On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon < jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca> wrote:
> I will go one step further: > > I believe that all the instances noted by Peter are not simply oversights; > I believe they are part of a kind of "benign neglect" aimed at creating as > much confusion as possible. The result is that researchers do not know > which way to and, therefore, abstain. > There are many hypotheses. I am not picking one in this case. * One, which I think happened about 10 years ago was general ignorance. "We've never heard of this Open Access thing" - etc. That's no longer the case anywhere * "we simply don't care". Again I doubt that. Most publishers have heard of Open Access. Note that "benign neglect" when driving a car in UK is called "careless driving" and can land you in jail. "careless publishing" is an offence morraly and should be legally. * "our company knows how to do things". I call this institutionisation, in keeping with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism. The organization as a whole is unaware of the injustice it is causing and may even think it is doing OK. * incompetence. Could also be system failure. * deliberate muddying. I differentiate this from careless publishing. I am absolutely sure it's happening. * moving the goal posts. Similar, but different. Here the position is clearly defined but constantly changing. At least, if I were a strategist within one of these big publishers, this > is what I would strive to do: avoid direct confrontation and muddy the > waters as much as you can while optimizing the revenue stream from whatever > source. > > The fact that the *deliberate* policy on CC-BY vs CC-NC/ND is so messy is an indication that muich of this is deliberate. PLOS/BMC/eLife/PeerJ/Ubiquity... are honest brokers. Pay your APC and they provide very clear CC-BY. There was never any question. The Toll-access publishers could an should have done this. Springer and Wiley have (I think) universal CC-BY. Good for them. But many others have offered tempting CC-NC and authors have "chosen" it. The analysis is as sophisticated as going into a class of 10-year-olds and asking "do you want carrot salad or do you want burger and chips and fried mars bar? Oh and the burger is cheaper". Of course authors aren't sophisticated enough to know that the *only* beneficiaries of CC-NC are the publishers because they then have a monopoly to sell reprints (which could be tens of thousands of USD per paper). > -- > > Jean-Claude Guédon > Professeur titulaire > Littérature comparée > Université de Montréal > > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal > > -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
_______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
