[GOAL] Re: The OA Interviews: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver
I think JC identifies the key point: On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: ** Gold OA will not get in the way of Green OA if it is explained correctly; and forfeiting gold OA will do more harm to the OA movement than the harm gold OA could ever and putatively make to green OA. If, among OA advocates, we could get this behind us, we could achieve four important results: 1. We would be far more united, and, therefore, more powerful; Yes. But JC does not go far enough. Here's my diagnosis and a fairy-tale - The OA movement is fragmented, with no clear unified objective. We (if I can count myself a member of anything) resemble the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front (Monty Python). Every time I am lectured on why one approach is the only one I lose energy and the movement - if it is a movement - loses credibility. Until we get a unified body that fights for our rights we are ineffective. - Most people (especially librarians) are scared stiff of publishers and their lawyers. - There is a huge pot of public money (tens of billions in sciences) and it's easier to pay off the publishers than standing against them. There is no price control on publishing - publishers charge what they can get away with. - The contract between publishers and academics has completely broken down. The Finch report, the Hargreaves process have not thrown up a single constructive suggestion from toll-access publishers - senior people in universities don't care enough about the problem to challenge publishers. It's easier to put up student fees to pay the ransom. And many have accepted the Faustian bargain. (Here's an awful example of an LSE academic who published a paper http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/11/scholarly-publishing-broken-guerrilla-self-publishing/only to have to wait TWO YEARS while th epubklishers typeset it. And her boss would rather NO ONE read it as long as LSE got the glory. - Young people are disillusioned and frightened. So here's my fairy tale. It more likely to happen than universal green OA mandates. It's more likely to happen than a useful amount of Gold OA. It is technically trivial (My software can do it). Fairy Tale: - The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice). - They bring along a few techies (I'd go). - They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software). - They reformat them to non-PDF. - They put them up on their university website. - They prepare to fight the challenge from the publishers. and - they win the law suit. Because it's inconceivable that a judge (except in Texas) will find for the publishers. - Other universities will take the model and do it. Total cost perhaps 1 million per university. It's cheaper than running our currently empty repositories. It's cheaper than hybrid fees. There's only one thing missing: COURAGE. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Reaching for the Reachable
On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Fairy Tale: - The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice). - They bring along a few techies (I'd go). - They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software). - They reformat them to non-PDF. - They put them up on their university website. - They prepare to fight the challenge from the publishers. and - they win the law suit. Because it's inconceivable that a judge (except in Texas) will find for the publishers. - Other universities will take the model and do it. Rather than asking universities, unrealistically, to risk a lawsuit, needlessly (even though I agree completely with PM-R that it would be lost), as in PM-R's fairy tail, why not, realistically, do almost the same thing: - The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days - They agree that they will mandate that copies of all the papers their faculty are deposited in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication - They adopt the optimal mandate: ID/OA, together with the email-eprint-request Almost-OA Button for embargoed deposits. - Other universities will take the model and do it. This is called Green Gratis OA self-archiving. No one is proposing to forfeit either Gold OA or Libre OA (re-use rights), just to accord priority to the more important and urgent, and also easier and more reachable goal of mandating Green Gratis OA first, because it is within reach and already underway. The Libre OA and Gold OA will follow the universal mandating of Green Gratis OA as surely as the publishers' lawsuit would lose if PM-R's fairy tale came true. But next to nothing at all will happen if we keep on failing to reach first for the reachable, and keep insisting instead on the unreachable. Stevan Harnad On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: I think JC identifies the key point: On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: ** Gold OA will not get in the way of Green OA if it is explained correctly; and forfeiting gold OA will do more harm to the OA movement than the harm gold OA could ever and putatively make to green OA. If, among OA advocates, we could get this behind us, we could achieve four important results: 1. We would be far more united, and, therefore, more powerful; Yes. But JC does not go far enough. Here's my diagnosis and a fairy-tale - The OA movement is fragmented, with no clear unified objective. We (if I can count myself a member of anything) resemble the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front (Monty Python). Every time I am lectured on why one approach is the only one I lose energy and the movement - if it is a movement - loses credibility. Until we get a unified body that fights for our rights we are ineffective. - Most people (especially librarians) are scared stiff of publishers and their lawyers. - There is a huge pot of public money (tens of billions in sciences) and it's easier to pay off the publishers than standing against them. There is no price control on publishing - publishers charge what they can get away with. - The contract between publishers and academics has completely broken down. The Finch report, the Hargreaves process have not thrown up a single constructive suggestion from toll-access publishers - senior people in universities don't care enough about the problem to challenge publishers. It's easier to put up student fees to pay the ransom. And many have accepted the Faustian bargain. (Here's an awful example of an LSE academic who published a paper http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/11/scholarly-publishing-broken-guerrilla-self-publishing/only to have to wait TWO YEARS while th epubklishers typeset it. And her boss would rather NO ONE read it as long as LSE got the glory. - Young people are disillusioned and frightened. So here's my fairy tale. It more likely to happen than universal green OA mandates. It's more likely to happen than a useful amount of Gold OA. It is technically trivial (My software can do it). Fairy Tale: - The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice). - They bring along a few techies (I'd go). - They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software).
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
I think we are going somewhere here. Could we manage, with the help of some foundation, manage to bring together a number of top university administrators from all over the world (minimum 20) to hash out exactly what could be done in a coordinated fashion? Moving en masse to a mandate would create a real momentum that could no longer be ignored. Who wants to work on this? I do! Jean-Claude Le jeudi 12 juillet 2012 à 10:15 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: Fairy Tale: * The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice). * They bring along a few techies (I'd go). * They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software). * They reformat them to non-PDF. * They put them up on their university website. * They prepare to fight the challenge from the publishers. and * they win the law suit. Because it's inconceivable that a judge (except in Texas) will find for the publishers. * Other universities will take the model and do it. Rather than asking universities, unrealistically, to risk a lawsuit, needlessly (even though I agree completely with PM-R that it would be lost), as in PM-R's fairy tail, why not, realistically, do almost the same thing: * The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days * They agree that they will mandate that copies of all the papers their faculty are deposited in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication * They adopt the optimal mandate: ID/OA, together with the email-eprint-request Almost-OA Button for embargoed deposits. * Other universities will take the model and do it. This is called Green Gratis OA self-archiving. No one is proposing to forfeit either Gold OA or Libre OA (re-use rights), just to accord priority to the more important and urgent, and also easier and more reachable goal of mandating Green Gratis OA first, because it is within reach and already underway. The Libre OA and Gold OA will follow the universal mandating of Green Gratis OA as surely as the publishers' lawsuit would lose if PM-R's fairy tale came true. But next to nothing at all will happen if we keep on failing to reach first for the reachable, and keep insisting instead on the unreachable. Stevan Harnad On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: I think JC identifies the key point: On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Gold OA will not get in the way of Green OA if it is explained correctly; and forfeiting gold OA will do more harm to the OA movement than the harm gold OA could ever and putatively make to green OA. If, among OA advocates, we could get this behind us, we could achieve four important results: 1. We would be far more united, and, therefore, more powerful; Yes. But JC does not go far enough. Here's my diagnosis and a fairy-tale * The OA movement is fragmented, with no clear unified objective. We (if I can count myself a member of anything) resemble the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front (Monty Python). Every time I am lectured on why one approach is the only one I lose energy and the movement - if it is a movement - loses credibility. Until we get a unified body that fights for our rights we are ineffective. * Most people (especially librarians) are scared stiff of publishers and their lawyers. * There is a huge pot of public money (tens of billions in sciences) and it's easier to pay off the publishers than standing against them. There is no price control on publishing - publishers charge what they can get away with. * The contract between publishers and academics has
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: *** The faculty ignore the mandates. This is the reality - Wellcome, who have the sanction of withholding grants and put huge efforts into promoting, still only get 55% compliance. You have spent 10 years trying to get effective mandates and they are hardly working. The compliance in chemistry is 0%. ZERO. Really? You'll have to tell that to your colleagues at, for example, U. Liege: There seem to be 3,620 chemistry papers deposited there: http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151 And that's the optimal ID/OA mandate (Liege model) that I recommended. Wellcome could raise their compliance rate to 100% if they were willing to listen to advice. (Admirably [indeed pioneeringly] early in adopting an OA mandate, they have nevertheless since been deaf to advice for years, insisting on institution-external deposit, allowing publisher deposit, and wasting scarce research money on paying for Gold OA instead of shoring up their Green OA mandate.) Other funders are listening, however, and integrating their mandates with institutional mandates, to make them mutually reinforcing: Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate Institutional Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/891-.html There is no way in my or your liftetime that senior chemists will self-archive. And that goes for many other disciplines. What are the VCs going to do? Sack them ? they bring in grant money? No: draw their attention to the financial benefits, as Alma Swan John Houghton have been doing, for Green and Gold OA: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf Yes - and probably 5% of VCs care about it. You are right that the mandate percentage is still far too small (and the effective mandate percentage is still smaller). But the benefits are large, and the costs are next to nothing: just effective policy-making and implementation. My argument - or fairy story - is that nothing will happen if we continue as we are. We have to get much tougher. And university mandates are seen as next to useless - universities can't police them and it alienates the faculty. The attraction of the fairy story is that it's vastly simpler and quicker to carry out. It even builds on the apathy of the faculty - the less they care, the easier it is. I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. I'm for reality rather than fairy tales. And reaching for the reachable, now, rather than fulminating about the unreachable (especially when reaching for the reachable, now, is eventually likely to bring more of the unreachable within reach). Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
On 2012-07-12, at 11:13 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. Comment: I agree and disagree. May I suggest that the OA community should work in tandem with mutual respect rather than attempting to unite? There is no one-size-fits all. Here are some reasons. I would argue that it is the communities of scholars, publishers, and librarians, working both separately and together, that need to take action. Physics has provided us with one model, first with arXiv and now with SCOAP3. Medicine has given us another, with the PubMedCentral International initiative. Economics has RePEC, an interesting initiative that builds on institutional repositories to build a discipline-focused service. Timothy Gowers and colleagues are leading the way in the field of mathematics. In Canada, librarians and publishers have come together in the Synergies project which has helped many scholarly journals to develop an online presence and made open access an easier choice. In Canada and many other countries, academic publishing is not a profitable venture, and so scholarly journals have been subsidized by the government. I think it was Leslie Chan Jean-Claude Guedon who helped the funder, SSHRC, develop an Aid to Open Access Journals program. Latin American countries are somewhat similar in this respect (scholarly publishing is not about the profits); I would argue that this is one of the reasons why this region has been able to go straight for gold. The situation is very different where the for-profit companies are at home and have more ability to lobby effectively, such as the UK and the US. Here, it is probably necessary to start with green. Strong open access policies are important - as Harnad pointed out, these need to be green, involve immediate deposit even if access is delayed, and accomodate the almost-OA researcher-mediated sharing. We should continue to push on these lines. However, I would also argue that ultimately what needs to happen is a careful, thoughtful transition of revenue from toll to open access. The Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity is doing good work in this area and is worthy of support. There are so many open access initiatives today that are worthy of support I can only apologize for the many that I am omitting. One way to think about open access (which a few of us in the Directory of Open Access Books discussion are agreeing on) is that the real opposite of open access is closed access - the works that we cannot read at all, because they are not available or so costly that we cannot afford to read them at all. my two bits, Heather Morrison, MLIS Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/ The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
Let us get back to basics instead of bickering among ourselves. How about trying to organize a high-level meeting of administrators and see what agreement could be achieved to move forward as a group and not through individual moves that keep on differing a little from each other. We need a group definition and implementation of some form of mandate with teeth. Obviously, Bernard Rentier and the rector from Minho could give their viewpoint on this issue in support of such a move. Obviously, Stuart Shieber and others who have managed faculty self-mandating should also be present. Anyone listening? Anyone willing to cooperate on this? Jean-Claude Guédon Le jeudi 12 juillet 2012 à 18:11 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote: *** The faculty ignore the mandates. This is the reality - Wellcome, who have the sanction of withholding grants and put huge efforts into promoting, still only get 55% compliance. You have spent 10 years trying to get effective mandates and they are hardly working. The compliance in chemistry is 0%. ZERO. Really? You'll have to tell that to your colleagues at, for example, U. Liege: There seem to be 3,620 chemistry papers deposited there: http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151 And that's the optimal ID/OA mandate (Liege model) that I recommended. Wellcome could raise their compliance rate to 100% if they were willing to listen to advice. (Admirably [indeed pioneeringly] early in adopting an OA mandate, they have nevertheless since been deaf to advice for years, insisting on institution-external deposit, allowing publisher deposit, and wasting scarce research money on paying for Gold OA instead of shoring up their Green OA mandate.) Other funders are listening, however, and integrating their mandates with institutional mandates, to make them mutually reinforcing: Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate Institutional Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/891-.html There is no way in my or your liftetime that senior chemists will self-archive. And that goes for many other disciplines. What are the VCs going to do? Sack them ? they bring in grant money? No: draw their attention to the financial benefits, as Alma Swan John Houghton have been doing, for Green and Gold OA: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf Yes - and probably 5% of VCs care about it. You are right that the mandate percentage is still far too small (and the effective mandate percentage is still smaller). But the benefits are large, and the costs are next to nothing: just effective policy-making and implementation. My argument - or fairy story - is that nothing will happen if we continue as we are. We have to get much tougher. And university mandates are seen as next to useless - universities can't police them and it alienates the faculty. The attraction of the fairy story is that it's vastly simpler and quicker to carry out. It even builds on the apathy of the faculty - the less they care, the easier it is. I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should unite and take decisive action. I'm for reality rather than fairy tales. And reaching for the reachable, now, rather than fulminating about the unreachable (especially when reaching for the reachable, now, is eventually likely to bring more of the unreachable within reach). Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
