[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
Hi all, Thanks for the various responses about positive things for which publishers should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized. I'm on the road for a bit (so won't be able to stay so actively involved in the discussion although I will continue to read/reflect with interest!), but thought it might be helpful to do a little round-up of some of the ideas that have surfaced. So in no particular order... Peter B - thanks for the constructive thought piece, and suggestion for an open access journal in remote sensing. I'm sure all the publishers on this list have taken note! In the interim if you would like your article to be published in one of our established journals you could make it freely available for non-commercial reuse through our sponsorship (i.e. hybrid oa) option. I note your (and David's and Jan's and Peter M-R's) preference for a CC-BY licensing option. We are currently in a test and learn phase and experimenting with a number of licensing options. Reme - you would like all publishers to allow immediate green oa posting. What do you think some of the potential concerns about this might be, and how might those concerns be alleviated? Stevan - You want the same. With our posting policy our intent is certainly not to confuse or intimidate authors, but to ensure the sustainability of the journals in which they choose to publish. Perhaps the Finch group will shed light on how to solve this challenge! Falk - you asked under what conditions Elsevier would be willing to change the business model from subscriptions to OA. I'm not quite sure about the scope of your question, so will answer at two levels of granularity. We already use both open access and subscription (and other!) business models and will continue to do so. If you are thinking of the conditions to flip the business model of an individual journal title, then we - and other publishers too, no doubt - will be very interested to participate in and learn from initiatives such as SCOAP3. Bernhard - you asked if our posting agreements involve payments to Elsevier by the funding bodies and/or authors and/or authors institutions. If an institution is willing to use an embargo period before the manuscript is made publicly available, then no payment is involved. Some funders/institutions prefer to make manuscripts available before the article's embargo period has expired, and in these cases sometimes a gold oa agreement or a blended gold/green agreement is more suitable. I'm happy to talk offline if you (or anyone else on the list) would like to explore further. Keith - one of your questions was how to get free access to researchers and the public everywhere. What are your thoughts on initiatives such as Research4Life (http://www.research4life.org/) or the APS programme to provide free access in public libraries (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=419118)? Good initiatives worth celebrating? Laurent - thank you for the suggestion that a clause allowing full data mining should be a systematic component of any subscription agreement, in particular in the case of big deals or national license programs. David - you provided helpful examples of publishers using gold oa publishing models (and this is another opportunity to draw attention to the wide array of signatories for the STM statement that publishers support sustainable open access http://www.stm-assoc.org/publishers-support-sustainable-open-access/). Also constructive are your comments that support publishers who make obvious which papers are oa, and your encouragement for publishers to invest in order to get their various back office processes in order. I also note your (and Jan's and Peter M-R's and Peter's) strong preference for CC-BY licensing. Dan - you noted schema.org and suggested that authors should not only post articles but standardized metadata for them as well. Is there a potential supportive role for librarians and/or publishers to play here? How might they be encouraged/incentivized to play it? Sally - great to see you taking active part in this discussion!! Peter M-R - You are frustrated by, and distrust, publishers. Despite this it may still be more practical to work with us to evolve the current system into one more to your liking than to create a completely new one. Either way we agree absolutely that content mining is essential to advance science, but perhaps will need to agree to disagree (at least for the time being) about the best tactics to enable this to happen more broadly. Jan - thank you for the constructive suggestion to make all the journal material available with delayed open access (CC-BY, fully re-usable and mine-able) after a reasonable embargo period. Why do you suppose it is that more publishers have not done just this, and are there any ways to offer reassurance or otherwise help to overcome any real or perceived barriers? Eric - thanks for the constructive posting just
[GOAL] Fwd: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
Here is a reply from Daniel Kulp of the American Physical Society (APS). The APS is also, like Elsevier, a publisher with a formal Green OA author rights-retention policy. If Elsevier is looking for an optimal model Green OA policy, to be encouraged, celebrated, recognized, it is that of the APS (since at least 1999!): http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0472.html But it is not even necessary for Elsevier to go as far as the APS has gone in order to earn again the right to be encouraged, celebrated, recognized for its Green OA author rights- retention policy. It is just necessary to drop from what has otherwise been Elsevier's commendable Green OA author agreement policy on author rights-retention since 2004 -- [As Elsevier author you retain] the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes... -- the clause that contains the following piece of unmitigated FUD that (if authors and institutions don't ignore it completely, as they should) contradicts everything that came before it: (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher). An author right is either retained or it is not. And if it is a right, and it is retained, then the author can exercise that right irrespective of whether the author's institution mandates that the author should exercise the right. It is as simple as that. And any attempt by Elsevier to defend retaining the clause is just more FUD: A right is a right (and a formal publisher agreement attesting that it is a right is only an agreement) only if the agreed author right can be exercised without requiring further publisher agreement. Stevan Harnad Begin forwarded message: From: LIBLICENSE liblice...@gmail.com Date: May 14, 2012 11:39:38 PM EDT To: liblicens...@listserv.crl.edu Subject: Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized Reply-To: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum liblicens...@listserv.crl.edu From: Daniel Kulp d...@aps.org Date: Mon, 14 May 2012 12:21:08 -0400 In response to Alicia and Stevan's recent exchange: The American Physical Society (APS) has had a collaborative relationship with authors and their institutions concerning green open access and derivative works for years. It has been in the interest of the Society to help support authors' efforts to disseminate their results in a way that maintains the financial stability of the journals. Within our standard Copyright Transfer Agreement we allow the following concerning the posting of the final APS version and the updated author's version on different websites and e-print servers, and rights associated with derivative works. POSTING APS VERSION: (3) The right to use all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, on the author(s)’ web home page or employer’s website and to make copies of all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, for the author(s)’ and/or the employer’s use for educational or research purposes. UPDATED VERSION ON E-PRINT SERVER: (4) The right to post and update the Article on free-access e-print servers as long as files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that purpose. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the Article for publication shall include a link to the online abstract in the APS journal or to the entry page of the journal. If the author wishes the APS-prepared version to be used for an online posting other than on the author(s)’ or employer’s website, APS permission is required; if permission is granted, APS will provide the Article as it was published in the journal, and use will be subject to APS terms and conditions. DERIVATIVE WORKS: (5) The right to make, and hold copyright in, works derived from the Article, as long as all of the following conditions are met: (a) at least one author of the derived work is an author of the Article; (b) the derived work includes at least ten (10) percent of new material not covered by APS’s copyright in the Article; and (c) the derived work includes no more than fifty (50) percent of the text (including equations) of the Article. If these conditions are met, copyright in the derived work rests with the authors of that work, and APS (and its successors and assigns) will make no claim on that copyright. If these conditions are not met, explicit APS permission must be obtained. Nothing in this Section shall prevent APS (and its successors and assigns) from exercising its rights in the Article. APS has other open access programs and initiatives that I am more than willing to talk about (feel free to
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
To answer Alicia Wise's query, 6 proposals of positive things from publishers that should be encouraged : Allow systematically and under no condition and at no cost depositing the peer-reviewed postprint – either the author's refereed, revised final draft or — even better for the Publishers publicity — the publisher's version of record in the author's institutional repository. Remove from authors' contracts the need to sign away their rights and transform it into a non exclusive license of their rights. Agree that by default, part of the rights on an article belong to the author's Institution if public and/or to the Funding organization, if public. Reduce significantly (or at least freeze for 5 years) the purchasing cost of periodicals, then increase at the real inflation rate, officially measured in Western countries (1-3 % per year). Reduce significantly the number of periodical titles published, aiming for excellence and getting rid of the mediocre title which are bundled in Elsevier's Big Deals and similar deals by other publishers. This would reduce their monopolistic position. Reward Institutions for the work provided by reviewers, editors and… authors, either directly or indirectly through lower subscription costs. Bernard Rentier___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
** Cross-Posted ** On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) a.w...@elsevier.com wrote: ...you would like all publishers to allow immediate green oa posting. What do you think some of the potential concerns about this might be, and how might those concerns be alleviated? ...With our posting policy our intent is certainly not to confuse or intimidate authors, but to ensure the sustainability of the journals in which they choose to publish. Perhaps the Finch group will shed light on how to solve this challenge! The concern is not about Elsevier's business goals but about the *meaning* of a self-contradictory publisher agreement (sic) on the rights (sic) retained (sic) by Elsevier authors that states: [As Elsevier author you retain] the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes and then follow it by a clause that contains the following piece of unmitigated FUD that (if authors and institutions don't ignore it completely, as they should) contradicts everything that came before it: (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher). An author right is either retained or it is not. And if it is a right, and it is retained, and a publisher agreement formally states that it is retained, then the author can exercise that retained right irrespective of whether the author's institution mandates that the author should exercise that retained right. It is as simple as that. And any attempt by Elsevier to defend retaining the clause is just more FUD: A right is a right (and a formal publisher agreement attesting that it is a right is only an agreement) only if the agreed author right can be exercised without requiring further publisher agreement. Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
On 15 May 2012 00:59, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) a.w...@elsevier.com wrote: Dan – you noted schema.org and suggested that authors should not only post articles but standardized metadata for them as well. Is there a potential supportive role for librarians and/or publishers to play here? How might they be encouraged/incentivized to play it? The single biggest supportive role publishers could play right now, is to unambiguously clarify that institutional mandates don't affect author's rights to post to websites and repositories. How might publishers be persuaded to do this? Why guess, when we can ask them directly - what would it take to see the following change?: He is correct that all our authors can post voluntarily to their websites and institutional repositories. Posting is also fine where there is a requirement/mandate AND we have an agreement in place. Just replace AND with , regardless of whether and we're good to go. Without that, no end of confusion. On the metadata front, publishers will likely want to make sure there are useful entry points into their various Web sites (by topic, author etc.) that HTML-oriented per-article metadata can usefully include. Assuming they have some use for greater incoming Web traffic... cheers, Dan ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
With due respect to Eric, I will disagree with at least the devolution of the first two tasks 1. The selection of editors should come from scientific communities themselves, not from commercial publishers. This is a good instance where commercial concerns (maximizing profits, etc.) can pollute research concerns. There is also something weird in having commercial publishers holding the key to what may amount to the ultimate academic promotion: being part of an editorial board means power over colleagues; being editor-in-chief even more so. At least, when journals were in the hands of scientific associations, the editorial choice remained inside the community of researchers. What criteria, beyond scientific competence and prestige, may enter into the calculations of a commercial publisher while choosing an editor-in-chief, God knows... 2. Effective peer review should be organized by peers themselves, by scholars and scientists, not by publishers. Tools to organize this process should ideally be based on free software and available to all in a way that allows disciplinary or speciality tweaking. The Open Journal System, for example, is a good, free, tool to organize peer review and manuscript handling in the editorial phase. Such a tool should be favoured over proprietary tools offered to editors as a way to convince them to join a particular journal stable, and as a way to make them dependent on that tool - yet another way to ensure growing stables of journals. Professional looks can indeed be given away to commercial publishers. Layout, spelling, perhaps some syntaxic and stylistic help would be nice. But I would stop there. As for the archivable historic record, I would have to see more details to give my personal blessing to this. Remember how Elsevier pitted Yale against the Royal Dutch Library when the issue of digital preservation began to emerge a dozen or so years ago. I am not sure about the distinction between archived and archivable. For searchability, remember what Clifford Lynch declared years ago in the OA book edited by Neil Jacobs: no real open access without open computation. Elsevier and other publishers do code their articles in XML, but provide only impoverished, eye-ball limited, pdf or html files. When one uses Science Direct, all kinds of links pop up to guide us toward other articles, presumably from Elsevier journals. This is part of driving a competition based on impact factors. That is not the kind of searchability we want, even though it is of some value. The quest for alternative comprehensive systems is exactly what Elsevier attempts to build with Scopus. In so doing, Elsevier picks up on the vision of Robert Maxwell when the latter did everything he could, from cajoling to suing, to get the Science Citation Index away from Garfield's hands. Is this really what we want? If it were open, and open access, Eric's idea would make sense; otherwise, it becomes a formidable source of economic power that will do much harm to scientific communication. In effect, with a universal indexing index and more than 2,000 titles in its stable, Elsevier could become judge and party of scientific value. Finally, I am not blaming companies for trying to make money, except when they pollute their environment. Most do so in the physical environment, and they are regulated, or should be. The commercial publishers do it in their virtual environment by driving research competition through tools that also favour their commercial goals. The intense competition around publishing in prestigious journals - prestige being defined here as impact factors, although impact factors are a crazy way to measure or compare almost anything - leads to all kinds of practices that go against the grain of scientific research. The rise in retracted papers in the most prestigious journals - prestige being again measured here by IF - is a symptom of this pollution. The rise in journal prices was tentatively explained in my old article, In Oldenburg's Long Shadow that came out eleven years ago. It tries at least to account for the artificial creation of an inelastic market around core journals, the latter being the consequence of the methods used to design the Science Citation Index. Incidentally, the invention of the core journal myth - myth because it arbitrarily transforms an operational truncation needed for the practical handling of large numbers of citations into an elite-building club of journals - has been one of the most grievous obstacle to the healthy globalization of science publishing in the whole world. Speak to Brazilians like Abel Packer about this, and he will tell you tons of stories related to this situation. Scientific quality grows along a continuous gradient, not according to a two-tier division between core science, so-called, and the rest. Jean-Claude Guédon -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le lundi 14 mai 2012 à 11:38 -0700, Eric F.
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Excellent points - and I will simply amplify some. ** With due respect to Eric, I will disagree with at least the devolution of the first two tasks This is critical. If 100% of the scholarly record were archived in 1500 Inst. Repos it would be largely undiscoverable and of relatively small value. I know others disagree with me on this, but I cite the example of chemistry theses in the UK. It is impossible to find them systematically. Yes if I know that X has written a thesis and what university they were at I have a chance. But there are 100,000 theses a year (I have no idea of the real figure and I doubt anyone has). The same is true of self-archived material - without a search engine it's undisoverable in bulk - and bulk is essential to many of us, if only to filter it for others. The quest for alternative comprehensive systems is exactly what Elsevier attempts to build with Scopus. In so doing, Elsevier picks up on the vision of Robert Maxwell when the latter did everything he could, from cajoling to suing, to get the Science Citation Index away from Garfield's hands. Is this really what we want? If it were open, and open access, Eric's idea would make sense; otherwise, it becomes a formidable source of economic power that will do much harm to scientific communication. In effect, with a universal indexing index and more than 2,000 titles in its stable, Elsevier could become judge and party of scientific value. It is almost trivial to build an Open index of the current electronic scholarly literature. We have developed a tool - PubCrawler - which has crawled the web for crystallography. It scales to any article in any journal of any known publisher. The ONLY barrier are publishers who might report that publishing it violated the sui generis database. Is #scholpub the only thing on the web we are not allowed to index? P. -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le lundi 14 mai 2012 à 11:38 -0700, Eric F. Van de Velde a écrit : To Alicia: Here are what I consider the positive contributions by commercial publishers. For any of the positive qualities I mention, it is easy find counterexamples. What matters is that, on the average, the major publishers have done a good job on the following: - Select good editorial boards of leading scholars. - Develop effective systems for organizing peer review. - Produce articles/journals that look professional commensurate with the importance of the scholarship. - Produce an archivable historical record of scholarship. Publishers only receive a marginally passing grade for producing searchable databases of the scholarly record and journals. In the age of iTunes, Netflix, etc., it is inexcusable that to search through scholarship one must buy separate products like the Web of Knowledge in addition to the journal subscriptions. Publishers need to work together to produce alternative comprehensive systems. Most commercial publishers and some society publishers (like ACS) receive failing grades on cost containment. Because of their importance to academia, scholarly publishers have been blessed with the opportunity to reinvent themselves for the future without the devastating disruption other kinds of publishers faced (newspapers, magazines, etc.). However, instead of taking advantage of this opportunity, scholarly publishers are squandering it for temporary financial gain. Every price increase brings severe disruption closer. On the current path, your CEOs are betting the existence of the company every year. About the only company who understands the current information market is Amazon, and everything they do is geared towards driving down costs of the infrastructure. Your competition will not come from Amazon directly, but from every single academic who will be able to produce a high-quality electronic journal from his/her office. There may be only one success for every hundred failed journals in this system, but suppose it is so easy 100,000 try... Your brand/prestige/etc. will carry you only so far. (Amazon is focusing on e-books production now, but it is only a matter of time when they come out with a journal system.) To Jean-Claude: Blaming commercial enterprises for making too much money is like blaming scholars for having too many good ideas. Making money is their purpose. They will stop raising prices if doing so is in their self-interest. The real question is why the scholarly information market is so screwed up that publishers are in a position to keep raising prices. I am blaming site licenses ( http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-problem.htmland http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html), but I am open to alternative explanations. --Eric.
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
To answer Alicia Wise's query, 6 proposals of positive things from publishers that should be encouraged : 1. Allow systematically and under no condition and at no cost depositing the peer-reviewed postprint â either the author's refereed, revised final draft or â even better for the Publishers publicity â the publisher's version of record in the author's institutional repository. 2. Remove from authors' contracts the need to sign away their rights and transform it into a non exclusive license of their rights. 3. Agree that by default, part of the rights on an article belong to the author's Institution if public and/or to the Funding organization, if public. 4. Reduce significantly (or at least freeze for 5 years) the purchasing cost of periodicals, then increase at the real inflation rate, officially measured in Western countries (1-3 % per year). 5. Reduce significantly the number of periodical titles published, aiming for excellence and getting rid of the mediocre title which are bundled in Elsevier's Big Deals and similar deals by other publishers. This would reduce their monopolistic position. 6. Reward Institutions for the work provided by reviewers, editors and⦠authors, either directly or indirectly through lower subscription costs. Bernard Rentier [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
On 15 May 2012, at 19:57, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: Universities will never collaborate (third law) So there you have it, the Third Law of Acadynamics. Anybody surprised that private enterprise has stepped into the breach? Another reason why I think that gold CC-BY will win out. PLoS-like, eLife-like, BMC-like, PeerJ-like outfits will prevail, and deliver, with the help of funding bodies, what the scientific community needs. A bit of historical information: the BigDeal, as started in the UK, was originally conceived as a nation-wide deal, top-sliced, with every university and every institution having access to everything that was published. It worked like that for 4 years in the UK, in partnership with HEFCE and covering the material that Academic Press published, and then it fell apart, because universities didn't like the top-slicing, in spite of the fact that a national deal came out cheaper in the aggregate, was easier to contain in terms of price increases (negotiating clout), gave access to every scholar and student, could easily evolve into nation-wide access for which no institutional affiliation was needed at all, and could be rolled out to encompass the material of other publishers.  However, it was thwarted by the Third Law of Acadynamics. With all the consequences we have to live with now. The fight for OA is not really one against publishers at all; it is chiefly one against academic inertia. Open access will write libraries out of the equation (what's the point of 'library collections' in an OA web world?), and also institutions. It will be funders who will make OA reality. Funders private and public, who finance the whole scientific enterprise and who realise that OA publishing is part and parcel of doing science itself and therefore of the cost of science. At that point universities don't need to collaborate any longer, and the Third Law of Acadynamics will have lost validity in matters relating to scientific literature. Jan [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Eric F. Van de Velde eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com wrote: If Open Access is the only goal then all we need to do is follow Stevan's advice. However, the goal of Open Access itself is to change the scholarly information system into a system suitable for the 21st century. In this sense, Green Open Access is an incremental change, which is expected to lead to more fundamental changes over time. It is disheartening to witness how hard it is to implement this incremental change. It is also clear that Green OA fixes our view of publishing in the last century. It does not encourage change. It holds the paper (sic) as the element of value and the publisher as an essential component and legislates for the continuance of both. It also builds in inefficiency into the system. However, it does not matter. Major disruption will come. When it comes, it will be sudden and chaotic. We have witnessed it before. It has been documented extensively. Most people in technology have read Clayton Christensen's seminal work The Innovator's Dilemma, and whoever has not should do as soon as possible. We are right in the run-up to a classical disruption where a low-margin/low-overhead business replaces a high-margin/high-overhead business. Initially, the low-margin business is sneered at because it offers low quality. By the time the high-margin business realizes it is in trouble it is too late. I completely agree. The tensions in the earthquake zone are palpable. Among the most obvious ones are: * the increasing failure of the academic-publisher system to follow the rapid development of technology. Sending manuscripts off to be retyped must be one of the most inefficient activities on the planet. * no evidence of the social web revolution * the impatience of the younger generation with the closed minds of the present. These are additional to the other tensions of: * financial strain in the system * the mismatch between traditional citation analysis and more modern forms of assessment * the voice of the scholarly poor There are more, but that's enough. This disruption (or one similar to it) is inevitable. The only question is when it will happen, and the precise path it will take. Yes - anyone getting it right and backing it stands to become rich and famous. There is a huge opportunity for well-directed investment. P. -- 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 ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
