Gary F. Daught wrote: [snip] > Second, I noticed you referred to REPOSITORY indexing services. Here I > think we may encounter a disciplinary difference. In the humanities, > and especially religious studies/theology, I believe the growth of > open access has a much better shot via the JOURNALS (Gold) route. I > don't see any problem with humanities scholars utilizing repositories > for practical preservation and supplemental discoverability. But this > is not going to be enough to encourage a shift to OA. Scholarly > tradition in the humanities strongly values associating one's research > with textual artifacts and textual communities that create a sense of > historical continuity. They want their research to appear as articles > in journals of reputation within their discipline, and to be preserved > in the archives of those journals. > > The first step (and this is the role I have assumed as an OA advocate > in religious studies) is to reassure humanist scholars that open > access journals can function just as effectively as well-known and > well-reputed subscription-based journals have done in the > past. Humanities scholars are also concerned with > discoverability. Here we have been stressing that OA can do a BETTER > job with discoverability because, among other things, we can easily > submit their research to indexing through search engines such as > Google. Here too, this brings me back to the original point: Google is > great. But can/ought we continue to rely so heavily on Google (or > Bing/Academic Search, etc.) to assure continued indexing to open > access literature?
Gary, you seem to be falling into the trap that Green Open Access (and the repositories that contain the papers) are somehow replacing journals with unrefereed self-published papers. This is NOT the case. The Green Road to Open Access is about providing access to the final author's text and graphics (but not the layout provided by the publisher) of peer reviewed papers published in journals following peer review. Repositories are not primarily for unrefereed material (though many repositories allow such material to be deposited - just about all of them clearly mark the status of such papers). They are provided and maintained to provide access to the main necessary element of the refereed journal literature: the author's words and graphics. Yes, there may well be a problem with the fetishism of humanities scholars whose research invovles authenticating historic texts. That doesn't apply to all humanities scholars of course. That has been an issue, too, for scientists. But the argyument is easy and clear. You just have to phrase the questions to scholars correctly: "Faced as a reader with a choice between access only to the text but not the layout of a paper, and no access at all, which would you rather have?" "Faced as an author with readers who have that choice, would you rather provide access to your text or no access at all." That's the question and the answer for almost everyone when it's asked correctly, is that they would prefer at least to see the text/allow the text to be seen. This is within our grasp now by mandating deposit in repositories. Once repositories contain 80% or 90% or more of the ongoing literature then we can work on imprioving searchability, findability, sustainable funding of peer review (and figuring out how scholarly societies can be funded without them placing a barrier in the way of scholarship in their field in the way of tolls for literature access - commercial publishers' profits are not a benefit to academia and so need concern academics no more than the loss of blacksmith's livelihoods concerned the early motorist), and other questions such as reuse rights without any requirement beyond attribution (*). (*) It still rankles me that my co-author on a paper had to ask out publisher's permission to re-use a diagram I created for a further paper of his building on our work. Even though the permission was granted without price, it still invovled his time to see it - the barrier being that the publisher of his second paper required formal permission from the first publisher. I have tried in the past to give a license to publish not a transfer and missed opportunities to publish is the right place for my work so had to revert to publishing in the right place and giving up many of the rights I would like to grant to the community (I don't want to keep them, I just don't want them exerted by the publisher against the interests of science and scholarship). -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
