As somebody who lives and works in the global north I can’t claim to have any particular insight into this issue, but I do wonder whether the way we treat access to content and access to publishing routes as symmetrical problems is helpful.
Say I am a reader and I want to have read a paper that is in a subscription journal. If I don’t have a subscription then I do not have access and I am denied the possibility of reading that paper. There is one main, official route to the paper and without a subscription that route is blocked. (Although there may be alternative, routes - inter-library loan, contacting the author, using sites like Research Gate or Sci-Hub, or green versions in repositories.) If I am an author and I want to disseminate my work what are my options? It may be that a specific journal is closed to me through a high APC (assuming that there are no waivers or discounts), but I can still disseminate the research - possibly through non-APC gold journals, possibly through institutional repositories. This is why I wonder if the problems are symmetrical. There is one (official) route to read non-OA papers - subscriptions. But there are many routes to disseminate a paper, not just APC-gold. I realise that this is a problem if one’s funder is rewarding publication in specific high-APC charging journals, but that is a reward problem, not an open access problems (although a problem nevertheless). For those communities that have decided not to play the high-impact factor game there are great opportunities to gain the benefits of open access without the problems of APCs - SciELO being a great example. David On 25 Apr 2018, at 11:17, Chris Zielinski <ch...@chriszielinski.com<mailto:ch...@chriszielinski.com>> wrote: Richard, In this context, you may be interested in a post I recently submitted to the Healthcare Information for All (HIFA) list in the context of a HIFA discussion of this topic: ---------- Original Message ---------- To: HIFA - Healthcare Information For All <h...@dgroups.org<mailto:h...@dgroups.org>> Date: 18 April 2018 at 19:33 Subject: Re: [hifa] Open Access Author Processing Charges (3) In the bad old days before Open Access (OA), a developing country author wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal and, if the paper was good enough, the generous people at the journal organized peer review, redid/redesigned the tables and most of the graphics, and maybe even did some language editing - at no cost to the author. Then they published the journal, charging for access to the paper version and pay-walling any online version. From the author's perspective, thus, there was no barrier to publication, although there were cost barriers to reading the paper subsequently, which was particularly onerous in poorer countries. So the situation in developing countries was good for authors - who simply had to write well - and bad for librarians and readers, who had to find the money to buy the content. Now that Open Access is making serious inroads, we are finding the situation reversed - librarians and readers bask in an avalanche of cost-free online papers, while authors are scrambling to find the resources to pay for publication.From the commentary on this list it is clear that authors in developing countries are being restrained from publishing by the "Article Processing Charge" (APC). Zoe Mullan, Editor of The Lancet Global Health makes the point that "we assume that this cost will be borne by the funding body". This seems to be rather more likely in industrialized countries than in developing ones. Basic research is much more frequently carried out in industrialized countries and supported by the sort of international funding that pays for papers. But the kind of health research that is essential in developing countries - health services and health systems research - is generally undertaken by local institutions and universities. This is a reason for serious concern, as the economic model of OA appears to be blocking the most important local research. I would add that this research needs to be published internationally, not just locally, in order to attract opinions, input and (in some cases) validation and consensus from the global health community. Many OA journals have special rates, flexibilities and waivers for writers from developing countries. It is also true that about a quarter of the OA journals do not charge an APC at all - I presume they pay for their work by sales of their print editions in industrialized countries, thus enabling those in other countries free access to the online version. Incidentally, this is not just an issue for developing country writers - I am a non-institutional writer in an industrialized country, writing papers which are not based on funded research, and it is a real hardship to find APC money to pay for my papers. Best, Chris Chris Zielinski ch...@chriszielinski.com<mailto:ch...@chriszielinski.com> Blogs: http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com<http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com/> and http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com<http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com/> Research publications: http://www.researchgate.net<http://www.researchgate.net/> On 25 April 2018 at 08:47 Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@cantab.net<mailto:richard.poyn...@cantab.net>> wrote: To try and get a sense of how open access looks from different parts of the world, particularly as the strategy of engineering a global “flip” of subscription journals to a pay-to-publish gold OA model gains more traction, I am interested in talking to open access advocates in different parts of the world, ideally by means of matched interviews. Earlier this month, for instance, I published a Q&A with Jeff MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer. (https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from.html). Yesterday, I published a matched Q&A covering the same themes with Mahmoud Khalifa, a librarian at the Library of Congress Cairo Office, and DOAJ Ambassador for the Middle East and Persian Gulf. This interview can be read here: https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from_24.html I have also been asking those I interview to comment on the answers given by their matched interviewee. Mahmoud Khalifa’s response to the MacKie-Mason Q&A is incorporated in this post: https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-mahmoud.html I am open to suggestions for further matched interviews. 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