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.
Â
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 letâs 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 âmandates have not failed, they
have
not been triedâ. 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.
Â
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 â 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 funderâs hands such a reservation is from the total pool
of money. In an institutionâs 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.
Â
THE SOCIAL NETWORKING PATH
Thirdly, let me assert that both these tactics are somewhat tired in todayâs
Internet era. Repositories are âbig computingâ 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 âan 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.â 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
âbig computingâ 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
âvolunteerismâ
can achieve.
Â
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)Â Â Â All Australian universities now have repositories (2012).
(2)Â Â Â Only one has an effective mandatory policy, and it has had it for a
long
time.
(3)Â Â Â Despite continued and determined efforts, no others have shown any
sign
of changing.
(4)Â Â Â The Australian research funders have only a policy of âwatchful
waitingâ.
Yet my own universityâs 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 donât 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.
Â
Arthur Sale
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
University of Tasmania
Â
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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