On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 4:46 AM, Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 3:19 AM, Richard Poynder
<[email protected]> wrote:
> To the intense joy of OA advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that
it has
> withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act.
I find no joy in progressing from the presently unacceptable position to a worse
one and then back to square one.
The only "progress" is to discover even more clearly that publishers are
institutionally anti-academic and anti-reader so that the few of us who fight
for basic rights have clearer evidence. I take no joy in the total silence of
organised academia - not a squeak of comment and support from any major
university or library leader.
Â
>
2. Boycotting authors cannot, need not and will not stop publishing in
or reviewing for their best journals: It is neither necessary nor
realistic. There are easier and better ways to make those journals'
contents freely accessible.
3. Researchers cannot, need not and will not stop serving on the
editorial boards of their best journals. It is neither necessary nor
realistic. There are easier and better ways to make those journals'
contents freely accessible.
Tell me how to do it for the American Chemical Society. The issue has been
fought for 10 years with zero progress. Simply restating "press for Green" makes
no difference.
7. Hence only one course of action is realistic, feasible and makes
sense: It will remedy the accessibility problem completely and it
will
eventually drive down journal expenses and prices as well as induce
a
conversion to Gold OA publishing at an affordable rate.
8. That course of action is for universities and research funders to
mandate Green OA self-archiving.
Unless I am told different I assume the following about "Green".
 * there is no ,legal basis for it that can be used to force a publisher such
as
the ACS to become green
 * there is no contractual agreement between any publishers and "the academic
system". Publishers have not committed formally to providing Green indefinitely.
Green practice is formally rescindable by the publisher. (Maybe the boycott hass
show this might be a poor decision, but large institutions are out of touch and
make many bad decisions. I doubt that the universities, unlike the NIH, would
have enough courage to challenge an ex-green publisher effecively)
9. Once Green OA self-archiving becomes universal because it is
universally mandated, the research accessibility is solved.
I strongly believe that will never happen. Some publishers like ACS will resist
to the end. An organisation which 2 years ago lost 40 million USD in pointless
lawsuits will die rather than be forced to change. I also believe that if
Greenness started to reach a significant proportion of publications the
publishers would rescind it, put other restrictions in its use or marginalise it
through other practices. So, for me, the idea that we get 100% green, the
publishers drop prices and we then redesign the publishing system is
unrealistic. (It might have some hope if Institutional Repositories actually
provided some added value rather than being impossible to navigate, hopeless to
search automatically, and highly laborious to populate. If Universities actually
built a BETTER system we might have some progress - the 2000+ person years spent
on IRs is of no value to me and my colleagues.
10. Once the research accessibility problem is solved, journal
affordability is no longer a life-or-death matter: libraries can
cancel journals because their contents are freely accessible to
their
users by some other means.
11. Once post-Green-OA cancellations make subscriptions
unsustainable
for meeting publishing costs, publishers will downsize to just the
cost of peer review alone, offloading access provision and archiving
onto institutional OA repositories, and converting to Gold OA
publishing.
12. Universities will then have the funds to pay the much lower
costs
of peer review alone out of their windfall subscription cancelation
savings.
(It is this optimal and inevitable outcome for research and
researchers that the publishers' lobby is doing its best to
forestall
as long as it possibly can. But it's entirely up to the research
community how long they allow them to do it. As long as they do, it
amounts to allowing the flea on its tail to wag the research/dogâ¦)
And the research community shows zero sign of any progress and I therefore
challenge the word "inevitable" - I take an opposite view. We've had 10 years of
advocacy for Green deposition. I challenge this list to answer the following
question:
* Provide me with a list of all the chemistry articles in IRs. (I can do it
myself for parts of Pubmed - the parts I am legally allowed to access).
I predict that no-one can answer it. Even if they can I predict that the
percentage of current articles is less than 5% and probably less than 1%.
P.
Â
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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