Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] OA Overview January 2017

[Sandy Thatcher]

Great to have this good summary of your overall 
argument about OA. I'm copying it into a Word 
file and keeping it in my database of valuable 
resources! :)


Happy New Year!




At 7:13 AM -0500 1/9/17, Stevan Harnad wrote:
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 5:30 AM, David Prosser 
<david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk> 
wrote:


SH: (2) No, the institution that pays for the 
research output is not paying a second time to 
buy it back. Institutional journal subscriptions 
are not for buying back their own research 
output. They already have their own research 
output. They are buying in the research output 
of other institutions, and of other countries, 
with their journal subscriptions. So no 
double-payment there, even if you reckon it at 
the funder- or the tax-payer-level instead of 
the level of the institution that pays for the 
subscription.



DP: So, when UCL (say) purchases access to 
Elsevier articles through ScienceDIrect (say) 
Elsevier removes all of the UCL articles from 
the bundle and prices accordingly?  Of course 
not.  The institution is purchasing articles by 
researchers across the world's, including its 
own.



To repeat: UCL (and everyone) has their own 
article output. Getting access to their own 
article output is not why researchers publish, 
nor why institutions subscribe to journals. It 
is to get access to the articles of others.


So that version of the simplistic double-payment 
plaint is, and remains, invalid. (And it, and 
its (il)logic predates OA by at least a decade.



DP: SBut I agree with (12)


But (12) is about OA, not the old double-payment 
argument against subscriptions (which, by the 
way, if it had been valid would also have 
applied to royalty-based output, including the 
institutional purchase of books by its own 
authors!). The essence of the case for OA is and 
has always been that (refereed) research is an 
author giveaway, written only for researcher 
uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty 
revenue. We keep forgetting this, with this 
misleading notion of "double-payment" (for 
subscription access).


There is certainly double-payment in the case of 
OA (subscription plus Fool's Gold publication 
fees) as well as double-dipping (in the case of 
hybrid Fool's Gold). But that is not at all the 
kind of double-payment that the old argument 
against subscriptions was (and is) about.


Stevan Harnad (tilling other fields, but not asleep)

 On 6 Jan 2017, at 13:22, Stevan Harnad 
<amscifo...@gmail.com> 
wrote:


(1) The old librarians' "double-payment" 
argument against subscription publishing (the 
institution pays once to fund the research, 
then a second time to "buy back" the 
publication) is false (and silly, actually) in 
the letter (though on the right track in 
spirit).


(2) No, the institution that pays for the 
research output is not paying a second time to 
buy it back. Institutional journal 
subscriptions are not for buying back their own 
research output. They already have their own 
research output. They are buying in the 
research output of other institutions, and of 
other countries, with their journal 
subscriptions. So no double-payment there, even 
if you reckon it at the funder- or the 
tax-payer-level instead of the level of the 
institution that pays for the subscription.


(3) The problem was never double-payment (for 
subscriptions): It was (a) (huge) overpayment 
for institutional access and (b) completely 
intolerable and counterproductive access-denial 
for researchers at institutions that couldn't 
or wouldn't pay for subscriptions to any given 
journal (and there are tens of thousands of 
research journals): The users that are the 
double losers there are (i) all researchers 
at all the institutions that 
produce all research output (who lose all those 
of their would-be users who are at 
non-subscribing institutions for any given 
journal) and (ii) all researchers at all the 
non-subscribing institutions for any given 
journal, who lose access to all non-subscribed 
research.


Now take a few minutes to think through the 
somewhat more complicated but much more 
accurate and informative version (3) of the 
double-payment fallacy in (1).


The solution is very clear, and has been clear 
for close to 30 years now (but not reached - 
nor even grasped by most):


(4) Peer-reviewed research should be freely 
accessible to all its users. It is give-away 
research. The authors gets no money for it: 
they (and their institutions and funder and 
tax-payer) only seek readers, users and impact.


(5) The only non-obsolete service that 
peer-reviewed journals still perform in the 
online era is peer review itself (and they 
don't even do most of that: researchers do all 
the refereeing for free, but a competent editor 
has to understand the submissions, pick the 
right referees, umpire their reports, and make 
sure that the necessary revisions are done by 
the autho). Journals today earn from $1500

Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] Question about changing 'esteem' value of journals

[Sandy Thatcher]

A similar phenomenon could occur with books if a publisher's 
reputation plummets, or a publisher once well known for its list in a 
certain field abandons that concentration. I think the latter 
probably occurs more frequently than the firmer. I know of no studies 
of this phenomenon either, however.


Sandy Thatcher


At 8:32 AM +0100 10/9/16, Danny Kingsley wrote:

Hi all,

This is a question that comes up every now and then with researchers.

You spend all your career publishing in the 'Journal of X' because 
it is the fancy-pants journal of your discipline. The citations to 
your work in Journal of X are also part of your reputation. Then 
something happens - the journal loses reputation, or is closed down, 
or another journal becomes more influential (the Glossa example 
comes to mind) and suddenly the 'Journal of X' is not considered the 
top journal any more because 'Journal of Y' is. What happens to your 
reputation?


I get the argument that 'it shouldn't matter because the emphasis 
should be on the quality of the paper' - but many (many, many) 
researchers have impact factor deeply embedded in their psyche.


I don't know if there are any case studies or writings on this issue 
that anyone can point me to?


Thanks in advance for help.

Danny

Dr Danny Kingsley
Head, Office of Scholarly Communication
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB39DR
P: +44 (0) 1223 747 437
M: +44 (0) 7711 500 564
E: da...@cam.ac.uk <mailto:da...@cam.ac.uk>
T: @dannykay68
B: https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/ 
<https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/>
S: http://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley 
<http://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley>

ORCID iD: -0002-3636-5939





Hi all,

This is a question that comes up every now and then with researchers.

You spend all your career publishing in the 'Journal of X' because 
it is the fancy-pants journal of your discipline. The citations to 
your work in Journal of X are also part of your reputation. Then 
something happens - the journal loses reputation, or is closed down, 
or another journal becomes more influential (the Glossa example 
comes to mind) and suddenly the 'Journal of X' is not considered the 
top journal any more because 'Journal of Y' is. What happens to your 
reputation?


I get the argument that 'it shouldn't matter because the emphasis 
should be on the quality of the paper' - but many (many, many) 
researchers have impact factor deeply embedded in their psyche.


I don't know if there are any case studies or writings on this issue 
that anyone can point me to?


Thanks in advance for help.

Danny


Dr Danny Kingsley
Head, Office of Scholarly Communication
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB39DR
P: +44 (0) 1223 747 437
M: +44 (0) 7711 500 564
E: <mailto:da...@cam.ac.uk>da...@cam.ac.uk
T: @dannykay68
B: 
<https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/>https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/
S: 
<http://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley>http://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley
ORCID iD: -0002-3636-5939






--
Sanford G. Thatcher
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu


"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)


"Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance 
with the limitations and incapacities of the human 
misunderstanding."-Ambrose Bierce (1906)
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Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] BLOG: The case for Open Research: the mismeasurement problem

[Sandy Thatcher]

One partial solution, pioneered many years ago by a few places like 
Harvard Medical School, is to impose a strict limit on the number of 
articles that can be submitted by a faculty member seeking tenure or 
promotion.  If only six can be submitted, then there is no value in 
writing fifty. Does anyone know  how widely adopted this practice has 
become?


Sandy Thatcher



At 3:25 PM +0100 7/11/16, Danny Kingsley wrote:

Hello all,

The first in a series of blogs about 'The case for Open Research' 
went live today.


The case for Open Research: the mismeasurement problem - 
<https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=713>https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=713


A taster:
*

Let's face it. The biggest blockage we have to widespread Open 
Access is not researcher apathy, a lack of interoperable systems, or 
an unwillingness of publishers to engage (although these do each 
play some part) - it is the problem that the only thing that counts 
in academia is publication in a high impact journal.


This situation is causing multiple problems, from huge numbers of 
authors on papers, researchers cherry picking results and 
retrospectively applying hypotheses, to the reproducibility crisis 
and a surge in retractions.


This blog was intended to be an exploration of some solutions 
prefaced by a short overview of the issues. Rather depressingly, 
there was so much material the blog has had to be split up, with 
several parts describing the problem(s) before getting to the 
solutions.


Prepare yourself, this will be a bumpy ride. <...snip...>
***

I'm not sure that 'enjoy' is the right sign off.

Danny
--
Dr Danny Kingsley
Head, Office of Scholarly Communication
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB39DR
P: +44 (0) 1223 747 437
M: +44 (0) 7711 500 564
E: <mailto:da...@cam.ac.uk>da...@cam.ac.uk
T: @dannykay68
B: 
<https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/>https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/
S: 
<http://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley>http://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley

ORCID iD: -0002-3636-5939



--
Sanford G. Thatcher
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu


"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)


"Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance 
with the limitations and incapacities of the human 
misunderstanding."-Ambrose Bierce (1906)
___
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Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] BLOG: Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?

[Sandy Thatcher]

Klaus Graf and I debated this question in an article in the first 
issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 
back in 2012: 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254667054_Point_Counterpoint_Is_CC_BY_the_Best_Open_Access_License


I was particularly concerned about translations.  It should be noted, 
by the way, that the CC BY license in existence at the time we wrote 
this article contained a reference to distortion, mutilation, etc., 
as part of the license terms. That part was dropped in later 
iterations, and the only reference now is this: "Moral rights, such 
as the right of integrity, are not licensed under this Public 
License, nor are publicity, privacy, and/or other similar personality 
rights; however, to the extent possible, the Licensor waives and/or 
agrees not to assert any such rights held by the Licensor to the 
limited extent necessary to allow You to exercise the Licensed 
Rights, but not otherwise." In other words, licensors do not give up 
their moral rights by offering this license to users, but since moral 
rights are not recognized under British or US law (with a very 
limited exception under US law to works of fine art), that clause is 
of little comfort or utility for Anglo-American authors.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

I am glad to see that the Cambridge discussion continues to recognize 
that translations may be a problem for HSS authors.


There is one non sequitur in the Cambridge summary that needs to be 
addressed: "Academics do not publish in journals for money, so the 
originator of a work that is subsequently sold on is not personally 
losing a revenue stream." Just because an academic author may not be 
motivated by personal monetary gain does not mean that a personal 
revenue stream is not, in fact, lost in some circumstances. As former 
director of Penn State University Press, I can cite examples of 
authors who benefited to the tune of thousands of dollars from the 
reprinting of their articles from some of the journals we published.


There is a general problem also with the definition of what is 
"commercial." When Creative Commons itself conducted a survey several 
years ago as to what people understand to be the meaning of this word 
in the context of publishing, there was little consensus beyond a 
very small core of shared understanding of what the term means.


Sandy Thatcher




At 12:11 PM + 3/3/16, Danny Kingsley wrote:



Dear all,

You might be interested in the outcomes of a roundtable discussion 
held at Cambridge University earlier this week on the topic of 
Creative Commons Attribution licences.


Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows? 
<https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=555>https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=555


A taster:
***

Comments from researchers and colleagues have indicated some 
disquiet about the Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence in some areas of 
the academic community. However, in conversation with some legal 
people and contemporaries at other institutions one of the 
observations was that generally academics are not necessarily 
cognizant with what the licences offer and indeed what protections 
are available under regular copyright.


To try and determine whether this was an education and advocacy 
problem or if there are real issues we had a roundtable discussion 
on 29 February at Cambridge University attended by about 35 people 
who were a mixture of academics, administrators, publishers and 
legal practitioners.


In summary, the discussion indicated that CC-BY licences do 
not encourage plagiarism, or issues with commercialism within 
academia (although there is a broader ethical issue). However in 
some cases CC-BY licences could pose problems for the moral 
integrity of the work and cause issues with translations. CC-BY 
licenses do create challenges for works containing sensitive 
information and for works containing third party copyright.


**
Please feel free to comment on the list. Due to a serious spam 
problem with the blog, comments sent to the blog are being buried 
(we are working on this).


Thanks

Danny
--
Dr Danny Kingsley
Head of Scholarly Communications
Cambridge University Library
West Road, Cambridge CB39DR
P: +44 (0) 1223 747 437
M: +44 (0) 7711 500 564
E: <mailto:da...@cam.ac.uk>da...@cam.ac.uk
T: @dannykay68
ORCID iD: -0002-3636-5939



--
Sanford G. Thatcher
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu


"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)


"Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance 
with the limitations and incapacities of the human 
misunderstanding."-Ambrose Bierce (1906)
__

[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Is this the real future of scholarly communication?

[Sandy Thatcher]

No real surprise here. Senior economists long ago stopped publishing 
in the major journals because of the time lag and just posted their 
papers on their own websites or collectives like SSRN.


And this phenomenon is hardly limited to economics. Blogs by top law 
professors are now widely acknowledged to be the place to look for 
cutting-edge work, not the law journals, which in thids field were 
never peer-reviewed anyway.


Sandy Thatcher


At 5:22 PM -0800 12/17/13, Eric F. Van de Velde wrote:
Check Paul Krugman's recent blog post on scholarly communication in 
economics...

<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/the-facebooking-of-economics/?_r=0>http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/the-facebooking-of-economics/?_r=0

--Eric.

<http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com>http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com

Twitter: @evdvelde
E-mail: <mailto:eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com>eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com



--
Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: s...@psu.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)
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[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Big Deals, Big Macs and Consortial Licensing

[Sandy Thatcher]

Stevan continues to be hung up on the idea that 
some academic authors still have visions of fame 
and fortune they'd like to achieve through 
publishing books in the traditional manner, so he 
believes that the time for OA in book publishing 
has not yet arrived. But perhaps a simple 
terminological distinction may suffice to place 
this problem in proper perspective.  Academic 
books may be divided into two types: monographs 
and trade books. Monographs, by definition, are 
works of scholarship written primarily to address 
other scholars and are therefore unlikely to 
attract many, if any, readers beyond the walls of 
academe. Trade books encompass a large category 
that includes, as one subset, nonfiction works 
written by scholars but addressed not only to 
fellow scholars but also to members of the 
general public.


There is an easy practical way to distinguish the 
two: commercial trade publishers (as distinct 
from commercial scholarly publishers that do not 
aim at a trade market) have certain requirements 
for potential sales that guarantee that 
monographs will never be accepted for 
publication.  It is true that the authors of 
monographs, published by university presses and 
commercial scholarly publishers, are sometimes 
paid royalties. But these amounts seldom 
accumulate to large sums (unless the monographs 
happen to become widely adopted in classrooms as 
course assignments--a phenomenon that happens 
less these days when coursepacks and e-reserves 
permit use of excerpts for classroom 
assignments).  Thus not much is sacrificed, 
financially speaking, by publishing these books 
OA. And, indeed, a scholar may have more to gain, 
in terms of increased reputation from wider 
circulation that may translate into tenure and 
promotion, which are vastly more financially 
rewarding over the long term than royalties are 
ever likely to be from monograph sales.


Also, of course, financial opportunities do not 
need to be sacrificed completely by OA if the 
CC-BY-NC-ND license is used for monographs, 
preserving some money-generating rights to 
authors even under OA.


It also needs to be said that even trade authors 
can benefit from OA, as the successes of such 
authors as Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Jonathan 
Zittrain, and others have demonstrated, with the 
free online versions of their books serving to 
stimulate print sales.


Thus I believe Stevan is not being quite 
pragmatic enough in recognizing that the time has 
arrived for OA monograph publishing also, not 
just OA article publishing.


Sandy Thatcher



At 12:44 PM -0500 11/19/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Ann Okerson (as 
<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html>interviewed 
by Richard Poynder) is committed to licensing. I 
am not sure whether the commitment is 
ideological or pragmatic, but it's clearly a 
lifelong ("asymptotic") commitment by now.


I was surprised to see the direction Ann 
ultimately took because -- as I have admitted 
many times -- it was Ann who first opened my 
eyes to (what eventually came to be called) 
"Open Access."


In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the 
thrall of the scholarly and scientific potential 
of the revolutionarily new online medium itself 
(<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/>"Scholarly 
Skywriting"), eager to get everything to be put 
online. It was Ann's work on the serials crisis 
that made me realize that it was not enough just 
to get it all online: it also had to be made 
accessible (online) to all of its potential 
users, toll-free -- not just to those whose 
institutions could afford the access-tolls 
(licenses).


And even that much I came to understand, 
sluggishly, only after I had first realized that 
what set apart the writings in question was not 
that they were (as I had first naively dubbed 
them) 
"<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal>esoteric" 
(i.e., they had few users) but that they were 
peer-reviewed research journal articles, written 
by researchers solely 
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1>for 
impact, not for income.


But I don't think the differences between Ann 
and me can be set down to ideology vs. 
pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying 
to free the growth of open access from the 
ideologues (publishing reformers, rights 
reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer 
review reformers, freedom of information 
reformers) who are slowing the progress of 
access to peer-reviewed journal articles (from 
"now" to "better") by insisting only and 
immediately on what they believe is the "best." 
Like Ann, I, too, am all pragmatics (repository 
software, analyses of the OA impact advantage, 
mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).


So Ann just seems to have a different 

[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Fool's Gold: Publisher Ransom for Freedom from Publisher Embargo?

[Sandy Thatcher]

Stevan is absolutely right on this point, and it 
behooves publishers who operate hybrid journals 
to make their finances transparent. Otherwise, 
there will always remain the suspicion that the 
publishers are double-dipping.


Sandy Thatcher


At 7:40 AM -0400 10/25/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:
<http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2013/10/07/open-access-in-the-uk-will-gold-or-green-prevail/#comment-1094488522>Bob 
Campbell wrote on the Wiley blog:


"<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1061-.html>Stevan 
accuses me of much conflation yet he himself 
conflates APCs and subscriptions when commenting 
on double-dipping. APCs are not paying for the 
'same articles' paid for by subscriptions. 
Publishers have always charged separately for 
different services/products. For example, a 
medical journal may charge a pharmaceutical 
company for reprints, advertising space and 
subscriptions. These are priced separately and 
charged separately, and accounted for separately 
in the publisher's financial management of the 
title. The pharmaceutical company does not 
demand that the cost of buying advertising space 
is offset against any library subscriptions."


Bob Campbell defends double-dipping by citing 
journal charges for the purchase of reprints, 
advertising and subscriptions. That's all fine.


But what we are discussing here is the cost of 
publication, not of extra products or services.


Worldwide institutional subscriptions pay the 
cost of publication (in full, and fulsomely). It 
is not at all clear what extra product or 
service is being paid for when an author pays 
for hybrid Gold OA (for the paper he has given 
the publisher, for free, to sell).


Of course it's an extra source of revenue to the 
hybrid Gold publisher to force the author to pay 
that extra money (for whatever it is that they 
are paying for). And let there be no doubt that 
the payment is indeed forced (if the hybrid Gold 
publisher embargoes Green). Is the extra 
"service," then, exemption from the 
publisher-imposed Green OA embargo?


(Note: If the publisher is among the 
<http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php>60% 
who endorse immediate Green OA, then none of my 
objections matter in the least, and I couldn't 
care less if the publisher earns some extra 
revenue from those authors who are silly enough 
to pay for hybrid Gold OA when they could have 
had the same, cost-free, by just providing Green 
OA.)


For the publisher who embargoes Green and then 
pockets the extra revenue derived from hybrid 
Gold, over and above subscriptions, without even 
reducing subscription charges proportionately, 
is indeed charging twice for publication, i.e., 
double-dipping (and offering absolutely nothing 
in return except freedom from the publisher's 
own Green OA embargo).


Subscriptions pay the cost of publication. Print 
reprints are an extra product. And adverts are 
an extra service. But hybrid Gold OA is merely 
fool's gold, if paid unforced. -- And if forced 
by a publish embargo, there is a word to 
describe the practice, but I will not use it, as 
a publisher has already once threatened to sue 
me for libel if I doŠ So let's just call it 
double-dipping, with no extra product or 
service...



Stevan Harnad



--
Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: s...@psu.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)
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[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] 1st-Party Give-Aways vs. 3rd-Party Rip-Offs

[Sandy Thatcher]

Technically, it probably is better to regard the eprint request 
Button as a function facilitating personal use rather than fair use. 
(Stevan once used to call this the "fair use button.")  The Copyright 
Act of 1976 does not directly address personal use, as it does fair 
use in Sec. 107, except in an addition that was later made to deal 
with home audiotaping.  The concept has arisen in some court cases, 
most notably the Sony case involving "time-shifting" of videotaping 
of TV shows for later viewing. But there remains a lot of debate 
about what personal use covers. It will likely be a subject of much 
discussion in the forthcoming hearings in Congress over comprehensive 
reform of copyright law.


Sandy Thatcher


At 10:37 AM -0400 8/7/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:
If supplying eprints to requesters could 
be <https://theconversation.com/neuroscientists-need-to-embrace-open-access-publishing-too-16736#comment_198916>delegated 
to 3rd parties like Repository Managers to perform automatically, 
then they would become violations of copyright contracts. 

What makes 
the <https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>eprint-request 
Button legal is the fact that it is the author who decides, in each 
individual instance, whether or not to comply with an individual 
eprint request for his own work; it does not happen automatically. 

Think about it: If it were just the fact of requesters having to do 
two keystrokes for access instead of just one (OA), then the 
compliance keystroke might as well have been done by software rather 
than the Repository Manager! And that would certainly not be 
compliance with a publisher OA embargo. "Almost OA" would just 
become 2-stroke OA.


No. What makes 
the <https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>eprint-request 
Button both legal and subversive is 
that <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0671.html>it 
is not 3rd-party piracy (by either a Repository Manager or an 
automatic computer programme) 
but <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/262893/1/resolution.html#9.1>1st-party 
provision of individual copies, to individual requesters, for 
research purposes, by the author, in each individual instance: the 
latter alone continues the long accepted tradition of 
reprint-provision by scholars and scientists to their own work. 

If reprint-request cards had been mailed instead to 3rd-parties who 
simply photocopied anyone's articles and mailed them to requesters 
(with or without a fee) the practice would have been attacked in the 
courts by publishers as piracy long ago.


The best way to undermine the Button as a remedy against publisher 
OA mandates, and to empower the publishing lobby to block it, would 
be to conflate it with 2-stroke 3rd-party OA!


That practice should never be recommended.

Rather, make crystal clear the fundamental difference between 
1st-party give-away and 3rd-party rip-off.



[Parenthetically: Of course it is true that all these legal and 
technical distinctions are trivial nonsense! It is an ineluctable 
fact that the online PostGutenberg medium has made technically and 
economically possible and easily feasible what was technically and 
economically impossible in the Gutenberg medium: to make all 
refereed research articles -- each, without exception, an author 
give-away, written purely for research impact rather than royalty 
income -- immediately accessible to all would-be users, not just to 
subscribers: OA. That outcome is both optimal and inevitable for 
research; researchers; their institutions; their funders; the R&D 
industry; students; teachers; journalists; the developing world; 
access-denied scholars and scientists; the general public; research 
uptake, productivity, impact and progress; and the tax-payers who 
fund the research. The only parties with whose interests that 
optimal outcome is in conflict are the refereed-research 
publishers who had been providing an essential service to research 
in the Gutenberg era. It is that publishing "tail" that is now 
trying to wag the research "dog," to deter and delay what is optimal 
and inevitable for research for as long as possible, by invoking 
Gutenberg-era pseudo-legal pseudo-technicalities to try to embargo 
OA, by holding it hostage to their accustomed revenue streams 
and modus operandi. OA mandates, the immediate-deposit clause, and 
the eprint-request Button are the research community's means of 
mooting these delay tactics and hastening the natural evolution to 
the optimal and inevitable outcome in the PostGutenberg era.]


Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. 
(2012) <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>Open Access Mandates 
and the "Fair Dealing" Button. 
In: <http://www.utppublishing.com/Dynamic-Fair-Dealing-Creating-Canadian-Culture-Online.html>Dynamic 
Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (

[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Rockefeller University Press editorial on a practical way to meet OA mandates

[Sandy Thatcher]

RUP's policies make perfectly good sense for the journals it 
publishes. And Mike makes a good case for the type of CC license RUP 
uses. I have real qualms about the use of the CC-BY license myself.

Whether six months would suffice for journals in the humanities is 
another question. We need more experimentation to determine what 
effect that short an embargo might have on subscriptions to journals 
in that sector.  Editors of British history journals who have spoken 
out do not think it is a long enough time.

Sandy Thatcher


At 9:48 AM -0700 3/11/13, Heather Morrison wrote:
>Thanks to Mike Rossner for this editorial explaining how RUP's 
>practices are designed to provide free access to all content after 6 
>months, meet the UK and US open access policy requirements, while 
>sustaining subscription revenue through the use of the Creative 
>Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - Sharealike license 
>(CC-BY-NC-SA). While questioning the need for specific permission 
>for data and text mining, RUP provides language clarifying that this 
>is indeed permitted to avoid confusion.
>
>The RUP approach meets the criteria for the PubMedCentral "Open 
>Access subset" after the 6-month embargo. RUP is Sherpa RomEO 
>"blue", permitting author self-archiving of post-prints but not 
>preprints.
>
>Rossner presents some useful analysis to the discussion about 
>licensing practices for open access journals. The editorial can be 
>found here:
>http://jcb.rupress.org/content/early/2013/03/05/jcb.201303016.full
>
>
>best,
>
>Heather Morrison, PhD
>Freedom for scholarship in the internet age
>https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530
>The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com


-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: s...@psu.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)

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[GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] Re: Martin Hall's Defence of the UK Finch Committee Recommendations: Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch

[Sandy Thatcher]

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 + 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 

[GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] RE: Simple Explanation of the Green Road

[Sandy Thatcher]

I don't find the advice overall nearly as objectionable as Jeffrey 
does--and I speak as a former publisher of academic journals. After 
all, the advice does include this important caveat: "The policy must 
not try to require the publisher's formatted PDF or any copyediting, 
just the author's final text - authors can include any copyedits or 
broader meta-data if they wish but the policy must not require it." 
(I think Prof. Adams might want to qualify that latter advice by 
saying that authors who include copyediting do so at their own legal 
risk; they could be sued for breach of contract.)  I don't see much 
here that Stevan harnad, for example, has not said many 
times--including the use of the eprint request button.


Sandy Thatcher


At 11:17 AM -0600 9/24/12, Beall, Jeffrey wrote:
I found the advice given in this "explanation" to be cavalier. The 
document says,


"Don't let a lawyer worry you with tales of copyright infringement 
lawsuits. No publisher has ever sued a university over making their 
academics' papers available. At most you need to respond to 
"take-down" requests by setting access to closed instead of open 
(never remove a paper from the IR, just set its access as closed, 
unless the paper is formally withdrawn by the journal for academic 
misconduct)."


Professor Adams, is this the type of practice you teach your 
students in your business ethics classes?


I work at a state-sponsored university, and here we are obliged to 
respect the existing laws. We also want to maintain good working 
relationships with publishers and to set a good example for our 
students. We don't do business like this.


I would encourage people to reject Professor Adams' insolent 
<http://www.a-cubed.info/OA/>advice.



Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS, Associate Professor
Scholarly Initiatives Librarian
Auraria Library
University of Colorado Denver
1100 Lawrence St.
Denver, Colo.  80204 USA
(303) 556-5936
<>jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu





-Original Message-
From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On 
Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams

Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2012 6:11 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Simple Explanation of the Green Road


Having written too many emails individually to people explaining the 
Green Road to Open Access and what I see as the optimum route and 
the errors various universities make in attempting to implement the 
Green Road, I was moved to write up a simple guide on my web site. 
Should you agree with the approach, please feel free to refer people 
to this guide.


<http://www.a-cubed.info/OA/>http://www.a-cubed.info/OA/

--
Professor Andrew A Adams 
<mailto:a...@meiji.ac.jp>a...@meiji.ac.jp
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/>http://www.a-cubed.info/



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Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="image001.jpg"
Content-Description: image001.jpg
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="image001.jpg"; size=4803;
creation-date="Mon, 24 Sep 2012 17:17:02 GMT";
modification-date="Mon, 24 Sep 2012 17:17:02 GMT"
Content-ID: 



--
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)
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Re: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum

[Sandy Thatcher]

I'm afraid I don't see what is incoherent about Elsevier's policy. It
certainly does NOT have the meaning attributed to it by "Dixit," who
seems to be the one confused here.

Sandy Thatcher


At 8:44 PM -0500 1/10/11, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>** Cross-posted **
>
>The following query came up on the UKCORR mailing list:
>
>>  I was surprised to read the paragraph below under author's rights
>  >(http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/copyright##rights)
>>  "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 web site or server for
>>>  scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a
>>>  link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not
>>>  in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional
>>>  repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is
>>>  a specific agreement with the publisher- see
>>>  http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbody agreements for further
>>>  information]);"
>
>You can't blame Elsevier's Perplexed Permissions Personnel for
>trying: After all, if researchers -- clueless and cowed about
>copyright -- have already lost nearly two decades of research
>access and impact for no reason at all, making it clear that only
>if/(when they are required (mandated) by their institutions and
>funders will they dare to do what is manifestly in their own best
>interests and already fully within their reach, then it's only
>natural that those who perceive their own interests to be in
>conflict with those of research and researchers will attempt to
>see whether they cannot capitalize on researchers' guileless
>gullibility, yet again.
>
>In three words, the above "restrictions" on the green light to
>make author's final drafts OA are (1) arbitrary, (2) incoherent,
>and (3) unenforceable. They are the rough equivalent of saying:
>You have "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 web site
>or server for scholarly purposes -- but not if you are required
>to do so by your institution or funder."
>
>They might as well have added "or if you have a blue-eyed uncle
>who prefers tea to toast on alternate Tuesdays."
>
>My own inclination is to say that if researchers prove to be
>stupid enough to fall for that, then they deserve everything that
>is coming to them (or rather, withheld from them).
>
>But even I, seasoned cynic that the last 20 years have made me,
>don't believe that researchers are quite that stupid -- though I
>wouldn't put it past SHERPA/Romeo to go ahead and solemnly
>enshrine this latest bit of double-talk in one of its slavish
>lists of "General Conditions" on a publisher's otherwise "green"
>self-archiving policy, thereby helpfully furnishing an effective
>pseudo-official megaphone for every such piece of optimistic
>gibberish, no matter how absurd.
>
>My advice to authors (if, unlike what the sensible computer
>scientists and physicists have been doing all along -- namely,
>self-archiving without first seeking anyone's blessing for two
>decades -- they only durst self-archive if their publishers have
>first given them their green light to do so) is that they take
>their publishers at their word when they do give them their green
>light to do so, and ignore any SHERPA/Romeo tommy-rot they may
>try to append to that green light to make it seem as if there is
>any rational line that can be drawn between "yes, you may make
>your refereed final draft OA" and "no, you may not make your
>refereed final draft OA."
>
>For those who are interested in knowing what is actually
>happening, worldwide, insofar as OA self-archiving is concerned,
>I recommend reading Peter Suber's stirring 2010 Summary of real
>progress rather than the sort of pseudo-legalistic
>smoke-screening periodically emitted by Permissions Department
>Pundits (whether or not not they are canonized by SHERPA-Romeo):
>http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010
>
>Dixit,
>
>Your Weary and Wizened Archivangelist


--
Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: sandy.thatc...@alumni.princeton.edu
Phone: (214) 705-1939
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)

Re: Changing the game

[Sandy Thatcher]

Along with Stevan Harnad, I wonder how such initiatives really will change
the economics of the system overall, especially in the short term.
Universities will still be paying for subscriptions for many journals and
now adding fees in addition, both for new OA journals and for journals that
offer OA selectively on payment of the fee. For the latter, the bottom line
is more money out the door, unless the publishers really do reduce
subscriptions rates somehow in proportion to the number of articles for
which OA fees are paid (and since the finances of commercial publishers are
not open to the public, how will one ever really know?).

And, for OA journals like PLoS, do we know what profit margin is being built
into its business model (or, as we call it in the non-profit world,
"surplus")?  Does Hindawi tell us what its profit margin is?  If the
immediate future for scholarly communication just ends up costing more
overall (and we should also take into account all those hidden subsidies
provided for university-based OA journals that do not charge fees), what
then? Has the game really changed or just readjusted the pieces on the
chessboard?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> September 24, 2009
> 
> CHANGING THE GAME:
> PIONEERS REPORT ON EFFORTS TO SUPPORT OPEN-ACCESS  PUBLICATION
> 
> Washington, DC -- Last year, the University of California at
> Berkeley and the University of Calgary were among a handful of
> institutions that established pools of money, through their
> libraries, to cover the cost of open-access journal fees. This
> approach -- aimed at supporting a new academic publishing model
> that could ultimately relieve at least some of the burden of
> expensive journal subscriptions -- has found a receptive audience
> among researchers on these two campuses.
> 
> SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
> is highlighting two approaches to establishing and maintaining
> open-access funds in a new SPARC Member Profile. SPARC is also
> preparing to launch a new initiative to provide additional
> information and resources detailing options for other
> institutions that may be considering such funds.
> 
> "Reporting on the progress and challenges associated with
> innovative new approaches to sharing research results is a
> fundamental component of building change in scholarly
> communication," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC.
> "These two SPARC members have learned valuable lessons in
> establishing their funds and fighting for faculty attention, and
> we are grateful to them for sharing the details. We hope the
> wider community will join us online to build on these successes,
> share some more experiences, and contribute to what promises to
> be a deep and engaging discussion."
> 
> At UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII)
> provides faculty, post-doc and graduate students up to $3,000 to
> cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access
> publication -- and up to $1,500 for opening an article that
> requires copyright transfer to the publisher. During the 18-month
> pilot project, the fund covered 52 articles at an average cost of
> $1,500 for open-access publications and $1,280 for articles
> requiring copyright transfer. During Calgary's first 13 months,
> the library's Open Access Authors Fund received 67 official
> submissions to cover open-access fees at an average cost of
> $1,538 (in Canadian dollars).
> 
> The cost of journal subscriptions at times is crippling for
> libraries and the Canadian university wanted to experiment with a
> different way of encouraging Open Access. "With money for Open
> Access coming from the library, we are trying to change the
> model," says Andrew Waller, serials librarian in Collection
> Services, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of
> Calgary.
> 
> When David Ackerly, associate professor of integrative biology at
> UC Berkeley wanted to publish a paper about the potential impact
> of climate change on plants of California, he turned to the
> library to cover the fee to publish in PLoS One, an initiative of
> the Public Library of Science. "I absolutely wanted the results
> to be freely available to the press, state agencies and others
> who don't necessarily have access to the libraries and journals,"
> he says. "It really paid off.  When it was published, we got
> great press coverage."
> 
> The Berkeley initiative set out to encourage a more sustainable
> scholarly communication environment. "We shouldn't be beholden to
> a single fund-flow model supporting journal publishing," says
> Chuck Eckman, associate university librarian and director of
&

Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates

[Sandy Thatcher]

The only statement in Stevan's commentary that I find surprising 
and questionable--because it is stated with such certainty of its 
truth, with no reference to any empirical backing, which is 
unusual for Stevan--is the claim that it is "exceedingly rare" 
(Stevan's emphasis) for copyediting "to detect any substantive 
errors" in articles. I have no evidence to disprove this claim 
that is based on systematic investigation of my own, but in all 
the years I spent as a copyeditor myself, it does not ring true, 
and was not consistent with my own experience in editing 
scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences.

Are the sciences any different? Not according to one editor who 
has worked on thousands of scientific articles, who commented on 
a draft of my article on "The Value Added by Copyediting" 
(Against the Grain, September 2008). Among other things, he 
testified that "even in highly technical articles 'the equations 
are usually accompanied by thickets of impenetrable prose,' and a 
lot of his work 'involves making sure that the text and the 
equations say the same thing.' He also adds that he checks 'the 
basic math in tables, since it's amazing how often scientists get 
the sums and averages wrong.'"

A study by Malcolm Wright and J. Scott Armstrong titled "Fawlty 
Towers of Knowledge" in the March/April 2008 issue of Interfaces 
also found high rates of errors in citations and quotations, 
partly because researchers relied on preprints and never bothered 
to check the accuracy of citations and quotations from those 
preprints. I would consider these "substantive errors," since 
they are not simply matters of style or grammar. So, I would ask 
Stevan whence his high degree of confidence in this claim 
derives. Nothing in my experience, or that of other editors I 
have asked, bears it out.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>Two members of STM have kindly, at my request, allowed me to see a
>copy of the STM Briefing on IRs and Deposit Mandates. I focused the
>commentary below on quoted excerpts, but before posting it I asked
>STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to include the quotes. As I do
>not yet have an answer, I am posting the commentary with paraphrases
>of the passages I had hoped to quote. If I receive permission from
>Michael, I will re-post this with the verbatim quotes. As it stands,
>it is self-contained and self-explanatory.
>
>Full hyperlinked version of the posting:
>http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/507-guid.html
>
>The International Association of Scientific, Technical and
>Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing
>to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar
>items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again),
>there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of
>the PRISM/pit-bull misadventure of 2007.
>
>Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections
>of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are
>unavoidably -- almost ritually -- repetitive, because the errors
>and misinformation themselves are so repetitive.
>
>STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON
>INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES
>
>[MOD. Note:  See URL above for the full text]

RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Sandy Thatcher]

There is much that I would like to debate with you, Stevan, in 
your reply to my post, e.g., the role that usage statistics and 
quantified metrics in general should play in assessing the 
importance and value of scholarship (much overrated, in my 
opinion), but I'll just focus here on this one assertion you made 
(and, by the way, I was not talking mainly about books in my 
post, as you seem to assume):

At 5:56 PM -0400 6/3/08, Stevan Harnad wrote:

>(2) Refereed journal articles undergo minimal copy-editing in 
>any case (unlike [some] books).

On what basis do you make this claim? Have you surveyed journals 
to find out how much copyediting they do? Are you basing this on 
your own personal experience with copyediting done by the 
journals to which you have submitted your own work primarily?

I, of course, cannot claim sufficiently wide knowledge to make 
sweeping generalizations about the degree and level of 
copyediting done for journals compared with books at all 
publishing houses. But as director of a press that publishes 11 
journals in the humanities, and a past employee of another press 
that published three (including one in mathematics), I can attest 
that the copyediting done for these journals is at the same level 
as done for books, which in university presses is pretty high. I 
suspect that other university presses operate in this respect the 
same way we do--which would mean that at least 1,000 scholarly 
journals get far more than "minimal copy-editing."

I can also attest, from my own years of experience as a 
copyeditor, that the job does not just involve polishing prose 
and improving grammar. Not uncommonly, copyeditors will find and 
correct egregious factual and other errors, thus sparing the 
authors from considerable embarrassment. Without their "value 
added" services, much will get published in Green OA form that 
will NOT serve either the authors' peers or the general public 
well.

Hence, I conclude, Harvard and others that follow its example and 
are content to publish less than the final archival version will 
be opening themselves to the exposure of all the flaws of 
scholarly writing that now get hidden from public view by the 
repair work done by copyeditors. Caveat lector!

-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher, Director
Penn State University Press
University Park, PA 16802-1003
e-mail: s...@psu.edu

RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Sandy Thatcher]

> Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > 
> > OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed journal
> > articles. The best and most likely way to find and access them is via a
> > harvester/indexer that links to the item, not by directly searching the
> > IR itself. (Direct searching of the IR is more relevant for (1)
> > institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance assessment, (3)
> > CV-generation, (4) grant application/fulfillment, and perhaps also some
> > window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or (7)
> > students.)
> > 
> > The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) to
> > maximize their accessibility, so they are accessible to all would-be
> > users, not just those whose institutions happen to have a subscription
> > to the journal in which they were published. That way (9) the usage and
> > impact of the institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10)
> > overall research progress).
> > 
> > >  But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its
> > >  IR.
> > 
> > It seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of institutional
> > gains from their IRs.

I question whether many, or even most, of these alleged benefits of IRs
really are such. Why is an IR needed for any individual performance
assessment? A faculty member simply submits relevant publications for the
P&T committee to review; having them on an IR doesn't seem much of a benefit
here. And why would anyone need to go to an IR to generate a CV? And window
shopping? I submit that faculty, grad students, and researchers will go look
for the work of the specialists in the areas they are most interested in,
not canvass a wide swathe of an institution's publications, and then rely on
more or less "objective" indicators of prestige ranking of departments by
various bodies that conduct regular assessments. Who is going to try using
an IR to measure "the usage and impact of the institutional research output"
overall? As we all know, usage statistics are only one small part of an
assessment exercise, and they do not even exist for large parts of a
university's output outside the sciences. How does an IR help measure the
success of an arts and architecture school, for instance? Given the widely
disparate nature of materials that would be contained in any university-wide
IR, I can't see how anyone could readily come up with an overall measure of
a university's contribution to research and scholarship. This is
pie-in-the-sky thinking, in my opinion.

> > > Harvard authors, on
> > > the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would
> > >  suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the
> > >  institution.
> > 
> > That may or may not be a good argument against depositing unrefereed
> > preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA mandates, or the primary
> > purpose of OA IRs.

To the contrary, Stevan, the peer-reviewed versions of articles you are
talking about being deposited have not undergone any copyediting, and my
guess is that most of what gets posted will be versions that have not had
copyediting done on them. I keep beating this drum, but I need to remind
people that unedited faculty prose is often not something they would want to
have exposed to the wider world. You mentioned that high energy physics
hasn't seem to have suffered any from its exposure on arXiv, but then how
many people beyond specialists actually read anything on this site?

Harvard, on the other hand, is mandating deposit of the writings of its
faculty in the humanities and social sciences, which at least in principle
could be of interest and accessible to a nonspecialist public. My contention
is that Harvard will more likely be embarrassed by the unedited writing of
some of its faculty than gain anything in prestige from it.

Indeed, I can see some bloggers starting to award annual prizes to the worst
writing on Harvard's site, along the lines of the Congressional "golden
fleece" awards or the "razzies" that are given out each year to the worst
movies. Really, believe me when I say, Stevan, that excellent scholars are
not always, or even often, the best writers; many a reputation has been
saved by the good work of unheralded copyeditors working behind the scenes.
To protect its reputation, Harvard might find itself having to hire
copyeditors itself to spruce up the articles before they get posted, or at
least proofreaders who could remove the most egregious errors and typos.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

Re: Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

[Sandy Thatcher]

You make it all sound so simple, Stevan, but there is nothing simple about a
transition from Green OA to Gold OA, including the redirection of savings
from journal subscriptions to funding Gold OA journals, because as many wise
people like Jim O'Donnell have pointed out on this list, universities don't
work that way. Wishing it were so does not make it so. And by talking about
peer review only, you oversimplify what is involved in journal publishing,
which requires skills that go beyond simply conducting peer review and that
are not most economically carried out by faculty, who are not trained for
such tasks and whose dedication of time to them detracts from the exercise
of their main talents as researchers. You are also wrong in interpreting
PRISM as just another repetition of the same old tired anti-OA rhetoric. As
a member of the publishing community whose press is a member of the PSP (but
not an endorser of PRISM), I can tell you that this is not just more of the
same. Whether we are getting close to a "tipping point" is of course a
matter of conjecture, but then so is the overall benefit from Green OA,
which you always state as though it were an established fact rather than a
hypothesis with some evidence in support of it yet hardly overwhelming
evidence at this point in time.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> 
> > Ah, yes, and if you'll remember our prior discussion about open
> > access, Stevan, I warned that just this "success" might be the
> > "tipping point" to drive a host of commercial and society
> > publishers out of the business of journal publishing. One "tipping
> > point" causes another? Witness, as partial proof, the reaction of
> > STM publishers represented by the PRISM initiative. I read that as
> > a warning that, if the government forces a change in their business
> > model, they may just walk away from the business. I assume you
> > wouldn't consider that a bad thing at all, but my question would be
> > what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations
> > will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?
> 
> What is remarkable, Sandy, is how actual empirical facts (very few)
> are being freely admixed, willy-nilly, with fact-free speculations
> for which there is, and continues to be zero empirical evidence,
> and, in many cases, decisive and familiar counterevidence, both
> empirical and logical.
> 
> Nothing has changed since our prior discussions except that there
> have (happily) been some more Green OA mandates (total adopted: 32,
> plus 8 more further proposed mandates).
> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
> 
> There has been no "tipping point." Just *talk* about tipping points,
> and that talk about tipping points has been going on for years.
> 
> There has been no one driven out of business, nor any empirical
> evidence of a trend toward being driven out of business. Just *talk*
> of being driven out of business, and that talk about being driven
> out of business has been going on for years.
> 
> And as to the "partial proof" in the form of the STM/PRISM
> "reaction" -- that very same reaction (with the very same false,
> alarmist arguments) has been voiced, verbatim, by the very same
> publisher groups (STM, AAP, ALPSP), over and over, for over a decade
> now. And they have been debunked just as often (see long list of
> links below). But that certainly hasn't been enough to make the
> publishers' anti-OA lobby cease and desist. Do you consider the
> relentless repetition, at louder and louder volume, of exactly the
> same specious and evidence-free claims, to be "proof" of anything,
> partial or otherwise?
> 
> And the phrase "the government forces a change in their business
> model" is just as false a description of what is actually going on
> when it is spoken in your own well-meaning words as when it is
> voiced by PRISM and Eric Dezenhall: The government is *not* forcing
> a change in a business model. The funders of tax-payer-funded
> research -- and, increasingly, universities, who are not "the
> government" at all! -- are insisting that the researchers they fund
> and employ make their peer-reviewed research freely available to all
> would-be users online, in line with the purpose of conducting and
> funding and publishing research in the first place.
> 
> This quite natural (and overdue) adaptation to the online age on the
> part of the research community -- Green OA -- may or may not lead to
> a transition to Gold OA publishing: no one knows whether, or when it
> will. But what is already known is that OA itself, whether Green o