[GOAL] Re: Titanium Killer Apps and OA

[Stevan Harnad]

Arthur Sale wrote:

      IS THE TITANIUM ROAD A TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERCHARGED GREEN ROAD?
        
      Well, if you want to play on words, you can think of it that way. I
      won’t. But you had better start thinking of the Gold Road as an
      ultimate commercial version of the Green Road too, because it is the
      author that decides to self-archive his or her article as Open
      Access by the choice of journal, selecting a hybrid option, offering
      an article, and paying author-side fees as needed.
        
      I could also argue that no journal can make an article open access
      without the author’s permission, so all roads are the same, since
      they are all author-roads.
        
      And for good measure to help your argument,  a Titanium app’s
      storage in the cloud, an institutional repository, a subject
      repository, a gold journal, and a hybrid journal are all
      repositories of scholarly articles. They differ only by their scopes
      and policies.
        
      I don’t find this sort of word play useful to me nor to OA. It is
      simply denigrating what is clearly a different way of achieving open
      access. One might as well argue that SMS and Twitter are simply
      technologically supercharged email, and Facebook is simply a
      website. They are all quite different phenomena, while having some
      common technological features and human needs underlying them.


My reply:

No word-play. There's two ways authors can make their articles free online
(OA): 
(1) publish them in any journal at all, and make them free online themselves
(Green OA) 
or 
(2) publish them in journals that make the free online (Gold OA). 
(Of course it is the author that decides, either way.)

Green OA mandates make sure authors do it. (Mandates can require authors to make
their articles OA, but cannot require them to publish in Gold OA journals.)

So there is no 3rd, "Titanium Road" to OA. There is technology that makes the
author doing it (Green Road) easier, more efficient, more powerful, more
beneficial. That is what Arthur is advocating.

But what we have learned across the long, lost years of trying to get authors to
make their articles OA (voluntarily) is that neither advocacy nor technology is
enough: It has to be mandated.

So what I am eager to hear from Arthur is how the Titanium Technology gets
adopted voluntarily (without a mandate) -- and how fast, compared to the current
growth rate of Gold OA vs. unmandated Green OA vs. mandated Green OA.

Arthur would of course quite rightly reply that whereas Titanium Green grows no
faster than any other form of unmandated Green (or Gold), and nowhere near as
fast as mandated Green, mandates themselves are not yet growing anywhere near
fast enough.

And that is exactly where our strategic divergence, after a half-decade of
convergent efforts, lies: 

Arthur is now for directing advocacy efforts at promoting the adoption of the
Titanium Technology, whereas I am for directing advocacy efforts at promoting
the adoption of Green OA mandates (because I do not believe any form of
voluntarism will get us to 100% OA anywhere near as quickly and surely as
mandates).

Stevan Harnad




    [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]

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