissemination and merit and do the whole lot without publishers. Traditionally they may get the proceedings published through a publisher but this is not necessary. So; * publishers are not necessary for top-quality peer review * publishers are not necessary for the technical creation of high-quality documents Traditional publishers now have exactly two unique selling points: * they sell perceived glory to universities * they "persuade" universities and authors to give them highly valuable material and then use the legal mechanisms of the last 200 years to control and resell content. Both are very fragile. If either crashes then the publisher has very little to sell. If both crash so will the publisher. If Green OA had been done properly - in 1995 - then I would be a supporter. Basically every university would have required its outputs to be fully posted on the web. Departments and individuals would be judged on that. Instead of building repositories they should have built publishing systems. By now we would have the whole of STM on the web. But in the 15 years of supine inaction by universities the publishers have now hired enough marketers, lawyers and created so much FUD that universities and especially their libraries run in fear of the publishers and their lawyers. On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Jan Velterop <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 -- Scanned by iCritical.
_______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
