Re: The affordability problem vs. the accessibility problem
I think there is a tendency to overly generalize the access problem which, = in my mind, is primarily a problem with the biomedical literature. Lack of access, by members of the general public who need to go from PubMed= to the full text, is obviously very frustrating. My sense, however, is that few serious researchers or students are truly h= aving a problem with access to the scientific literature. I disagree completely. There is a serious access problem. It is particularly bad for researchers at mid-level/mid-size research universities who don't have the library resources that the larger top-level research universities have. I would put CalTech in that latter group, I think. It is also much more of a problem for inter/multidisciplinary researchers (*). I estimate that around half of the articles I wish to access are behind toll gates for which the individual article charge is usually $35. A colleague of mine from the University of Reading is currently on sabbatical and attached to University College London in a visiting position and is delighted with the extra access to the journal literature (primarily electronic via their VPN) that their library is able to afford over that which Reading is able to do so. (*) The reason that this is more of a problem for them (us, I should say since it includes myself) is that they eed access to a wider range of literature and not just a small set of core journals. My own work has referenced (only what I can access) journals from fields including history, sociology, computer science, politics, regional studies, psychology, law, and others. Neither my previous nor my current university has groups studying all these in the particular subfields that I want and therefore has no group pushing for access to all the different journals I need access to (typically I want access to one specific article in each journal, occasionally a whole special issue) and hence they are not on either university's subscription list and I have to scratch around or wait for paper ILL (which still costs). Typically I will contact the author if I can find their details and ask for an eprint, which sometimes works, but which sometimes leads an author who has the same attitude as you to simply point me at the publisher's website to pay their toll access fee (I try not to get angry when this happens in response to a request for an Open Access version or an emailed eprint). -- Professor Andrew A Adams 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/
Re: The affordability problem vs. the accessibility problem
I agree with what Stevan and Andrew have said.  The idea that someone who has an access problem goes to a colleague in a different institution to get them to help out would be a breach of the e journal licence by that colleague.  I know of cases where the e journal publisher has cut off an entire university from access to its suite of journal for a lengthy period because it discovered that an academic was forwarding full text to people outside the institution. The solution for a young researcher needing publications is to submit their article to a prestigious Green-friendly journal, and post in a repository, OR submit the article to a prestigious OA journal like PLoS. Charles  Professor Charles Oppenheim From: Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Friday, 4 November 2011, 0:51 Subject: Re: The affordability problem vs. the accessibility problem I think there is a tendency to overly generalize the access problem which, = in my mind, is primarily a problem with the biomedical literature. Lack of access, by members of the general public who need to go from PubMed=  to the full text, is obviously very frustrating. My sense, however, is that few serious researchers or students are truly h= aving a problem with access to the scientific literature. I disagree completely. There is a serious access problem. It is particularly bad for researchers at mid-level/mid-size research universities who don't have the library resources that the larger top-level research universities have. I would put CalTech in that latter group, I think. It is also much more of a problem for inter/multidisciplinary researchers (*). I estimate that around half of the articles I wish to access are behind toll gates for which the individual article charge is usually $35. A colleague of mine from the University of Reading is currently on sabbatical and attached to University College London in a visiting position and is delighted with the extra access to the journal literature (primarily electronic via their VPN) that their library is able to afford over that which Reading is able to do so. (*) The reason that this is more of a problem for them (us, I should say since it includes myself) is that they eed access to a wider range of literature and not just a small set of core journals. My own work has referenced (only what I can access) journals from fields including history, sociology, computer science, politics, regional studies, psychology, law, and others. Neither my previous nor my current university has groups studying all these in the particular subfields that I want and therefore has no group pushing for access to all the different journals I need access to (typically I want access to one specific article in each journal, occasionally a whole special issue) and hence they are not on either university's subscription list and I have to scratch around or wait for paper ILL (which still costs). Typically I will contact the author if I can find their details and ask for an eprint, which sometimes works, but which sometimes leads an author who has the same attitude as you to simply point me at the publisher's website to pay their toll access fee (I try not to get angry when this happens in response to a request for an Open Access version or an emailed eprint). -- Professor Andrew A Adams           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/
Re: The affordability problem vs. the accessibility problem
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 4:27 AM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM c.oppenh...@btinternet.com wrote: The solution for a young researcher needing publications is to submit their article to a prestigious Green-friendly journal, and post in a repository, OR submit the article to a prestigious OA journal like PLoS. Almost exactly the right advice! -- but not quite: The solution for a young researcher needing publications is to submit their article to the most appropriate journal, with the highest quality standards the research can meet -- and always deposit the final draft in their repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. If the journal is Green-OA-friendly (or Gold-OA), make the deposit OA immediately. If the journal is anti-Green-OA (i.e., if it embargoes OA), make the deposit Closed Access instead of OA (and, with the help of the repository's automated email eprint request button, provide a single copy for research purposes with one button press to any would-be user who, with one button press, requests a copy for research purposes). Obviously, if there are two journals of equal appropriateness and equal quality standards, pick the Green-friendly or Gold one over the anti-Green one. All of the above is the rationale for the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate, which is the one that all universities, research institutions and research funders should adopt, worldwide. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenAcholarship (EOS) http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_6226/open-access-policies-for-universitie s-and-research-institutions?hlText=policie On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 4:27 AM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM c.oppenh...@btinternet.com wrote: I agree with what Stevan and Andrew have said.  The idea that someone who has an access problem goes to a colleague in a different institution to get them to help out would be a breach of the e journal licence by that colleague.  I know of cases where the e journal publisher has cut off an entire university from access to its suite of journal for a lengthy period because it discovered that an academic was forwarding full text to people outside the institution. The solution for a young researcher needing publications is to submit their article to a prestigious Green-friendly journal, and post in a repository, OR submit the article to a prestigious OA journal like PLoS. Charles  Professor Charles Oppenheim
Access problem and affordability
Dana Ruth said: I think there is a tendency to overly generalize the access problem which, in my mind, is primarily a problem with the biomedical literature. Lack of access, by members of the general public who need to go from PubMed to the full text, is obviously very frustrating. My sense, however,  is that few serious researchers or students are truly having a problem with access to the scientific literature. Granted there are problems for non-subscribers desirous of immediate ... seamless ... access.  But with options such as institutional document delivery, visiting or contacting a friend at a subscribing library, direct purchase of individual articles, author websites, institutional repositories, etc. ... I doubt that very many researchers are having a serious problem with access.  On the contrary, a very very large number of researchers around the world are having a serious problem with access. Perceptions depend on one's own circumstances. We are all conditioned by our own experience. Dana lives in California and works at Caltech. Affluent places. Most researchers in the world work in places where their libraries cannot afford even one tenth or one hundredth of Caltech library's collection of books, journals, reports, and paid online sources. For us the access problem is real and huge. [Even in the affluent West, librarians associations started advocating open access when they started feeling the pinch of steep rises in journal subscription costs.] That is why many of us advocate open access repositories. When arXiv was founded, physicists around the world (including those working at Caltech, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge) benefited a great deal. That is why researchers in less-endowed institutions need open access to all research. And the preferred mode is OA repositories. Talking about OA journals, notice that many OA journals in the West (e.g. PLoS, BMC) charge a publication fee from the authors, but hardly any OA journal published from Brazil or India or any other developing country. Access and affordability are both important. One without the other is far less effective.  And when every researcher adopts open access self-archiving, then  everyone, everywhere, will have free online access to all journal articles and the issue of affordability (for subscribing to expensive journals) will diminish in importance. That is where institutional and funder OA mandates become important.  Arun Subbiah Arunachalam Distinguished Fellow Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, India
