If respositories take on the functions of managing peer review and
providing value-added services like copyediting, then by definition
they will become part of the publishing industry, just as university
presses are. A case then needs to be made that this kind of
publishing can be run more efficiently and cost effectively by
repository publishers than by regular commercial publishers. What
often happens, of course--and this is true for the accounting of
costs for university presses--is that many subsidies are provided by
the parent universities that are not officially recognized on the
balance sheet. Just to give one example, at Penn State Press it was
cheaper for us to have copyeditors on staff than to use free-lancers,
but only because the University covered the cost of all benefits and
did not charge this cost to the Press's operating expenses. Of
course, as mission-driven organizations, university presses do not
have to be concerned about generating profits, but that "cost" may be
the only real difference between a repository-run publishing
operation and a commercial one. When it is as high as Elsevier's is
claimed to be, that can be significant, admittedly.
Sandy Thatcher
At 4:01 PM +0000 11/12/12, Frederick Friend wrote:
I read Martin Hall's defence of the Finch Group Recommendations very
carefully, because one curious feature of this episode in the
development of open access in the UK is the way in which previously
staunch defenders of open access through repositories who were
members of the Finch Group have signed up to a Report which only
allocates roles in preservation and data storage to repositories,
removing the role of access to published research reports they
previously shared with journals. The key objection Martin Hall has
to an open access policy based around repositories is "their main
limitations are that they do not - and cannot - contain everything.
In particular, they cannot contain the 'version of record' when this
is protected by a copyright that has been ceded to a publisher, and
the publisher requires payment to view the paper, either via a
journal subscription paid by an individual or an institution, or by
means of a 'pay-to-view' charge via a commercial website." In
response it can be argued that repositories have never claimed to
contain all versions of record, but that is not to say that they
could not do so. Behind Martin Hall's statement is a view of
scholarly communication which allocates responsibility for the
"version of record" uniquely to publishers. There is nothing that a
publisher does to an author's manuscript in respect of peer-review
or copy-editing than could not be done by a repository out-sourcing
such services probably at less cost than the cost of an average
publisher's APC. (N.B. Such a solution may appear radical but it is
common in other areas.) Martin Hall's statement also indicates an
acceptance of the situation in which all rights are transferred from
an author to a publisher. Neither Martin Hall nor the Finch Group as
a whole have suggested the very feasible solution of funders
requiring authors to retain certain rights for public benefit while
still giving a publisher the right to publish. Such a recommendation
from the Finch Group would have removed the limitation for
repositories to provide text- and data-mining services which Martin
sees as a reason not to support the deposit of journal articles in
repositories.
If the argument for not supporting repository development is weak,
the argument for supporting a preference for gold open access is
even weaker. (N.B. what follows should not be read as opposing all
open access journal publication, merely the perverse policy to make
journals the primary route to open access.) The argument put forward
in the Finch Report is not only that repositories cannot provide a
high-quality sustainable service but also that even if they could, a
publisher-led approach is desirable. No evidence is put forward to
support this key point in the Finch Report. The case for a
transition to gold open access is not evidence-based but based upon
a perceived threat to the publishing industry from any policy which
gives a substantial role to repositories as an alternative source of
supply of research articles. The case for "sustainability" presented
in the Finch Report is a case for sustainability of the publishing
industry, including the use of profits from journals to sustain the
activities of academic societies. Is there any other industry able
to obtain that level of subsidised protection from a government
which - in hard economic times - is willing to pay many millions of
pounds in author publication charges to the industry receiving the
protection in order to provide that protection? The UK Government
payments will ensure open access to a proportion of UK research
outputs but will place a heavy and unnecessary burden upon the
research budget for only a partial solution to the provision of open
access. In relation to the cost of gold open access the Finch Report
rightly mentions the importance of the extent to which other
countries adopt the same policy as the UK, but the optimism on this
point in the Report is clearly misplaced and represents a huge
gamble not only with taxpayer funds but also with the UK
researchers' relationship with their peers in other countries.
There are many other points to be made as comments upon Martin
Hall's article and upon the Finch Report, including the points made
by Stevan Harnad below. As a result of reading Martin's article and
re-reading the Finch Report I am no further forward in understanding
how the open access advocates on the Finch Group could have signed
up to the Report, even though they may have been out-voted by the
publisher and society members. I was involved in much of the work
cited in the Finch Report, work which can be used as evidence of the
background to the issues, but nowhere have I been involved in or
come across independent evidence which could be used to justify the
twin key recommendations of a preference for gold open access and a
limitation upon the role of repositories in providing open access to
publicly-funded research outputs.
Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
<http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk>http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk
From: <mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com>Stevan Harnad
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2012 12:55 PM
To: <mailto:goal@eprints.org>Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Martin Hall's Defence of the UK Finch Committee
Recommendations: Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch
Martin Hall: "Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch"
<http://uksg.metapress.com/content/e062u112h295h114/fulltext.html>http://uksg.metapress.com/content/e062u112h295h114/fulltext.html
Fuller hyperlinked version of this posting:
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/956-guid.html>http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/956-guid.html
The substance of Martin Hall's defence of the Finch recommendation
that the UK should (double-)pay for Gold instead of strengthening
its mandate for Green is that (1) Gold provides the publisher's
version of record, rather than just the author's peer-reviewed final
draft, that (2) Gold provides text-mining rights and that (3) Gold
is the way to solve the journal price problem.
What Hall does not even consider is whether the publisher's version
of record and text-mining rights are worth the asking price of Gold,
compared to cost-free Green. His account (like everyone else's) is
also astonishingly vague and fuzzy about how the transition to Gold
is to take place in the UK. And Hall (like Finch) completely fails
to take the rest of the world into account. All the reckoning about
the future of publishing is based on the UK's policy for its 6%.
Hall quotes Peter Suber's objection but does not answer it. The
Swan/Houghton economic analyses, too, are cited by Hall, as if in
support, but in fact not heeded at all.
Stevan Harnad
_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
--
Sanford G. Thatcher
Director Emeritus, Penn State University Press
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX 75034-5514
e-mail: sandy.thatc...@alumni.princeton.edu
Phone: (214) 705-1939
Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sanford.thatcher
"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)
"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people
who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)
_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
