[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

[Arthur Sale]

I don’t have access to the raw data now apart from knowing that we fulfill 
13,000+ requests a year, but the University of Tasmania has operated a free 
unlimited-quantity service for 15 years, funded pay-per-view centrally (ie in 
replacement for subscriptions). It is very much used, and regarded as a 
keystone of library research support. It simply is not true that academics are 
devoted to instant access, and they are prepared to wait a day or two to read 
the papers they think are relevant. Of course they use alert services, 
metadata, etc in making the judgment, but if they think a paper is worth 
reading in full (it may not be after they have read it but nobody cares) they 
have no hesitation in using the university’s service. The economics do stack 
up, and I am proud to have introduced it in about 1998.

See http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery and 
http://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/65611/Document-Delivery-Service-online-guide-v10.7.12.pdf.
 

For context, the University is in the top ten Australian universities for 
research, and in student size modest (27,000 students, 18% of whom are from 
outside Australia).

If someone wants to mine the data, contact the University Librarian.

 

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania, Australia

 

From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of 
Stevan Harnad
Sent: Tuesday, 5 January 2016 02:24 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

 

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Christian Gutknecht 
 wrote:

Stevan, 

 

[ahjs] …

 

But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an 
outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much, is 
to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free money the 
library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA fund (incl. 
hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs resulting getting 
access to documents that are not longer available via subscription (like costs 
for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual subscription of a really 
important journal).. Because librarians constantly overestimate the importance 
of their subscriptions and especially the Big Deals where they buy/rent a lot 
of stuff that is never used by their community. I think most libraries would 
find out that researchers would get along quite well with this option

 

Christian, I strongly suggest that you look into the actual costs of such a 
proposal (replacing subscriptions by pay-to-view costs, per paper). 

 

We are in the online era, when scholars are accustomed to reaching content 
immediately with one click, and browsing it to see whether it's even worth 
reading. A scholar may look at dozens of papers a day this way. That's what 
they do with their institutional licensed content. You are imagining (without 
any data at all) that the cost of doing this via pay-per-view, at the usual $30 
or so per paper, would amount to less cost for an institution than its current 
licensing costs.

 

Please repeat this proposal once you have done the arithmetic and have the 
evidence. (It won't be enough to find out the license costs and the 
pay-per-view costs. You will also have to monitor the daily usage, per 
discipline, of a sufficient representative sample of researchers. 

Until then, subscription cancellation is not an option for institutions today. 
(But with universal immediate-deposit 

  it will be.)

 

As Thomas mentioned it’s really easy these days to get to the papers by simply 
asking the author. Also Researchgate and academia.edu close the gap where IRs 
fail to provide access. 

 

The ease and immediacy of online access to which institutional authors are now 
accustomed is for licensed (+ OA) content. Find the actual  user data for 
unlicensed, non-OA content. And prepare to discover that copy-requests -- for 
which you have expressed pessimism when they are Button-based -- may turn out 
to be much less immediate or reliable if they must be mediated by email address 
search and waiting to see whether the author responds then when they are 
requested. With immediate deposit and the Button, the request is just one click 
for the user and one for the author...

 

[ahjs] …

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[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

[Velterop]

Christian, and other readers of this list,

It seems to me that many researchers are unhappy with any kind of 
requirement or imposition, resorting to the 'academic freedom' argument 
rather (all too?) quickly and easily. But librarians are in a bind. They 
can't really cancel most subscriptions or BigDeal licences without 
invoking the ire of faculty, which makes it impossible for them to have 
meaningful negotiations with publishers, because there is no way for 
them to have a 'walk-away point', so important when negotiating. 
Publishers know, of course, that librarians are not in a position to 
negotiate, and even if negotiations are escalated up to the level of 
university leaders, such as we found in The Netherlands recently, their 
position is also fairly weak as they face pressure from both the 
publishers and their faculty, not to risk reducing access to 
subscription journals. Complaining is cheap for faculty: they don't pay 
for subscriptions and often are not even fully aware of the cost.


My proposal to make members of the faculty pay for articles they publish 
in subscription journals was meant to address this lack of awareness. If 
charging them for publishing in subscription journals doesn't work — and 
I recognise the difficult position librarians are in regarding such 
charges — then at least it shouldn't be beyond the possibility of 
librarians to do more to make authors aware of the cost of their 
decision to publish in subscription journals, short of actually charging 
them. Making them aware of the cost may perhaps not immediately result 
in changed behaviour, but it could be a very useful nudge in the 
somewhat longer run (after decades of advocating open access, who 
notices a year or two?). Does it ever happen? I'd be most interested to 
hear about instances where it does.


I don't know why you think that cancelling subscriptions and getting rid 
of BigDeal licences would not upset researchers much. I am very 
skeptical of that idea. However, if you would cancel and replace all 
subscriptions by a 'pay-by-the-drink' approach, whereby individual 
articles are bought upon request, from any journal, you may be on to 
something. You would ensure access for researchers (and potentially to a 
much wider range of journals than you can possibly subscribe to). You 
would simply be substituting the 'just-in-case' model by an actual 
usage-based one.


There are no-doubt risks involved, such as researchers 'buying' far more 
articles than the budget would allow for, and inconveniences, such as 
needing a transaction for every article, and there will no-doubt be 
objections from faculty, too, but if done transparently, it would make 
them more aware of the costs and the anachronisms of the pay-wall system 
of scholarly publishing.


I am certain that people will protest at this and other proposals as 
'bad', 'not workable' et cetera, but the fact is that if other, new, 
ways of dealing with scholarly literature are not experimented with, 
nothing will change, and even where it does change, it does so painfully 
slowly. The idea of open access has been around for decades now, and yet 
the proportion of articles being available and re-usable barrier-free is 
still very small, and though growing in number, hardly growing in 
proportion to everything that is being published (it is my impression 
that the growth in the total number of articles published is hardly 
smaller than the number of open access articles every year).


To believe that change will come from publishers is most unrealistic. 
They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, and not to 
academia, which militates against the sort of change the scholarly 
community needs. And even where some changes do occur on the part of 
publishers — hybrid journals, for instance — they are almost universally 
denigrated (I'm not saying that is wrong, but it's always done on the 
basis of 'double-dipping', which is a red herring and masking the real 
reasons why hybrid journals are an unwelcome development). The optimism 
with which I, and other members of the original BOAI group of 
participants insofar as I know, embarked on advocating open access has, 
at least in my view, mainly been frustrated by deeply held conservatism 
in academic circles. Most of what I hear and read about open access 
discussions, is complaints about publishers. All too rarely do I hear or 
read proposed — or better still, implemented — attempts at solutions. 
There are very few around. Stevan keeps banging on about self-archiving 
mandates. Admirable tenacity; poor results, so far. And there are a few 
new style journal initiatives, such as PeerJ and ScienceOpen and the 
like, which don't, unfortunately, account for many articles yet, and the 
so far rather more successful PLOS-One. And that's it. Altogether very 
small fry in the scheme of things. In fact, 'hybrid' seems to be able to 
claim the most success. Quite possibly because it preserves most of the 

[GOAL] The OA Interviews: Toma Susi, physicist, University of Vienna

[Richard Poynder]

Since the birth of the open access movement in 2002, demands for greater
openness and transparency in the research process have both grown and
broadened. Today there are calls not just for OA to research papers, but
(amongst other things) to the underlying data, to peer review reports, and
to lab notebooks. 

 

In response to these developments, earlier this year the Research Ideas &
Outcomes (RIO) Journal was launched. RIO's mission is to open up the entire
research cycle - by publishing project proposals, data, methods, workflows,
software, project reports and research articles. These will all be made
freely available on a single collaborative platform. 

 

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the first grant proposal made openly available on
RIO was published by a physicist - Finnish-born Toma Susi, who is based at
the University of Vienna in Austria. 

 

An interview with Susi about his proposal, and his experience of publishing
on RIO is available here:

 

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-oa-interviews-toma-susi-physicist.
html

 

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[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Christian Gutknecht <
christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch> wrote:

> Stevan,
>
> I guess the record in RoarMap about the policy of the University of Zurich
> is not correct at that point. The deposition of at least the metadata of a
> publication in the IR is required to get included in the annual report,
> which is the foundation of research evaluation.
>

That is of no use whatsoever for OA. It is mere record-keeping. What must
be deposited immediately is the full text, because (1) that is what creates
the systematic universal practice of immediate self-archiving and (2) that
is what allows the repository's request-a-copy Button to provide
immediate-Almost-OA (the author willing).

It’s however correct that the distinction of of the accessibility on ZORA
> (Fulltext freely available or not) is not part of the research evaluation.
> But I do not know any university that only counts publications that are
> freely available at the repository.
>

Again, the requirement is that the full-text be immediately deposited, not
that it be immediately OA. And there is a growing number of institutions
and funders that are adopting this optimal policy
,
called the "Liège model
."
See for example the U Liège policy  as well
as the HEFCE/REF policy in ROARMAP.


> Also counting records where the full text is restricted but only available
> with a request-a-copy button as Almost-OA on the same level as OA is not
> valid for me. With „Request a copy“ there’s always a certain chance that
> you never will get the full text. Especially for older records you cannot
> expect the author to answer your request, because he/she may already have
> left the university.
>

As noted, there are two objectives of the immediate-deposit mandate: (1) To
get all authors into the systematic habit of depositing their full test
immediately upon acceptance for publication and (2) to provide Almost-OA
via the Button for embargoed deposits during the embargo.

And, with all due respect, the purpose of the mandate is not to be valid
"for you" or for me or for anyone, but to reach 100% immediate-OA as
quickly as possible, for all institutional refereed research output.

The Button is a compromise to make the most of deposits that (foolishly)
elect to comply with publisher OA embargoes. It is then up to authors to
decide whether and when to provide requested copies (with one click). Those
scholarly practices will of course evolve, and they will evolve in the
direction of providing OA. For now, the fundamental hurdle to overcome
(universally) is *immediate deposit*. That done, all the rest (the collapse
of subscriptions and embargoes, downsizing and conversion to fair-gold fees
for peer review alone, CC-BY) will all take care of itself
,
easily and naturally, of its own accord (including the release of older
records!).

>
> Regarding the suggested approach of Jan to charge authors publishing in
> subscription journals, I think this would be a bad option. Any requirement
> that tells authors where to publish (even indirectly by imposing charges)
> will be rejected as a not tolerable influence of the academic freedom. I
> mean some academics already protesting with this argument, if the
> university requires them to make their full text available on the IR.
>

Constraints on journal choice, i.e., on where authors may publish (and
especially constraints based on the publisher's economic model rather than
its quality) are most definitely violations of academic freedom.

But the requirement to deposit the digital full text immediately upon
acceptance (not necessarily as OA), regardless of where it is published, is
most definitely not a violation of academic freedom, any more than the
requirement to publish-or-perish is.

The (very common) conflation of these two things is just one of many
examples of the astonishingly muddy and careless thinking of the academic
community on the subject of OA (and no doubt on many other subjects!)

>
> But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an
> outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much,
> is to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free
> money the library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA
> fund (incl. hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs
> resulting getting access to documents that are not longer available via
> subscription (like costs for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual
> subscription of a really important journal).. Because librarians constantly
> overestimate the importance of their subscriptions and especially the Big
>