Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action
A fair amount of Google research does end up published. It's impossible to know what percentage. However, there is not the "publish or perish" pressure on Google researchers to publish. In most cases, they are encourged to engage with the broader research community via attendance at relevant conferences (academic, academic/industry, multi-stakeholder) as and when it's important for their research and personal career development. In the fields of privcy and security (one of my core areas) i regularly encounter Google-based researchers on technical and socio-technical issues at conferences and read their papers. In addition to a lack of external pressure to publish from their institution, they do have to get permission to submit from managers which in the case of conferences or special issues with tight deadlines, can lead the researchers to be less likely to publish. This is similar to many other tech-related companies such as telcos (I've worked directly with people at KDDI, the second largest Japanese telco). Other major applied research organisations in tech vary a lot. MS reserachers are invovled in some fields quite heavily, but not in others. I don't believe i've ever seen a paper published by an Amazon researcher, and it's well-known that Amazon discourages company-based commits to FLOSS projects (but on a case-by-case basis allows individuals to submit code as individuals if they can make a case that it serves Amazon's purposes for the general code-base to include Amazon's own developments). -- Dr Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Wired: "The FTC Is Cracking Down on Predatory Science Journals"
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/ The FTC is suing OMICS for unfair business practices, apparently. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] BLOG: The case for Open Research: the mismeasurement problem
> 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? In the UK, I'm pretty sure it's standard practice to limit the number of articles submitted for consideration as part of promotions to in the region of 5. However, the full publications list will generally also be submitted. So, they look to measure both the quality of the best and the total quantity. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier
> "The software may change, but you can't sell off a distributed network of > independent repositories.” > > I agree, and I think that this is the crucial point. The software doesn’t > matter (well, it does matter, but it doesn’t affect this principle). It’s > about the distribution of *control*. > > We are truly fortunate to have a global, distributed infrastructure of > institutional repositories which are (mostly) under institutional control. > This is quite an unusual arrangement these days - and I think we should > regard it as precious and inherently powerful in its denial of the > possibility of “ownership” by one party. > > We should do what we can to both hang on to this infrastructure, and to > exploit it more fully, in pursuit of a better scholarly communications system. We used to have a distributed system of email and file storage in universities, mostly under the control of the institution. In recent years, however, a large proportion of universities have purchased loud email and file storage services (mostly from Google and Microsoft). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] BLOG: Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?
> > The copyleft or "share-alike" principle does not prevent enclosing > > something in a paywall, > > By this fact, it becomes clear that CC-BY-SA is not the "correct" license for > academic work. Quoting a single line of a longer piece out of context is both mis-leading and rude. If you'd bothered to read past this one line and see the whole argument you might have understood that while it doesn't prevent it directly it undercuts any attempt to "proprietise" by first denying an exclusive right, provided someone, anyone, else has the original piece and makes it available - the original author, their institution, the Internet Archive... It also further udnercuts the incentive to even try because the organisation putting it behind a paywall is not permitted to prevent further dissemination for anyoine who has accessed it through the paywall. We have large numbers of clear examples of how copleft/share-alike works in Free Software. There is very little Libre Software that is not also available gratis. Even where ther are organisations charging for access to derivative versions, the share-alike principle generally prevents them from doing more than charging for their real value-added changes because anyone who pays then gains the right to re-distribute the derivative version. Besides which, my response was about a discussion which concluded that CC-BY was the correcct license. I disagree and argued for CC-BY-SA or in a few cases CC-BY-ND. I explained why CC-BY-NC is not a good license because of its utter lack of clarity in what it means. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] BLOG: Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?
Danny, My opinion is that CC-BY-SA is the correct license for academic works. All the claims I have seen for people wanting to use "NC" terms (NC is a controversial element whose meaning is not properly clear) are generally fixed by using SA instead. The copyleft or "share-alike" principle does not prevent enclosing something in a paywall, but ddoes require that there are no restrictions placed on anyone who then does have access, and for anything reasonably deemed a derivative work, it means that it must also be a CC-BY-SA licensed work, which generally discourages exploitive terms since then any consortium can club together, purchase access and then re-distribute. For a small class of works there is a justification for CC-BY-ND which prevents derivatives beyond fair use/fair dealing (which are the basis on which m,ost academic quoting works anyway under "all rights reserved" licenses) for material which is controversial or sensitive. However, these cases are rare and should be used very sparingly. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Insistence by researchers that we do not make metadata available prior to publication for Nature, NEJM and Cell journals
Richard Poynder wrote: > As a matter of interest, what is the average time span between > acceptance and publication? I'm not sure an average number is really useful here. More useful but still aggregate data would perhaps be something like each decile of delay, to pull some random numbers out to llustrate only: 10% of papers are published with no significant delay; 20% of papers are published with up to three months delay; 30% of papers are published with up to six months delay; 40 % of papers are published with up to eight months delay; 50 % of papers are published with up to a one year delay etc. I would also find it useful to know about the difference between advanced online release and final publication with volume and age numbers. I find it very frustrating that a paper of mine which was accepted for publication in January 2013 wasn't given a volume and pages until July 2015, a delay of two and a half years! I was also not informed when it actually appeared. -- Professor Andrew A. Adams ã¢ãã ã¹ ã¢ã³ããªã¥ã¼ Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics a...@meiji.ac.jp ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: One way to expand the OA movement: be more inclusive
Heather Morrison wrote: Challenge: My research blog and data verses are both fully open with no CC license at all. They are All Rights Reserved, and yet posted on the web, in the case of the dataverse deliberately so that people can go ahead and download and manipulate the data. I challenge anyone to go ahead and try some text and data mining. If you think there are legalities preventing you from doing this, please explain what they are. Blog: sustainingknowledgecommons.orghttp://sustainingknowledgecommons.org OA APCs: http://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dvn/dv/oaapc/ There probably are some barriers to text and data mining, however these have nothing to do with legalities. For example, this morning I was looking for Walt Crawford's comment on one of my posts. This didn't come up, but that's likely just because Wordpress is not set up to search comments. Technical access is not the same as the legal right to access. Consider Aaron Shwartz' case. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier: Trying to squeeze the virtual genie back into the physical bottle
David Prosser wrote: I remember severn or eight years ago a prominent publisher saying that allo= wing green self-archiving was a massive tactical mistake on the part of pub= lishers. They only allowed it because they believed it would never gain an= y traction. This is why Elsevier is back-paddling furiously and we are tre= ated to the rather sad sight of Alicia Wise trying to promote the back-pedd= ling as a massive move towards fairness and being responsive of the desires= of researchers and research institutions. So both Stevan and David seem to be saying we should be happy with (not supportive of, but happy about) Elsevier's move, since it means that we're (albeit still too slowly) winning the battle for Open Access by following Stevan's prescription (universal gratis, Green first - achieveable with interlocking funder and institutional greeen deposit mandates plus the button). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: CC-BY journal draft policy: possibly of interest
I agree with Marc's comments but would add that authors need to know that use includes commercial use (this includes for-sale and for-profit re-use), and remix. Re-use doesn't mean the kind of re-uses we like, it just means re-use. It might mean a serious scholar re-using part of our work in their own highly prestigious work - or it could mean a for-profit company taking a picture of a research subject and using it in an ad. That's another form of commercial re-use and re-mix. Actually, they couldn't _necessarily_ do so. The coyright in a particular picture is separate from the personal rights of the model depicted. There's a good discussion of the US law on this here: http://tinyurl.com/2awd4do (sorry for the tinyurl, but it's a long URL and my mailer would munge it. It's a lawyer's personal blog rising.blackstar.com) -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: International survey on scholarly communication - and its relevance for open access
They have the Access Request Button listed as a source of full text, but bizarrely missed out repositories directly. Their list of software is also proprietary-heavy ignoring FLOSS tools such as PSPP (a GNU implementation of a stats package somewhat akin to SPSS) and R (a FLOSS implementation of a command-line stats tool - the commercial equivalent S is rarely used). Academia.edu is included as a tool to promote one's work, but not as a tool to find the work of others. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: $1, 300 per article or $25, 000 annual subsidy can generously support small scholar-led OA journal publishing
Not all academic societies with large publishing arms have their heads in the sand, nor are expecting the publishing income stream to continue to be a significant net revenue for long. As part of the ACM (*) for the last few years I have been raising OA issues, including the question of APCs. The response of the senior management, both appointed/employed and elected has been measured and reasonable. ACM is fully green-compliant, offers some interesting open access elements itself and has APCs of $1700 for non-members or $1300 for members of the ACM or a Special Interest Group (and since these memberships costs significantly less than $400 for the minimum and only one author needs to be a member, one would be foolish not to take a cheap membership if one insisted on paying for the hybrid Gold - although since ACM is Green that is paying for Fool's Gold). There are plans to reduce these prices over time, particularly as they can drive down their associated costs. (*) for non-computer scientists, the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the largest computer societies in the world and together with the IEEE (which includes a Computer Society as a sub-unit) publish a large proportion of the journals and refereed conference proceedings that constitute the academic computer science literature. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Sharing and reuse - not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy
While Jeffrey Beale may find it acceptable, moral and simple to assign his copyrights to a publisher simply for the benefit of being published, I find it an intolerable demand and while I do sign such in order to facilitate my career and to gain the benefits of dissemination in the best journal for my work I find the consequences appalling. Here is a real example of the consequences. For a paper I and two others wrote, I created a diagram showing our expression of a well-known but variously exressed concept (the uchi-soto model of Japanese social interaction). As part of their further work my two co-authors wrote another article which used the same concept and wished to re-use the diagram I'd created. I was quite happy that they do so since although I had created the diagram my understanding of the concept had been developed from their teaching - I was simply better able to use graphic design tools to render it simple to understand. Because we'd had to sign a copyright transfer in order to get the original article published somewhere suitable (we went through three journals before finally finding one for which the topic fit the aims and objectives) we had to go back to the publisher and get permission to use re-use the diagram. Even if it had been me, I would have had to go through the same process. No other publisher would accept the article reproducing the diagram without a copyright permission form from the publisher of the first article. I find this a ridiculous situation and contrary to the ideals of the development of scholarship. Having learned from this, I now plan to release all graphics I create that I might use in an article, under a CC-BY license before submission. I'd like to release it under CC-BY-SA because I'm a believer in copyleft, but that would prevent me from using it in articles where the publisher requires me to asign copyright in the article, and where they won't release the article CC-BY-SA themselves. (While it's possible that a publisher could then refuse to publish an article using that diagram, I think it's unlikely - I don't work in a field where the diagrams are a huge part of the value of the article - I understand that is not the case universally. They could require me to take down my original copy from my website as part of the agreement to publish, but I could just make sure that someone else was still making a copy available and I would have no ability to prevent that spreading. I have gone through a similar issue with a book publisher. I released a set of lecture slides under a CC license while writing a textbook on the topic. The publisher wanted slides and I offered these, but pointed out that they were already available, and had been for about a year, under a CC license, so while I could transfer copyright in the slides to them - that's what they demanded - it would be pointless since even I myself could still use them under the original CC release. After some internal discussion they released them on their website under the same CC license I'd used - CC-BY-NC, which I later realised is the wrong license and I now use CC-BY-SA where I can and CC-By where I can't require SA.) -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: CC-BY and open access question: who is the Licensor?
heather.morri...@uottawa.ca wrote: PLOS authors retain copyright. CC licenses are a waiver of one's rights under copyright. Graham Triggs grahamtri...@gmail.com replied: That isn't quite true - CC licences are an expression of the rights that you grant to end users, and the conditions attached to that licence. Rather than a waiver, it is pre-authorisation to exercise rights that are normally reserved under copyright, without seeking express permission. It's a really important difference when you consider that the licence also contains conditions under which invalidates the licence for an end user. Say, for example, you completely misrepresented someone through re-use of their work - that would invalidate the licence as it applies to you. Not only would you be unable to re-use the work in that way, you would not be allowed any future re-use of the original work under a CC-BY licence, without express permission. In those circumstances, the full extent of copyright restrictions can be applied against you, as someone without access to the CC-BY licence. However, that does raise an interesting question about licensor vs copyright holder - if an end user invalidated the CC-BY licence as granted to them, who would be able to authorise any future use: PLoS, or the author(s)? I don't think it's this clear-cut. Over on a list of lawyers working on Free Software legal issues (*) we recently had a discussion about what happens when someone violates a provision of a free software license. Do they then lose all access to the software or could they, after simply stopping their violating behaviour, simply download a new copy of the software and start using it again? There is generally no language in any of the Free Software licenses limiting the grant of the rights. Different views were offered and none have been tested so far in any jurisdiction. So, if I redistribute a derivate if a CC-ND work, together with a copy of the original, I can certainly be sued (with a good chance fo success) for violating the ND element. I doubt that a court would increase damages because my violation of the ND license then means I didn't have a license to distribute the original unamended. Would a court order me to stop future distribution of the unamended work as well? How about simoply keeping a copy of the original work for my own use? (*) Just in caxe anyone here is unaware, the whole CC license approach was derived from ideas in the Free Software movement, although there are some divergences from Free Software ideas in the implementation. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: RE : Re: RE : Re: The Qualis and the silence of the Brazilian researchers
Jeroen wrote: What would be foolish however is to assess, judge, award, hire or fund someone based on the lid of the silo that person has published in. I'm convinced that in the long run academia will recognize that. You can already see it happening in e.g. Germany, UK and the Netherlands. I see little sign of this happening in the UK (albeit I'm in Japan these days but I keep in good touch with colleagues in the UK). If anything the RAE and now the REF has made hiring in particular, but also promotion, more slavishly attached to things like Impact Factors. In the runup to the recent REF one department I know of had a requirement that all staff attempt to publish four papers during the REF asssessment period in journals with an IF greater than 1. No suggestion even that publishing in a journal with a lower impact factor but achieving high citation rates (I published a paper in an OA (no-APCs) journal with 2013 SJR of 0.9 which has received well over 100 citations) would be acceptable. It had to be an an IF1 journal for inclusion in the REF return. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] 114 million scholarly documents on the web; 27 million toll-free
How many scholarly papers are on the Web? At least 114 million, professor finds Penn State University pressrelease: https://tinyurl.com/kogygol The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web Madian Khabsa, C. Lee Giles mail Published: May 09, 2014 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0093949 PLOS OnePaper: https://tinyurl.com/pwefk88 -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Librarians, copyright and the IR
Chris Zielinski ziggytheb...@gmail.com: From my perspective as a former head of the UK collecting society for British authors. the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, I think the real weak link in the copyright chain is the academic author. If authors claimed or retained their copyright more strongly and just gave publishers publication licenses for specific uses, they could control, or at least influence, the openness of publication. Individual authors can't do this. It requires mass action, which we've shown in over a decade of discussion of OA that is very hard to acheive except by mobilising the existing institutional arrangements. Individual authors seeking a permission to publish rather than a copyright transfer are simply told that their papers cannot be published. At least that was my experience a few years ago when I tried a number of times tokeep the copyright to my papersand missed out on special issues relevant to my work, because the editor couldn't get permission from the corporate owner to vary their requirement to transfer cpoyright. Of course the US government has shown us that if a large enough (or inthe case of universities a large enough bloc) has apolicy, then the publishers will accept it. But individual authors just cut off their noses if they try this and as Stevan has pointed out, requiring a copyright retention clause can make it harder to get an OA policy accepted as authors quite rightly worry that their papers will be unable to be published in their journal of choice because of the copyright requirement. In an ideal world all publishers would have something similar to the ACM permission to publish license instead of a copyright transfer, butwe don'tlive in an ideal world and individual authors as individuals can't do anything to change this. Senior tenured professors may be able to ignore publication locus, but even they may be subject to reviews (e.g. REF) where nothaving published in the most prestigious places can harm them. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Library Vetting of Repository Deposits
Dana Roth wrote: Thanks to Stevan for reminding the list that working with librarians will, in the long run, be much more productive than denigrating their efforts. I am all in favour or working with librarians when those librarians are working to promote Open Access. When librarians work in ways which inhibit my view of the best route to Open Access, I reserve the right to criticise those actions. There are many librarians who do get it and with who I'm happy to share common cause, and to praise their efforts. I have in the past said that the ideal situation for promoting open access at an institution is for a coalition of reseaerchers, manager and librarians to work at explaining the benefits to the institution (in achieving its mission and in gaining early adopter relative benefits) to the rest of the researchers, managers and librarians. Unfortunately, in too many cases, librarians (often those who were not the original OA evangelist librarians) apply a wrong-headed set of roadblocks to institutional repository deposit processes which delays OA, makes deposit more frustrating and more difficult for researchers, and weakens the deposit process. It is these librarians that I wish to get out of the way, not librarians in general. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex
The challenge now for UK Universities will be to keep librarians out of the way of reserachers, or their assistants, depositing the basic meta-data and full text in the repository. At the University of Reading, where I was involved in early developments around the IR but left the University before the final deposit mandate (*) was adopted and the process decided on, they have librarians acting as a roadblock in getting material uploaded.Thisistotheextentthat a paper published in an electronic proceedings at a conference was refused permission to be placed in the repository, for example, while there is a significant delay in deposited materials becoming visible, while librarians do a host of (mostly useful but just added value and not necessary) checking. Sigh, empire building and other bureaucratic nonsense getting in the way of the primary mission - scholarly communications. (*) They have a deposit mandate but refuse to call it that. I'm not sure why, butthey insist on calling it a policy. If one reads this policy, it's a mandate (albeit not an ideal one). For a University with an overly strong management team and a mangerialist approach, this unwillingness to call a spade a spade and a mandate a mandate, seems odd. Perhaps it's that this policy came from a bottom up development and not a senior management idea so they're unwilling to give it a strong name. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: When Gold OA isn't free to non-subscribers!!
https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/03/26/elseviergate-elsevier-is-still-charging-for-open-access-even-after-i-have-told-them-wellcome-should-take-them-to-court/ Elseviergate; Elsevier is STILL charging for Open Access even after I have told them. Wellcome should take them to court Someone needs to take formal action against Elsevier. Like taking them to court. In this case Wellcome. This is yet another reason to prefer the Green route to Open Access. Hybrid Open Access depends on the publisher actually making the paper freely available, while their infrasutrcture is set up, and the incentives are in place, for them to default technically to closed access if they have any doubt or difficulty about the status ofthat article. Even Gold OA can have its problems. I published a paper in the then-new then-OA journal Policy and Internet in 2010. Last year I happened to follow the link on my own website to find that the link was broken, the journal had moved to Wiley and had become toll access. Until that point, I had not been properly depositing my OA journal papers in a repository,butinstead was trusting that OA papers would stay OA. Foolish me. It appears that even when one has paid for an article to be made openly accessible, it does not always appear so, permanently. So, wemust take responsibility ourselves for ensuring access to our articles, which means repositories, and agreements between repositories to provide distributed cross-archiving of content. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles
Sally Morris wrote: I find Andrew's experience surprising. When Cox Cox last looked into this (in 2008), 53% of publishers requested a copyright transfer, 20.8% asked for a licence to publish instead, and 6.6% did not require any written agreement. A further 19.6%, though initially asking for transfer of copyright, would on request provide a licence document instead. There had been a steady move away from transfer of copyright since 2003. What's surprising about the fact that if 50% or so of publishers require a copyright transfer that a personal policy of not transferring copyright would be a problem? In my first case there was a special issue call that was perfect for a paper I was in the process of writing. I asked the editor about anexclusive license to publish instead of a copyright transfer. The (academic) special issue editor passed me to the (academic) main editor who passed me to the (publishing house) production staff who said an unequivocal no. I passed on the special issue then had to go through three journals to find a suitable publication locus. Particularly when one's work is unusual and interdisciplinary, putting the extra burden of not transferring copyright on oneself limits one's choice of journals significantly and may well require publication in a far less prestigious place. The move may have been away fom copyright transfer, as it should be, but as I said for junior staff or those for whom publication locus is used by anyone as a quality proxy, it's not something one should do individually. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Public (Library) Access: A Predictable Publish Sop/Swap for Open Access
I'm a subcriber and occasional columnist for the THE and I've found their OA coverage to be almost universally poor. Most of the feature articles are written by people who oppose OA for some reason (either publisher [including scholarly assocition] representatives mroe concerned with their publishing profits [surpluses] than academic communication; or academics who've not properly looked at the proposals and who conflate OA with removing peer review, or with Author-pays Gold OA only). Their staff articles are usually just as wrong-headed. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles
Chris Zielinski ziggytheb...@gmail.com wrote: But even more prudent authors simply shouldn't sign the copyright assignment form - publishers don't need anything more than a licence to publish. Good luck with that if you're anything other than a tenured professor with a track record that means where your recent papers are published won't effect funding decisions (individually or for your univesity). I tried to apply this rule myself a few years ago and after a couple of occasions of getting nowhere with the publishers decided that doing this individually was just harming my career and not having any impact on the journals. Now, I just archive and be damnedposting the author's final text (not the publisher PDF) in open depot ignoring any embargoes. If any publisher bothered to issue a take-down I'd reset to closed access (and always respond to button requests). None have so far. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Unanimity (Re: Monographs)
Rick Anderson wrote: Researchers tend to see OA models as presenting a mixed bag of upsides and downsides (as any publishing model does). Open Access is NOT a publishing model. It is a descriptive binary property of an article: is it available electronically, without fee, from an easily locatable source (gratis OA; and with a suitable license for libre OA)? Green OA is not 8directly) about publishing models (though if we reach close to 100% Green gratis OA there may be consequences for some business models of publishing). There are many routes to OA, some involving new publishing models, but OA is a description not a model. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Unanimity (Re: Monographs)
Jan, There are reasons for requiring green deposit even where an article is already OA on the journal. First, that canchange - one of my articles was published in a new Journal (Vol 2(2)) which a couple of years later was sold by bepress to iley and became closed - very annoyingly to me on two grounds - I was not informed of the change and the original URL stopped working. Second is the very practical measure that it is easy for an institution to check whether every article deposited has a full text paper in the repository (simply by checking that a suitable document is there - the fact that it would be possible for an author to upload a blank document requires an assumption of malfeasance far beyond the likelihood of it ever happening - the chances that sooner or later someone would spot and report such an upload are so high that very few would be foolish enough to do this). Compare this to checking (regularly because of my first point) that the URL (which is more likely to a web page rather than adeep link tothedocument) gives open access, which takes a ridiculous amount of work. Institutions almost universally already collect for very good reasons the meta-data of their researchers' output. Adding the requirement to submit the full text of the accepted version is a very small amount of extra work done in a scalable manner. Everything else does not properly scale. On the point about libre OA and gratis OA, I'm afraid you are wrong about open in English meaning the same as libre. Open has exactly the same problems as free in terms of being overloaded. I'm working on a paper at the moment on this issue, but the simple pointer to this is the use of the word open in the two phrases: Open Educational Resources (OERs), in which open generally means libre Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), in which open generally means gratis None of the main MOOC platforms have libre licensing of the content, not even the non-profit ones. MIT's OpenCourseWare (not the first or the only OER resource but a major instance of it) specifically provides for a CC-BY-NC license. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Big Deals, Big Macs and Consortial Licensing
ID/OA mandate for journal articles can then go on to break new ground with books and book chapters, but until most universities have such mandates even then the time of their senior people with a passion for and belief in the necessity of OA would still be better putting MOST of their effort into spreading the word to other institutions while quietly working with their own staff on extending the mandate in sensible small incremental ways to material for which the case is not so clear and all-encompassing: i.e. libre OA, mandates for other types of material, open data deposits etc. However, even if somewhere like Liege strengthened their mandate to include Libre OA and other types of material, then the way to that goal for everyone would still be to first adopt a journal article deposit mandate and then strengthen it with the support of the authors, instead of trying to go for a big bang. We don'thave seven league boots so we must plod towards OA one step at a time: First step: lobby each institution to adopt a Liege-style ID/OA mandate. Once we've got that step taken by enough institutions then we cantalk about the next steps. Otherwise we stumble and get nowhere or at least not very far (as we have mostly been doing for well two decades). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Query about OA Publisher
Actually ... Sciknow is on Beall's list http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ So it is. I managed to miss it when checking through (I promise you I did look before posting - I should have looked twice, I guess). Sorry to have wasted people's time. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Query about OA Publisher
Has anyone come across SciKnow (www.sciknow.org) and have an opinion about their legitimacy? (They're not on Beall's list.) -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Media research analyst at Exane BNP Paribas Sami Kassab on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?
RIchard Poynder quotes Sami Kassab from an interview: The same goes for institutions. Elsevier has over 4,000 institutional clients around the globe. Less than 300 institutions have signed OA mandates worldwide. In contrast, MOOCs have taken the higher education world by storm with hundreds of institutions experimenting with MOOCs within a few months. Hmm, something of a apples and oranges comparison here. Experimenting with MOOCs could better be likened to having an institutional repository into which staff members are allowed to deposit articles, rather than the adoption of a strong deposit mandate. I know of no University that has required the development of any MOOC (it's one of my areas of research). So far, the MOOCs on offer are those produced by the early enthusiasts for teaching innovation, at similar proportions (a tiny percentage of all staff) who voluntarily deposited their papers in the early days of OA. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Forthcoming research: open access article processing fees
Heather, The ACM, a major scholarly society publisher in computer science, set it APCs for hybrid gold journals (and hybrid gold for its fully-refereed conference proceedings, an unusual element of computer science research whereby full papers are reviewed for conference which produce proceedings which are of equivalent status to journals, in some cases being the premiere publication locus in a field) by reference explicitly not to the costs it incurs for articles but at the low end of commercial publishing rates. They are looking at their entire business model (which currently has publishing as a major income line but which they admit is an uncertain basis on which to proceed) over the next few months but any changes to this will not be quick. There are groups within ACM pushing for cost-receovery only on APCs including breaks for under-resourced authors (including but not limited to those from developing economies). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Sour Grapes in the SSP Scholarly Scullery
Joseph Esposito wrote: I think it is also incorrect, or at least misleading, to say that 60% of articles are OA now. �The figure is closer to 100%. �Articles appear everywhere: �on author's blogs, in institutional repositories, on sites dedicated to particular topics--not to mention the availability as email attachments. �What's missing is an easy way to find things and to know that what you find is the version you are looking for. If that happens, there would be no Green OA at all. I'm afraid Joseph is mistaken. I have often spent a significant amount of time trying to find an article, even to the extent of emailing the authors asking if they have an electronic off-print they can send me or an open access version to which they can send me a link. While I can sometimes find a version on a web page other than a repository, it's quite rare outside computer science. In at least one case the response to a request for an OA version was a pointer to the toll-access publisher page. In that case the author did not even understand the request. As an interdisciplinary researcher I range over a lot of disciplines and often am looking quite far back (I recently traced a set of theories in psychology back to their origins in the 60s and 70s, for example) and even for older articles there is a lot that is not available to me, and I work at a university with a reasonably well-funded library. Chaos is NOT the answer. Scholars are NOT universally voluntarily providing access to their work. Persuading institutions to require their scholars to provide access via their repositories. I still have seen no other suggestion for which the mathematics works. Disciplines are too ill-defined for the most part for the arXiv approach to work, and disciplines and institutions are the only points of leverage that I can see, since attempt to directly persuade all researchers individually have failed to even get the idea of open access through to some (see the above example about being pointed to the toll access portal when asking for an open access version). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] University-as-publisher goes OA, but fails as University-as-provider
Via the EIFL newsletter: - OA publishing at Nicolaus Copernicus University Published: 26 Jul 2013 Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Poland introduces a mandatory open access publishing policy for all NCU journals. In 2012 an open journal publishing platform (based on OJS) was launched that currently hosts 30 open access journals published under Creative Commons BY-ND license. Within two years all 40 NCU journals will be openly available on this platform. NCU also encourages open access to all research outputs and open educational resources via institutional OA repository, digital library and OER portal to promote Polish science and education in the world. The University Library has played a significant role in these developments. Congratulations to Bo\u017cena Bednarek-Michalska, EIFL-OA country coordinator, and her NCU colleagues! http://tinyurl.com/pb763fl - AAA comment: However, Nicolaus Copernicus University does not appear to have a Green OA Mandate (it has no entry in ROARMAP, at least). SO, while it's activity as a publisher in moving to OA is to be lauded, it is likely that its own academics produce far more articles in a year than are published in these 40 journals, and without a mandate many of these articles are probably languishing inaccessible behind paywalls at publisher sites. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Paid Gold vs. Free Gold
Are there examples of such subscription journals that make their online version freely accessible online (immediately upon publication). Policy and Internet, which used to be published by BEPress (and annoyingly, links to their site are now dead, without them telling authors) but since moved to Wiley Online Library. The subscription is online only and institutional only. BEPress used to have a nag-wall in the way of access (they requested but didn't require that you recommend institutional subscription to your librarian to help fund the journal). The annual institutional subscription rate is $327 pa. I'm not sure what, other than helping to ensure the viability of the journal, this subscription gets the institution since both the HTML and PDF versions of all the papers seem to be open (I don't think we have an institutional subscription that's invisible to me, though I haven't checked from home). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Paid Gold vs. Free Gold
Jan is right. It appears my institution has a subscription that I didn't know about - when trying to access the papers from home, I now get directed to a paywall. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: March 2013 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Peter Suber wrote (in the SPARC OA Newsletter): Because Holdren is officially the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), some are calling this the OSTP directive. That's accurate and fair. But because it would not have seen the light of day without the President's approval, I'm calling it the Obama or White House directive. Incidentally, in addition to running OSTP, Holdren is the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/about/leadershipstaff/director Holdren's own title for the directive is, Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. You can see why we need a new, snappier title. (Any ideas?) I think we should refer to this as the White House Open Access Directive, or the WHOA Directive. Whoa, dude, that's seriously good news. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Arthur Sale wrote: Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. My focus is on the papers. The text and images published in the peer reviewed journal literature. For that, but the whole of that (all subjects, all papers), I contend that institutional repositories, with deposit of the paper mandated by the institution and funders, is the quickest and simplest route to universal gratis OA. If we receive that before I clock out I can assure you that I will be involved in the push for expanding that openness, but I have yet to see a mechanism that scales to all fields better than institutional and funder mandates for IR-deposit (plus whatever data deposit individual discplines mandate, with simple cross-deposit of papers where feasible). For specific fields there are areas of highly structured data that could and should be put into disciplinary archives, and linked across to papers that use/refer to that data. These archives are best centrally-run by a non-profit scholarly body. Papers that reference data in that can easily be deposited locally and then the central data repository can either have the paper pushed to it or pull the meta-data and link back to the IR for the full-text (with access button request if needed by publisher embargoes). I do not disagree on this. However, the push for central discipline-specific repositories being the mandated locus of deposit for papers does not scale to all disciplines because not all disciplines have a need of a data repository, not all disciplines have a cohesive enough body to run one and many disciplines have very fuzzy edges. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Peter, Thank you for the correction. I mis-remembered the mandate from these (I think a bit confusingly named) systems. Too late to send a correction to an organisation like the White House. Hopefully if anyone who understand it well enough for it to be useful actually reads it, they will also spot and discount the error. On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. Deposit locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than trying to mandate different deposit loci for the various authors in an institution. It's easy enough to automatically harvest/cross-deposit, and then one gets the best of all worlds. Central deposit and then local harvest is the wrong workflow. It's trying to make a river flow upstream. Sure, you can do it, but why bother if all you need is a connection one way or the other. ALl the benefits you claim simply come from deposit, not direct deposit, in central repositories. Which would you recommend for medical physics, by the way? ArXiv or PMC? Both surely, but that's much more easily achieved if the workflow is to deposit locally then automatically upload/harvest to both, than two central deposits or trying to set up cross-harvesting from ArXiv to PMC. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. Deposit locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than trying to mandate different deposit loci for the various authors in an institution. Peter Murray-Rust replied: This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to deposit sequences communally - and they do. The genome community requires genes deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require crsytal structures and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers... The community requires? How, exactly? I do not dispute that there are a smal number of subfields where OA of papers has been successful without mandates, and in some areas instead of in addition there is deposit of certain types of research data unmandated. However, they are a tiny minority of academia. Do you disagree with this assessment? The question then becomes how we get the rest of academia to do so. Despite the possibilities having existed for over twety years, the vast majority have yet to do so, despite it being in their interests. Who can require them to do so? Their employers and funders. What is the most efficient way for employers and funder to mandate deposit (a mandate requires at least some level of compliance checking otherwise it's really just a suggestion). Since: A. The funder alrady knows the institution of the researcher (in most cases the institution receives some funds as wlel as the individual) and virtually all funded research is to researchers within an institutional context. B. the institution knows who the researchers are and knows what grants they hold. C. Interdisciplinary research has no single natural home - does medical physics go to arXiv or PMC? Do we deposit in one and push to the other or deposit in both? D. There are other institutional benefits to local deposit (all local papers are acessible locally without worrying about embargoes; publication lists for projects, researchers, departments, and the whole institution can be automatically generated) which can't so easily be gained from local harvesting from diverse central repositories. From a mathematical standpoint central and local deposit and harvesting are functionally equivalent if the technology is sufficiently advanced. But this abstracts away the very practical issue that researchers have a known (and in the vast majority of cases singular) institutional affiliation which the research, institution and funder all know about already, whereas in a large number of cases disciplinary affiliations are murky and hard to define. It is entirely possible to set up a national repository instead of local ones with the log-in credentials of the researcher set to include their affiliation. This is very different from subject repositories and can easily be regarded as a set of institutional repositories sharing a back-end service. Discipline boundaries are too fuzzy to be efficient as a mechanism for mandating and monitoring mandate-compliance. THey are much better situated as overlays providing viewpoints on the data sets (whether holding the full-text or just the meta-data at this point is a minor issue, since the problem at present is not incoherence but lack of content). My published papers include references to, and/or publication in journals of computer science, mathematics, education, artificial intelligence, law, governance, history, psychology, sociology and others. What subject repository should I be depositing in? SHould my distance education papers be in both an educational and a computer science repository? Should my privacy papers be in law, sociology, psychology, economics and computer science? I have had three institutional affiliations and each paper was published when I was at one of another of these, giving clarity and a limit on where I should deposit. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Peter, You're talking about a very narrow subset of science here. I'm talking about all of academic scholarship that is published in journals. Yes, the stuff you're talking about is a small minority of academic research. A quick search seems to show that much of Crystallography is open access. That's great for crystallographers. They're on the ball, clearly. But so few others are! Would I like scholarship to be better done (including science)? Oh my word, yes. But I don't think we're going to get everyone quickly to revise their approaches. We've seen twenty years of trying to get other fields to sort themselves out as HE Physics did and as Crystallography appears to have done. How many other fields have done this? How many people are arguing for it in those fields, how many wasted years are we seeing? I run across basic barriers of access to my own research needs day in and day out, as do my students. What I primarily need access to is papers, not large datasets. Large datasets in my areas of research are limited and nowhere near as universal as the physical sciences (well-done crystallography data is only going to be superseded when better tools come along, but social science data sets are highly time and culture-dependent, while practical computer science results are often outmoded every eighteen months by Moore's Law). If I could get the ACM, the IEEE, the IET to open all their papers held in well-developed digital libraries, I would do so. I do argue for them to do so and they're slowly moving in this direction (ACM at least, the one I'm most involved with). But it's slow and they're only a minority (albeit a large one) of CS literature and that leaves out the psychology, sociology. It sounds to me like the reason that you keep arguing for better data mining access on papers is because in your field that actual access to the raw data and the individual's access to papers (a quick search on crystallography revealed few barriers, although since I'm at work I'm not sure how many are invisible to me because of my work IP address). You're in a privileged position if this is so. Partly because my work is so interdisciplinary, I see the access barriers every day. About half the papers on my hard drive are OA versions. I can access far fewer than half of the papers I'd like to see because they're neither open access nor inside a subscription that my university pays for. So, Peter, when was the last time you wanted personal access to a paper to read it (not so that you could data mine it, but so that you could just read it with your own eyeballs) and couldn't get it? How often does this happen to you? What proportion of the papers you'd like to read are unavailable to you? Has what the crystallographers done been good? From the looks of it, it's great. But I can't get other fields to do it, because I'm not inside them, and since very few of them are showing significant movements in the right direction, I'm persuaded that we have to come at this from a different angle - funders and institutions. If we can get them to work together, then we can get the majority of papers open. That7s the first step, but only the first step, you're right. But once that first step has been taken the rest, I believe, will become much much easier to take. Otherwise we're back to finding people passionate enough to push through openness in every single discipline and most disciplines are nowhere near as cohesive as HE Physics and Crystallography. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Here is a message I sent to the US White House about the OATP Presidential mandate. First I would like to express my support and thanks for the announcement of the policy on open access to scientific literature announced by Dr John Holdren. This is an important expansion of themove towards open access globally and in all disciplines. THis is in no way a criticism, but a push to help ensure that the implementation of this policy achieves the best effect. There are two problems with the existing NIH policy which impede its effectiveness and I would urge that you consider these in communications with the relevant heads of agencies. The first is that the primary means of achieving Open Access should be by deposit in either an institutional repository (for those researchers with an institutiona such as a research lab or a university) or in a single nominated general repository (preferably the OpenDepot: www.opendepot.org). Please do not encourage agencies to make the mistake of following the NIH which mandated direct deposit in BioMedCentral. By all means encourage automatic harvesting for relevant papers to relevant central or subject repositories such as BMC or even an agencies own. However, mandating deposit in an institutional repository encourages and reinforces institutions to maintain their own repositories and to mandate deposit of all research into that repository (not just federal funded research). While the federal government cannot easily mandate the outputs of research it does not fund to be deposited, specifying institutional repositories as the locus of deposit of outputs from federally-funded projects helps to encourage institutional mandates, and reduces the complexity of complying with multiple funder mandates: researchers deposit in the institutional repository whichever funder or funders they work with (and by adding a funder field, any central harvesting can then be automatic, as can reports to the funder about compliance with the mandate - see next point). The second problem with the NIH mandate which should be avoided is related and is the oversight of compliance with the mandate. By specifying that the institution and the author(s) have the responsibility for deposit in their institutional repository, this allows quite simple checking of compliance with the mandate. In particular, the submission of future funding applications and reports on current/recently completed projects can then admit papers as evidence of track record/project success only if they are accompanied by a pointer to the deposit. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] New Year's challenge for repository developers and managers: awesome cross-search
Alma Swan wrote: The UK's House of Lords (upper chamber of Parliament) Science Technology Committee is conducting an enquiry into Open Access. Written submissions are welcome. Individuals and organisations are invited to give their views on the actions taken by Government and RCUK following publication of the Finch report. [snip] In particular, there are four issues highlighted by the committee: [snip] 2 embargo periods for articles published under the Green model [snip] Sigh. How often do we have to explain the very basics of the Open Access movement to these people making policy? How can we have spent so long failing to make the simple definitions clear: There is no such thing as an article published under the Green model. The Green approach to Open Access involves articles being published in a journal following peer review. The publisher provides access to a formatted version of this article on print and/or electronically, usually in return for a fee. In order to provide access to those who cannot afford to pay the publisher's toll, the author, either on their own initiative or because of mandate from their funder or employer, deposits the original accepted text (from after peer review and corrections sought by the reviewers but often before any formatting, copyediting or similar services provided by the publisher) in a repository and provides access either openly, or by individual request. THey are not publishing the article in the academic sense, simply providing parallel access to the core text (and graphics). Using the term articles published under the Green model invites the misunderstanding that Green is about articles self-published without peer review. Green is about supplementary access provision to articles Published in the traditional manner, not about some radical new form of publication. Alma, could you provide the source of the issues you highlight? The URL you gave is just to the format of how to submit, but does not include the actual remit of the inquiry. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Aaron Swartz RIP
Many on this list are probably aware of Aaron Swartz due to his investigation (some have described it as hounding) after his unauthorised installation of a computer in a network system cupboard at MIT through which he downloaded a substantial number of papers from JSTOR (which he explained he desired to use for text mining and could not access that size of corpus any other way). He was very well known in the wider free culture, free software and digital rights communities as a brilliant dedicated campaigner and developer, in particular being a major campaigner against the PIPA/SOPA bills in the US Congress recently. He committed suicide on 11th January (he had suffered from depression). There are various obituaries and dedications to his memory online. Here are a few: http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26 http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Further Fallout From Finch Folly
Are many of the new commercial journals actually �subscribed to� or are they added to existing packages in hopes they will capture sufficient market share to continue? � my assumption is that the concept of loss leaders is NOT operable for society published journals. While I don't think many societies consider loss leading with one or more journals, I do think there are journals suported by scholarly societies that do not directly cover their costs. It all depends on the society. The ACM is IMHO one of the better societies on OA, though I would still like to push it further and more quickly and will do so as opportunity arises - they've just compelted a major move on OA and the publications board seem unwilling to entertain new ideas before the current one beds in. They do not require each and every publication to directly cover its own costs in subscriptions, or even in usage in their digital library. As a non-prifit with an elected publications board while the society seeks to maintain proper operating budget controls they also cross-subsidise operations and do not try to allocate fixed central costs evenly or even pro-rated to all publications. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: The UK Gold Rush: A Hand-Out from the British Government
Fred Friend wrote: [snip] I myself have addressed three e-mails to Rt Hon David Willetts MP through a message system on the BIS web-site for those taxpayers who âwant to get in touch with a BIS Ministerâ, receiving no reply to any of the three messages within the 15 working days promised. A hint about how politics and representation works in the UK, for those with a vote in the UK. Write to your own MP either on paper or via fax (www.writetothem.org provides an electronic interface which identifies your MP for you, allows you to enter your message, has you confirm your email address and then sends the fax for you - it's part of mysociety.org, a non-profit devoted to improving democratic accountability in the UK). Ask you MP to raise the question with the minister on your behalf. Ministers are supposed to answer questions from MPs and most MPs are happy to pass on reasonable questions on policy and implementation details for their constituents. While it may take a while, I have always got a reply from a minister from whom I have desired information by using this method. The MPs have admin staf whose job it is to chase up unanswered queries. Of course the typical response will be a form letter, so I've found it useful to then reply to my MP again (they send a letter out so I have sent one back, though one could use writetothem again) pointing out that the stock answer doesn't answer my real question and asking for further attention to be paid. It's an invovled process, but tat's the way to have a real impact and ensure that someone close to a minister pays attention to the issues being raised. They use both the via-the-MP, physical/fax and two strikes methods to separate out things that people really care about from those that won't change their votes. Multiple submissions of the exact same question look like an orchestrated campaign and have less impact than individual questions on the same topic but with varied wording and emphasis addressing substantially the same issue. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke
Erice Van de Velde wrote: In my mind, the explicit and the non-explicit versions are all equivalent, and all equally irrelevant, as they are just different levels of name calling. I am not aware of anyone making the explicit Hitler argument when it comes to open access. In fact, even my shrill version of the argument was a non-explicit version. I thought I was clear about this in the post, but just restating it to be absolutely clear. I don't think we need Hitler's to exist in order to say that en masse the role of scientific publishers has become a net negative for scholarly work, but is so entrenched and there are far too many collaborators amongst particularly senior academics and managers of academic institutions (sometimes the same group, or the latter drawn from the same group but not always). However, at the risk of sounding shrill and falling afoul of Godwin's Law, I do think that the banality of evil applies here. The current commercial publishers, many of them multi-media conglomerates who have gobbled up the smaller companies who were quietly making modest profits and working with the academic community in a way much more similar to the scholarly societies than the large commercial publishers (*), have taken the existing agreement on things like copyright transfer rather than license to publsh and gone beyond the unwritten bargain and started applying the letter of the copyright law by doing things like requiring written permission before allowing re-use of a diagram (even by the author and creator) and by charging ridiculous sums per article - more than many books, the standard price usually being about $30-40 per article, delivered electronically. All this while the technology has allowed them to cut costs substantially (and to transfer some of the lowered costs onto authors who now do large parts of the typesetting themselves). They do this while now restricting access from what it could be. Their motives are immaterial, the result is evil. (*) largely run by and employing people who cared about the content of what they were publishing rather than simply seeing it as one more cash cow -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[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/ -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] (no subject)
are only the first step, but without us taking that first step first, as a body, focussing on getting everyone (by everyone I mean all researchers, research instutitions, funders and governments) to take that first step, we will continue to fall flat on our faces. Finch is a diversion from taking that first step, driven by idealists who have failed to learn the lessons of the decade since the BOAI and by the those with their own rent-seeking profits in mind. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable
There have been a number of rather aggressive exchanges on this list recently and some of them have contained the accusation that Stevan or one of the other Green-first proponents are against Gold or against Libre. I would just like to shortly and clearly re-iterate my own position on this which I am certain Stevan at least shares (and which I am fairly certain all of the other Green-first advocates also share): CC-BY licensed journals without reader charges are the clear long-term goal of OA. Those supporting the Green Mandate route simply claim that so far the only route which can be demonstrated by argument to most quickly achieve a significant portion of this (restricted licensed access to the author's final draft directly for ~60% of papers and via an automated request button for the other 40%) is via funder and institutional Immediate Deposit/Optional Access mandates. In replying to arguments putting forth this view, please do not advance the claim that anyone advancing it is anti-Gold or anti-CC-BY. We are not, we are just realists that change is usually incremental, and this is the only incremental step that we can see being possible to persuade academia to take in sufficient numbers to get us moving towards the final goal, and to gain us a significant benefit in the short term. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Why should publishers agree to Green OA?
Alicia, What on earth business is it of Elsevier what the arrangements I have with my funding body or university? You are seriously overreaching in your arrogance to presume to interfere. You either give me (i.e. all authors) the right to make a green deposit or you don't. This overweening attitude of the academic publishers - an intermediary and no more - in the field of scholarly communications starts to beggar belief. I will not abide by any such ridiculous terms or caveats regarding my relations with third parties, nor do I advise anyone else to pay any attention whatsoever to this unbelievable FUD. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Dreadful Daily Mail article on Open Access
Eric Van de Velde wrote: I do not think one can counter the jobs argument by simply denying it. Open access will destroy jobs initially, but it will also create jobs by making access to research free, which is particularly significant for start-up ventures. It may also lower the cost of education or, at least, help tame the educational rate of inflation. This will not be an easy argument to make to a skeptical public, which will be presented with misleading PR like the one in the Daily Mail article. Indeed, the analysis being quoted by David Willets and the Mail, and on which the Finch Report seems to be based, is a standard example of the classis Broken Window Fallacy where what is easily seen in the economy is taken to be more valuable than that which takes detailed analysis to observe and which can frequently only be estimated not directly measured (though those estimates if done properly can include decent upper and lower bounds and good confidence figures. While the UK may see money come into its economy on balance from worldwide universities paying publishers their parasitic profits, the cost to UK Universities alone (let alone any other UK body which pays these profits) and how much amplification on wealth production (investment in universities is very lucrative for an economy, one of the reasons the current governments' strategies on university funding are so deeply flawed) would almost certainly outweigh any loss of income from worldwide publishing rents. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] UK's EPSRC Reminder Scientists of OA Mandate
On 15th May 2012, the UK'S EPSRC issued a reminder on their OA policy in their Connect newsletter. This article available (freely) here: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/pubs/mags/connect/2012/86/Pages/ccesstoresea rchpublications.aspx or via tinyurl since my mail handler will split the line of that long URL: http://tinyurl.com/c68jt93 -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Meaning of Open Access
Jan Velterop wrote: there is scant reason to overcome those [technical difficulties] for so-called OA articles if text-mining is not allowed. This has to be one of the most ridiculous statements I've seen anyone make on this list. The vast majority of scholars and scientists want and need to read articles. Text mining of the corpus is an interesting and potentially useful new tool but the main tool for academics and other readers of the journal literature is their own eyes and minds. Look at the term open access. What is the principle noun here? Access. Nothing else, just access. Without access nothing else can follow. Indeed this access, by humans quickly and simply for their own reading and understanding, is what is needed by all and all this is needed by most. Let us first grasp that, rather than trying to solve all the problems at once. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Meaning of Open Access
Jan Velterop wrote: there is scant reason to overcome those [technical difficulties] for so-called OA articles if text-mining is not allowed. This has to be one of the most ridiculous statements I've seen anyone make on this list. The vast majority of scholars and scientists want and need to read articles. Text mining of the corpus is an interesting and potentially useful new tool but the main tool for academics and other readers of the journal literature is their own eyes and minds. Look at the term open access. What is the principle noun here? Access. Nothing else, just access. Without access nothing else can follow. Indeed this access, by humans quickly and simply for their own reading and understanding, is what is needed by all and all this is needed by most. Let us first grasp that, rather than trying to solve all the problems at once. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open data
Jan Velterop wrote: The trouble with focussing on 'green', rather than on full BOAI-compliant OA for research literature, is that it has become an a priori concession and an end in itself. That only confuses matters (as do ill-defined labels such as 'gratis' and 'libre').? We should insist on BOAI-compliant OA (CC-BY or CC-0) for all research articles, including for self-archived articles. And if anything, we should insist on institutional repositories to actually be searchable and accessible also for text mining. Human-readable OA is a conditio sine qua non, but it is not sufficient for modern science. The trouble with focussing on this high level is that there isn't agreement amongst scientists that this is what is needed, and on exactly what the limits of this are. Indeed, opening up one's data can involve significantly more work for the scientist/scholar. Green OA requires a few keystrokes per paper. Perhaps five minutes work (so long as one's repository is set up well and one keeps focussed on providing the paper's text and does not get too hung up about more than citing meta-data). I have a PhD student, for example, who has just finished her thesis. The thesis and papers from it contain various statistics and quotes drawn from her field work. We are still working on further papers from the thesis with an expectatin of two more to come. The data has been appropriately developed for the publications written at present, but the fullw interviews from which quotes are drawn have not had their source seudonymised; the numeric data has only been put systematised for the precise analyses used in the thesis and the papers. Some of it is in incompatible file formats with chunks of the raw data put into different tools in different (overlapping but not a single set in any one tool). What rights to first publication of specific analysis on this data do my student and her supervisors have? Which elements of the data are required to be made available? If we wait until we can answer these questions before providing the additional access to the existing outputs then we are likely to wait another twenty years or more before achieving full access to the papers. Yes, in a few fields perhaps, the data must be in a publishable form before a paper can be published, but there are currently no social mechanisms, and indeed few technological mechanisms, that can cope with providing this data at present. There is an easy, simple solution to providing access to the text of papers: put a pdf, word, html, rtf, odt or even plain text of the author's final submitted text in an institutional repository or the opendepot. Human-readable OA is within our grasp but we're not grasping it! Let us grasp this first and THEN go on to sort out the more difficult issues. Otherwise we're just fiddling while Rome burns (struggling to reform the whole of scholarly and scientific communications in one go rather than doing what is simple and achievable now with little in the way of controversy about its beneficial effects on science and scholarship and then and only then dealing with the more difficult issues). -- 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/ [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Willett's Speech in Support of OA
As trailed earlier, the speech made to the Publishers' Association earlier today by David Willetts (the UK Minister for Universities and Science) is now available. While we may quibble at some aspects, it is hugely supportive of OA: http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/david-willetts-public-access-to-research I'm afraid I do rather more than quibble at some aspects. This shows the dangerous misunderstandings about OA that are hindering real progress (alongside the bizarre inability of most academics to see that we need OA as a body and that the quickest and easiest way to achieve it is to provide it mutually). Here are the phrases which worry me: Our starting point is very simple. The Coalition is committed to the principle of public access to publicly-funded research results... Perhaps I might speak from the experience of writing my own book, The Pinch, on fairness between the generations. It was very frustrating to track down an article and then find it hidden behind a pay wall. That meant it was freely accessible to a professional in an academic institution, but not to me as an independent writer. He misunderstands that this problem exists for academics as well as the general public. It would be deeply irresponsible to get rid of one business model and not put anything in its place. I am worried that he is concerned about the profits of publishers. Profits are not necessarily a natural part of academic publishing. If a profitable business model exists that reflects added value, then that's fine. However, finding a model in which costs are covered (and that can include subsidy from other sources such as membership to scholarly societies, direct university funding, direct public funding) without those costs being diverted into the coffers of a rent-seeking parasitic business is needed, not a way to ensure that someone makes profits while potentially hindering academic communication. Communication (between academics and from them to the rest of society) is the goal. The crucial options are, as you know, called green and gold. Green means publishers are required to make research openly accessible within an agreed embargo period. Here is my biggest problem. Davd Willetts does not understand Green OA. Well, he's a minister. He generally won't understand all the details of every speech he makes (the two brains nickname notwithstanding. What is more worrying is the fact that this speech reflects the lack of understanding amongst his speechwriters (political and civil servants who act as his general staff in deciding policy). With this fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that Green OA is about academics and institutions making their papers' contents available gratis while Gold OA is about publishers making papers' content available, any policy developed by the BIUS will be deeply flawed. I understand that in this speech he was talking to publishers. Perhaps we can somehow arrange for the Minister for Universities to come and give a talk at a UK university at which his message might be targetted to academics, instead. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: Wikipedia founder to help in [UK] government's research scheme
The [UK] government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. I was hoping that the new government might be less star-struck than the previous one. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, it would seem. We really don't need Jimmy Wales advising on this. The team behind eprints has been (with minimal funding) developing the technology needed for many years and there are many academics in the UK much better versed in the intricacies of UK academic work and life than Mr Wales. Sigh. I foresee another lost couple of years wasted on this instead of getting to grips with the known problem and the known solution (including providing better funding for eprints development to the team that created it and still does the software engineering for it). -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: Wikipedia founder to help in [UK] government's research scheme
The [UK] government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. I was hoping that the new government might be less star-struck than the previous one. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, it would seem. We really don't need Jimmy Wales advising on this. The team behind eprints has been (with minimal funding) developing the technology needed for many years and there are many academics in the UK much better versed in the intricacies of UK academic work and life than Mr Wales. Sigh. I foresee another lost couple of years wasted on this instead of getting to grips with the known problem and the known solution (including providing better funding for eprints development to the team that created it and still does the software engineering for it). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Dana Roth wrote: Would not the widespread provision of 'open access to the published version' at public libraries ... as is currently allowed by the American Physical Society ... solve the problem of 'public access'? Only librarians go to the library every day or find it a convenient place to find information these days. For the public it's even less convenient to visit a library in person than for academics, most of the time. Most academics at least tend to work physically (some of the time) at locations with a library. Public libraries are closing down in many places and even where they do exist, the idea that one should have to visit a specific physical location in order to access electronic information is a ridiculous anti-feature. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Dana Roth wrote: Would not the widespread provision of 'open access to the published version' at public libraries ... as is currently allowed by the American Physical Society ... solve the problem of 'public access'? Only librarians go to the library every day or find it a convenient place to find information these days. For the public it's even less convenient to visit a library in person than for academics, most of the time. Most academics at least tend to work physically (some of the time) at locations with a library. Public libraries are closing down in many places and even where they do exist, the idea that one should have to visit a specific physical location in order to access electronic information is a ridiculous anti-feature. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Researchers may already know that providing peer access is in their best interest, yet they don't massively take that interest to heart. The scientific 'community' is very conservative. Scientists, like politicians, are generally into reluctant followship, less into leadership. In my view it is time to change tactics and put more effort into mustering the persuasiveness that the potentially more dynamic general public may be able to provide. A recent spate of articles in The Guardian and The Observer in the UK, and even articles in The Economist, are good examples of what can be done to create an atmosphere in which not providing open access is frowned upon and becoming unacceptable. The pressure of public opinion can be formidable, particularly on governments and government-backed funders (though rarely admitted, of course). Recent steps taken by the RCUK may well (subconsciously) have been inspired by a desire to preempt such public pressure (and having to admit that 'it was the pressure of public opinion wot did it'). Especially in times of austerity it pays to keep the general public on board. Literally. Jan, How much influence does public opinion actually have on real policies and real actions by ordinary academics, though? Having been an academic union activist for a number of years and having tried to talk to my friends about the highly stressful situation of academics and the poor pay they receive in the UK, I found that even those with degrees (most of my friends) really had no understanding of academic work, situations etc. I suspect that's the reality found by most academics. Since they know non-academics don't understand academia, they tend to ignore pressure from the general public on specific issues because they assume the general public just doesn't get it about academia (and in many cases they are right, even if they're wrong in this one). Getting the general public to support OA may help in getting funder mandates, although as we've seen, often those funder mandates are slightly mis-aimed at central deposit. The numbers also suggest that support for medical literature will be easy (everyone needs health and even those without the understanding will know someone (their own doctor if no one else) who would probably benefit from OA). However, the number who actually read any field are likely to be a minority, and those who read any particular field an even smaller minority. Trying to get them all to get behind OA in general may well be hard to do with the publishers using their large warchests to fight us in the public debate (if you think large warchests don't matter in public debate, look at US presidential politics). We're also talking about where to focus our (i.e. archivangelists) efforts to achieve the quickest route to as much OA as we can get. Spreading ourselves thin by trying to swing general public opinion round as well as the rest may end up delaying OA if instead we focussed on persuading researchers, librarians and managers at universities and research institutions that it is in their best interests to adopt a mandate and promote it with the Liege model. By all means where there are opportunities to promote public access and funder mandates let us do that, but not at the expense of following up on the hopefully S-shaped curve of mandate adoption to keep it moving on the increasing acceleration path we've seen in the last few years. I think we're in danger of taking our eyes of the ball just as we are beginning to get somewhere with mandates. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Researchers may already know that providing peer access is in their best interest, yet they don't massively take that interest to heart. The scientific 'community' is very conservative. Scientists, like politicians, are generally into reluctant followship, less into leadership. In my view it is time to change tactics and put more effort into mustering the persuasiveness that the potentially more dynamic general public may be able to provide. A recent spate of articles in The Guardian and The Observer in the UK, and even articles in The Economist, are good examples of what can be done to create an atmosphere in which not providing open access is frowned upon and becoming unacceptable. The pressure of public opinion can be formidable, particularly on governments and government-backed funders (though rarely admitted, of course). Recent steps taken by the RCUK may well (subconsciously) have been inspired by a desire to preempt such public pressure (and having to admit that 'it was the pressure of public opinion wot did it'). Especially in times of austerity it pays to keep the general public on board. Literally. Jan, How much influence does public opinion actually have on real policies and real actions by ordinary academics, though? Having been an academic union activist for a number of years and having tried to talk to my friends about the highly stressful situation of academics and the poor pay they receive in the UK, I found that even those with degrees (most of my friends) really had no understanding of academic work, situations etc. I suspect that's the reality found by most academics. Since they know non-academics don't understand academia, they tend to ignore pressure from the general public on specific issues because they assume the general public just doesn't get it about academia (and in many cases they are right, even if they're wrong in this one). Getting the general public to support OA may help in getting funder mandates, although as we've seen, often those funder mandates are slightly mis-aimed at central deposit. The numbers also suggest that support for medical literature will be easy (everyone needs health and even those without the understanding will know someone (their own doctor if no one else) who would probably benefit from OA). However, the number who actually read any field are likely to be a minority, and those who read any particular field an even smaller minority. Trying to get them all to get behind OA in general may well be hard to do with the publishers using their large warchests to fight us in the public debate (if you think large warchests don't matter in public debate, look at US presidential politics). We're also talking about where to focus our (i.e. archivangelists) efforts to achieve the quickest route to as much OA as we can get. Spreading ourselves thin by trying to swing general public opinion round as well as the rest may end up delaying OA if instead we focussed on persuading researchers, librarians and managers at universities and research institutions that it is in their best interests to adopt a mandate and promote it with the Liege model. By all means where there are opportunities to promote public access and funder mandates let us do that, but not at the expense of following up on the hopefully S-shaped curve of mandate adoption to keep it moving on the increasing acceleration path we've seen in the last few years. I think we're in danger of taking our eyes of the ball just as we are beginning to get somewhere with mandates. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Tireless Ad Hoc Critiques of OA Study After OA Study: Will Wishful Thinking Ever Cease?
Is it really common sense? You write: Not only is OA research downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, as a result of making it accessible free for all, rather than just for those whose institutions can afford a subscription. First, downloaded more - I can agree. But cited more? This might be an entire different matter. Usually, as common sense would expect, researchers will cite. The general public, however, will not cite - they do not publish research articles. Given that researchers have more access than the general public, due to the access policies of their institution (paid-for-access, open-access, access-by-delivery), the citations to articles will not be hampered by accessibility. Because when it comes to citing an article, a serious researcher has to read it. And to read it, means: getting access, in one way or another. Jan, You are putting the cart before the horse here. A decision to cite depends (when the researcher is doing their job properly) on being able to read. Only after an article has been read can the decision to cite or not come into it. For some articles it may be plain from what is toll-fre accesible (the title for pretty much all articles, the abstract for almost all) that an article is important enough to pay whatever price is demanded for access in order to read it and then perhaps to cite it. Given that the cost for an article to which one has no institutional subscription access is usually, in my experience, $30+ for access, then in most cases I would expect researchers to look for alternative articles to read on a topic in which they are looking for relevant material. Those alternative articles will be one to which their institution has a subscription or those for which an OA version is easily available (typically through a search engine though also through web links and through repository browsing and other routes). If one works in a narrow field one is likely to have access to the small number of journals one needs. The broader one's field, and for interdisciplinary researchers this is a particular problem, the less likely it is that one's institution has a relevant subscription. My own approach is certainly this. When looking at an area of research I use various methods of finding apparently-appropriate material, which I then delve deeper into, spiralling in on what is available to me (through subscription or OA) and reading a little bit more at each stage until I get to the point of reading a whole article before perhaps citing it. If I don't have access to the article, it doesn't even get added to my citaton database - what would be the point? I can't cite it if I can't read it and I have never paid for access to an inividual article --- I check for a version I can access, subscription or OA, then email the author if I can to ask for an eprint, but if that fails I abandon the idea of reading that article and move on. There's more published in my area than I could read all of so I read and then cite from what's available to me. Anecdote not evidence, sure, but the large amounts of data on OA increasing citation rates does seem clear - in all significantly sized studies with appropriately chosen sets of articles, those that are available without cost to any and all potential citers are more often cited than those for whom potential citers are limited to those in institutions with subscription access to that article or those persuaded sight unseen to pay for access to that specific article. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: RCUK Open Access Feedback
David Prosser wrote: Say I wanted to data mine 10,000 articles. I'm at a university, but I am c= o-funded by a pharmaceutical company and there is a possibility that the re= search that I'm doing may result in a new drug discovery, which that compan= y will want to take to market. The 10,000 articles are all 'open access', = but they are under CC-BY-NC-SA licenses. What mechanism is there by which = I can contact all 10,000 authors and gain permission for my research? The intent of CC-NC is that one cannot take the original material, re-mix it (or even just as-is) and sell the resulting new work. It does not mean that the information it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting, but that the expression it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting. A simple example is that a CC-NC licensed book cannot be recorded as an audio play which is then sold. If one makes an audio book it must be available for free. However, copies of a CC-NC book can be distributed to students who are paying for a course in English literature as one of the books studied. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
) are the extra conditions, but so far everything less than a real mandate fails to achieve more than 20% or so of deposits. The process of getting a mandate adopted often requires gaining relatively broad acceptance of the idea by promotion and explanation anyway. So, I don't think we have any real disagreement on fundamental practical matters here. We agree that the technology could be better, for example interoperability between repository software and academic networking systems could be improved, ease-of-deposit can be improved by things like local or global disambiguated author lists (I find it frustrating that every time I co-author a paper with people I've coauthored with before that most repositories require me to manually fill in their names again and that they don't have joint ownership of the document). But all these are simply nice-to-have add-ons and while the vast majority of the world's research remains behind toll access barriers and while we have evidence of a way that works (properly worded and promoted mandates [shorthand: mandates]) all these extra bits of gravy are a distraction for most from following the green brick road to OA. As I've said in my own presentations on OA, a coalition of librarians, academics and management who all stand to benefit in a win-win-win from universal OA, is the way to avoid yet more lost years or even lost decades, byt moving towards adoption of the optimal mandate solution described above. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at 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/
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
Andrew Sorry for the mistake about your name and thank you for the tolerance. No problem. I've been called worse, and not in deliberate insult, either. I think the worst was being introduced to someone as Adam Adamson. The perils of a surname that is almost a first name. I'm not immune to the syndrome, either, having in person done the first/last name switch with two others, so I live in a glass house and shouldn't throw stones :-). I think that you have a rosy idea of what private enterprise researchers actually do. In many cases their attention span is under a second (well say five seconds). They have real work to do. But please DO NOT suggest that I think the AM is not any good. It is. But to suggest that any of this is OK is ideal is exaggeration, and that is what I was responding to in Stevan's post. You should also realize that private enterprise researchers (such as a fish farmer) does not have the easy un-approved access to funds that a university person has, so they don't go further. (I add that I am an honorary 'university person' so I admit to bias.) Though I have industry tacts and experience). Well, I have no experience with fish farmers. My experience is mostly with computing researchers and law resaerchers. Both of them tend to do research in very much the same way an academic will do, albeit usually with less broadness in their initial grabbing of what looks worth initial consideration than an academic would use (in my experience). I do know through my wife, who is a bi-tech journalist, that bio-tech industry people often have the same problem of limited access because of high costs that academics do but they also need to keep up with what's going on in areas related to their field so OA is really valuable to them. I don't have evidence that they do the same winnowing down that I described, but unless one works in a very narrow field I'm not sure what else one can do and keep up with the rest of the work going on. Ion point 2, I agree, mostly. In practice the mandate 'policy' is almost meaningless. In some cases it means something but is ignored. I do know you are in complete agreement with Stevan, but he uses shorthand because of the email flood, which most do not understand. I didn't say the mandate was meaningless. I think the mandate is an important and, when done correctly, necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving OA via the Green Brick Road. Too many policies are meaningless because they're either not mandates (opt-outs, attempts to force copyright-retention). I'm not sure if there are any solid mandates for ID/OA that have achieved less than 50% after a reasonable period of operation (say, 3 years). Given the mass of evidence that outside HE Physics and CS that unmandated deposit rates are around 20%, getting to 50% 60% or more in a few years is more progress than we can demonstrate for any other mechanism. Show me a mechanism with a real track-record of better success and I'll happily start advocating it. Where we disagree is that mandates are THE answer. After years of toiling along this path I have to disagree. Mandates are never going to work, just by themselves. That is why publishers are so complacent. The answer is more complex, and proponents of OA should be more perspicuous. The Research Works Act, however, seems to show that publishers are NOT complacent about mandates. In fact, they do seem to be rather more worried about mandates than unmandated allowances for archiving. What I most fear is that this mandate policy will cost OA another one or perhaps two decades. It's the best we've got now, though, and at least it's a clear mechanism that has a proven small scale track record and does scale. Nothing else we've got now shows that. So, if people want to explore other mechanisms, they're free to do so, but promoting them befre they're shown to have a better track record than the best we've got now is premature and, IMHO, more likely to lead to further lost access than promoting mandates. As mandates become better understood, we can hope that they become easy to get adopted and easier to understand and implement. -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
In response to Stevan Harnad, Arthur Sale wrote: When we turn to the researcher, the situation changes significantly, if slightly. Researchers regard the VoR as the canonic version of their article, almost exclusively (I exempt you and me and a small set of similar-minded people). As far as they are concerned, all earlier versions are suspect and not to be displayed once they have served their purpose. They also believe they wnthe VoR. This is not an cademic ideal but a practical reality. The VoR is THE CANONIC VERSION. It is one reason why many researchers fail to post anything on an OA repository, because they do not understand what their rights are and they are reluctant to post something they conceive of as flawed. There's an assumption in many of the posts on this topic that all articles accessed will be cited. My experience is that I identify many articles from their abstract (usually available for free), a forward and backwards reference search (an article is cited by another I've read or cites another one I've read), from the list of publications of an author whose other works I've read and from a number of other sources. If that article is available to me in the VoR or as an AM then I can first skim the introduction/conclusions and if it seems of further interest read the full article, or selected elements of it. After this proper reading of all or some of either the VoR or the AM then at some point I MAY wish to reference the article or quote from it. Then and only then is the VoR actually needed at all, ad actually I (as you note below) rely on the open access AM version if I don't have access already to the VoR (of course any article I don't have access to doesn't get read and therefore not cited - in particular I almost never pay the ridiculous per-article costs requested by publishers - one article costing the same as 50-100% of full books? That just demonstrates exactly how ridiculous are the subscription rates on which the per-article charges are sert pro-rata). If I really felt I needed the VoR for the articles I want to cite then I could pay the per article charge (I don't, but others may be more hesitant). In my experience, and this is just personal anecdote, I identify perhaps 50-100 times as many articles as of potential interest as I actually cite. For someone in a less interdisciplinary field perhaps their numbers might be lower, but then again they may also already have subscription access to the journals they feel they need - the narrower one's research focus, and the large one's group of researchers with the same interest, the more likely one is to have access to the necessary literature. However, I would suspect that most researchers do not cite every article they ever read. For any article one does not actually wish to cite, the VoR is not necessary. The AM should absolutely be sufficient for evaluating the importance of the article. Arthur Sale continued: Interestingly though, I believe there are a growing number of researchers who totally ignore any agreement they sign with publishers, and post their VoR regardless, because it is heirs It is this practice (in the form of providing electronic reprints) that publishers find difficult to ignore, and possibly why the copyright transfer agreements are strengthened. [snip] You make a quantitative claim here. Do you have any evidence you can offer for this? [further snippage] -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: MIT Press does not support Research Works Act
Perhaps those of us with contacts in other academic presses (particularly the major ones such as Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago...) could press their contacts to push for a disavowal from there, as well. They might also look at how such AAP lobbying and press releases is working in so diametrically opposed a fashion to parts of their interests (though I understand that such organisations have multiple facets and why MIT Press feels unable to drop its membership over this particular individual issue). -- 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/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: Is a Different OA Strategy Needed for Social Sciences and Humanities? (No)
On 2011-11-06, at 5:58 PM, Jean-Claude Gu??on wrote: most SSH journals would not accept the kind of referencing he suggests. Most journals, in fact, impose their citation and quotation referencing styles. As they now also accept electronic references, it leads to what I said: references to repository articles are beginning to appear in significant numbers. This raise a new question, that of quality control of the versions in the repositories, but that can be solved too. It is therefore true that the lack of reliable pagination is probably a fading inconvenience. Stevan Harnad replied: Yes, quote-location convention-updating is a minor and fading inconvenience. But not because we need (or are providing) peer review for already peer-reviewed author drafts, just so that quotes can have page numbers! There are simple ways to accomplish that. And what is cited is the canonical published version of record, not the specific document one actually accessed. (I don't cite a photocopy of an article, I cite the article -- journal, title, date, volume, page-span.) If a journal copy-editor, unsatisfied with the section-heading and paragraph number, insists on page numbers for the quotes, they can go look them up (when they look up the quote itself, whose wording, after all, even more important to get right than its pagination) I would go even further than Stevan and say that practically (not in the minds of editors, but as a matter of practical usage fo researchers, not librarians, not editors, not bibliometricists) even paragrph numbering is pointless and unncessary in the new world of OA, if we ever reach it. If one has access to an electronic version of a paper referenced, then quotes or keywords can be searched for in the accesible electronic version. In computer science the concept of pages has been done away with in a number of new journals. Articles are referenced by article number within volume (i.e. year of publication). We are getting caght in all these gutenberg-era traps distracting us from providing the most important thing: access to the information. Everything else is simply a matter of having the proper tools available to make use of that access. We used to worry about findability - Google Scholar pretty much solves that one. If one has even a half-decent reference with author name(s)/title and journal name, then Google scholar will find it if it can be crawled. We used to worry about finding an element within an article. Syntactic search within an article with appropriately chosen words can not only solve that, but also show where else in the same paper the same concepts were addressed. All we're missing is the access and that is within our grasp if we as a community would stop worrying about all these mythical problems and deposit. -- 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: Is a Different OA Strategy Needed for Social Sciences and Humanities? (No)
On 2011-11-06, at 5:58 PM, Jean-Claude Gu??on wrote: most SSH journals would not accept the kind of referencing he suggests. Most journals, in fact, impose their citation and quotation referencing styles. As they now also accept electronic references, it leads to what I said: references to repository articles are beginning to appear in significant numbers. This raise a new question, that of quality control of the versions in the repositories, but that can be solved too. It is therefore true that the lack of reliable pagination is probably a fading inconvenience. Stevan Harnad replied: Yes, quote-location convention-updating is a minor and fading inconvenience. But not because we need (or are providing) peer review for already peer-reviewed author drafts, just so that quotes can have page numbers! There are simple ways to accomplish that. And what is cited is the canonical published version of record, not the specific document one actually accessed. (I don't cite a photocopy of an article, I cite the article -- journal, title, date, volume, page-span.) If a journal copy-editor, unsatisfied with the section-heading and paragraph number, insists on page numbers for the quotes, they can go look them up (when they look up the quote itself, whose wording, after all, even more important to get right than its pagination) I would go even further than Stevan and say that practically (not in the minds of editors, but as a matter of practical usage fo researchers, not librarians, not editors, not bibliometricists) even paragrph numbering is pointless and unncessary in the new world of OA, if we ever reach it. If one has access to an electronic version of a paper referenced, then quotes or keywords can be searched for in the accesible electronic version. In computer science the concept of pages has been done away with in a number of new journals. Articles are referenced by article number within volume (i.e. year of publication). We are getting caght in all these gutenberg-era traps distracting us from providing the most important thing: access to the information. Everything else is simply a matter of having the proper tools available to make use of that access. We used to worry about findability - Google Scholar pretty much solves that one. If one has even a half-decent reference with author name(s)/title and journal name, then Google scholar will find it if it can be crawled. We used to worry about finding an element within an article. Syntactic search within an article with appropriately chosen words can not only solve that, but also show where else in the same paper the same concepts were addressed. All we're missing is the access and that is within our grasp if we as a community would stop worrying about all these mythical problems and deposit. -- 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 h= as 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 colleag= ue. I know of cases where the e journal publisher has cut off an entire un= iversity from access to its suite of journal for a lengthy period because i= t discovered that an academic was forwarding full text to people outside th= e institution. I go to the author. On one occasion I remember going to a colleague with a subscription to a society's digital library (they were a member of the relevant sub-society) for a copy of one article - difficult for the society to spot one article, I think. 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. I'm afraid I disagree here, though. The solution for young researchers is to submit their articles to whichever is the most appropriate journal ignoring OA status. On acceptance they should post their final author's version to their IR or OpenDepot in OA, embargoed OA or Closed Access (but respond to requests for copies via the button). It's hard enough being a junior academic these days without screwing with the choice of journal when only a little work will provide them with most of the benefits of OA (a few may not bother to make the request, but if one worries about that, putting a comment on the deposit that individual requests are welcome and will be viewed positively may also help). Of course, there's also the option that caused a previous disagreement between Charles and myself on this list - the publish and wait to be sued approach that I undertake, of posting all articles OA on my web page and/or in a repository whatever the embargo or OA status of the journal/publisher. I actually do advise people to do that, but if they're very worried about potential consequences I then give the above advice about The Button. -- 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 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/
FWD: ACM Announces Innovative Article Linking Service for Authors
All, An announcement from the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is below. Quick summary: authors of articles included in the ACM's toll-access Digital Library (DL) can now nominate one URL from which toll-free access to the DL version (usually the publisher's version of record) will work. Central or institutional repository pages can be used as the launch-point. Other notes: 1. The ACM is a green publisher and endorse the deposit of the author's version of the post-print on their web pages or in repositories. 2. The ACM's copyright policy, although a copyright transfer, provides significant libre rights back to the original author(s) (though not to others). 3. The ACM Digital Library includes material not originally published by the ACM. These materials are also covered by the toll-free access provision (the ACM will fund any charges incurred for access to third-party materials from the DL subscriptions in the same way it does for subscriber access). 4. This applies retroactively to all material currently in the DL, not just new material appearing from now on. --- Forwarded Message Dear Colleague: I am pleased to announce a unique service that ACM is introducing called ACM Author-Izer. It enables ACM authors to post links on either their own web page or institutional repository for visitors to download the definitive version of their articles from the ACM Digital Library at no charge. ACM Author-Izer also enables the dynamic display of download and citation statistics for each authorized article on the author's personal page. By linking the author's personal bibliography with the ACM Digital Library, downloads from the author's site are captured in official ACM statistics, more accurately reflecting total usage. ACM Author-Izer also expands ACM's reputation as an innovative Green Path publisher. This service is based on ACM's strong belief that the computing community should have the widest possible access to the definitive versions of scholarly literature. By making ACM Author-Izer a free service to both authors and visitors to those authors' websites, ACM is emphasizing its continuing commitment to the interests of its authors and to the computing community in ways that are consistent with its existing subscription access models. For additional information including a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates ACM Author-Izer, please visit http://www.acm.org/publications/acm- author-izer-service. I hope you will use this service and inform friends and colleagues about the existence of ACM Author-Izer. Your actions will help contribute to improving the community's access to ACM published articles. I value any thoughts you may have about it at dl-feedb...@acm.org. Regards, John R. White Executive Director/CEO Association for Computing Machinery --- End of Forwarded Message -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Chair, ACM SIGCAS http://www.sigcas.org/ (Special Interest Group on Computers and Society) Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
UK Guardian and Monbiot on Publishers' Contributions and profits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoc h-socialist (If the URL is split across lines, please copy it back onto one line to access the article. Sorry.) Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, 29 August 2011 21.08 BST ? The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (?724m on revenues of ?2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles. More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all? The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer's words) because they develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years. But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process ? if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available. Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more... -- 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/
Hacktivist Charged with criminal offences for downloading JSTOR
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/activist-swartz-indicted-for-massive-mit-and- jstor-data-theft/ http://gothamist.com/2011/07/20/open_access_hacktivist_in_deep_doo-.php ? http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/07/20/the-difference-between-google-an d-aaron-swartz/ (You may have to re-merge the lines of the URLs to access them - sorry.) -- 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: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
I negotiated with Elsevier when my article was accepted by one of their jo= urnals. My refusal to assign copyright was at the time a matter of princip= le rather than any anticipation of the OA movement. So issues of having to= later negotiate permission to self-archive never arose. In the case of Kluwer, my approach has been to print out its copyright assi= gnment form, sign it and post it back to them, but only AFTER I had deleted= the words I assign copyright and replaced it with I grant you a licence= to print or similar. They never complained, and always published the wor= k; in contract law (UK law at least and I suspect the rest of the world), m= y revised contract was the one that applied. I suspect they never noticed = the change in wording, but that's their problem, not mine. I commend that a= pproach. According to my legal training it's not a valid contract. The publisher could quite easily repudiate it. Whether they'd be liable to some of it provisions is a question that could only be settled by a court case, but the usual definition of a contract requires both parties to be aware of (and in the case of employees to be authorised to commit to) the final version. The fact that the author never actually receives anything signed by the publisher in the case of academic journal publications is just one of the reasons I'm actually of the opinion that all of these so-called contracts are very dodgy. When I published a book with Wiley, for example, we went round a couple of times on the proposed contract and the one that7s valid has been signed by both parties and both parties have signed copies which match. I've never received anything signed by a publisher, and hence the contract in which I assign copyright to them is suspicious to me as valid in court. Of course there are in certain legal jurisdictions customary contracts and verbal contracts, but again these all assume that everyone involved have a common understanding of what they're agreeing to. Not trying to continue with any personal disharmony between myself and Charles but I find his approach to be equally fraught with potential legal and ethical issues as my own. The fig-leaf of returning an amended form which the recipient could well claim it expects only to receive as signed if unamended strikes me as equally problematic as ignoring unreasonable provisions in the first place, when one's expectation is that the other party is blissfully unaware of the changes made. -- 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: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
of its provisions without radically undermining the other benefits gained by modern computer and communication technologies, BUT that this law is unethical because of the imbalance between middlemen and creators, and the imbalance between creators, consumers and re-users. I do not have the standing or the resources to attempt to chip away at the legal side to see if they can be forced to be a little more fair, especially since the greater unfairness is one of the underlying economic and structural situation and the existing law. Caught between the rock of the categorical imperative to ensure publication and wide distribution of my academic outputs and the unethical but probably legally valid contract I make an ethical decision to benefit humanity as a whole with access to my work, whatever small benefit that may be. I do so fully aware of the issues involved, and indeed it is precisely that kind of ethical analysis and decision-making that I teach my students. I teach them in my information ethics course not to be bound by the minutiae of laws developed in corrupt ways and which are anyway practically unenforceable. It is like the old saying about banks and debts (highly relevant int he recent economic climate). If I owe the bank a hundred pounds and cannot pay then _I_ have a problem. If I owe the bank a hundred million pounds and cannot pay, the _bank_ has a problem. If 0.1% of citizens ignore a law, then those 0.1% of citizens have a problem. If 90% of citizens ignore a law, then the law has a problem. Sometimes even if 1% of citizens ignore a law then the law has a problem. -- 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: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
As I say regularly in my talks on OA, don't worry about copyright. The contract between academic authors and publishers of journals is rather suspect anyway, to my mind. he consideration offered of distribution is not necessarily compelling enough for a publisher to even consider it a certain win in a court case. The worst that will happen is a take-down notice, which can be complied with by setting closed access via the email request button. No publisher is going to sue the author of an academic paper for making it available online. Such an act would almost certainly lead to a significant (though not universal) boycott of that journal/publisher by academics. Publishers know the old model is not sustainable and they're just trying to squeeze out as much profit as possible before it dies, while spreading FUD to slow down its decline. Don't worry about copyright. As Stevan says, CS and HE Physicists have been making their papers available for over twenty years without any significant problems. -- 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: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
What interesting advice from a Professor of Business Administration! Volu= ntarily enter into a contract with a third party and then ignore its terms = and conditions because the third party is unlikely to do anything to enforc= e it. Well, if that's the nature of what is taught there, Meiji University= is one place I will not be recommending anyone to study at. The solution is clear. DON'T ENTER INTO THAT CONTRACT IN THE FIRST PLACE! = That approach is both legal and ethical, unlike Professor Adams'. When faced with unfair contract terms, that's exactly the only thing that can be done. Or do you feel, Charles that the contract terms offered by scholarly publishers are fair and reasonable? As a junior academic (and even now as a more senior one) I'm hedged in by the more senior colleagues who have consistently, over the decades refused to reform the system of academic promotions, tenure, etc and allowed them to be captured by a system which prevents junior academics from retaining their rights. I know, I've tried, and finally had to capitulate to transfer of copyright to the pigopolist publishers because otherwise my work can't get published in the appropriate journals (specifically I missed the opportunity to submit work to special issues that were exactly the right place for the work I was doing, but which I refused for a short while to submit to because of contract terms). Meanwhile the more senior professors, and yes Charles I am specifically looking at you in this regard since you chose tyo make this a personal attack, have sat pretty on their tenure and promotions leaving junior academics subject to the unfair practices of a publishing business that's become a horrible parasite on academic communications. They \have done this by persisting in using locus of publication as aproxy for quality of publication, by continuing to sit on the editorial boards of journals published by these parasites. So, Charles, exactly how would you advise junior academics to avoid getting either screwed out of their rights or screwed by their seniors and peers on promotion? You're between a rock and a hard place because senior academics have set up the system and didn't give a damn about their juniors as the world changed around them, because they'd already achieved their security. At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, Charles, your approach would have condemned Rosa Parks for refusing to comply with the terms of carriage of the bus companies in Montgomery. When a legal situation is biased, unfair and unjust you're damned right I advise people to violate the unfair terms of a contract. That's the way things actually change, rather than by handwringing. I also take this advice into practice in my own personal life. For example I was one of the people who pledged to refuse a UK ID Card if and when it became compulsory, and contributed my money ahead of time to the legal defence fund to help my fellow pledgers. I have always posted my own work freely available on my webpage and now do so in The Depot, until such time as my University has a repository I and my putative readers can use (it's there but only with a Japanese interface). Finally (I'm struggling to keep polite on this but hopefully managing it), please keep your ad hominem attacks on my professional ethics, what I teach and the University I teach at it off this list. It's unworthy of you, your position, your university and the standard of debate which should be on this list. Keep to the arguments and keep to the topic. Take your personal insults elsewhere (and that's the polite version). -- 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/
Organisation of Repository Managers?
I gave a talk last week at a Digital Repository Foundation meeting in Japan. This is a group of (primarily) librarians involved in running repositories for their institutions here in Japan. They asked if there was an equivalent organisation in the UK or elsewhere. I don't know of one, but that doesn't mean there isn't, since I'm not actively involved in running a repository, merely evangelising about IRs and mandates. Does anyone know of similar organisations elsewhere that I can point the Japanese DRF people at? -- 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: An Overview of Open Access for Open Access Week 2010
Open Access Week Events: Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University. As part of Open Access Week, both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University (Otaru is the smallest University in Japan, based in Otaru on Hokkaido, thirty minutes train journey from Sapporo, where one of the largest Japanese universities, Hokkaido University, is based) ran events promoting their respective institutional archives. Kindly supported by a grant from Osaka University, they invited me to give a talk at each event. After some discussion with Sugita-san from Otaru's library and repository team and Suzuki-san from Hokkaido's library and repository team, we decided on the focus of maximizing the impact of your research. Both meetings also included local staff speaking in Japanese introducing the institutional repository and/or their usage of it. Otaru University's repository is called Barrel (the kanji characters for the town of Otaru mean small barrel) while Hokkaido's is called HUSCAP, which is also the name of a small relatively rare berry which grows in Hokkaido (nowhere else in Japan, though elsewhere in Northern Europe and Asia). HUSCAP also stands for Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers (yes, they know that doesn't quite spell the acronym). The events were lightly attended, with around 20 people at Otaru and around 40 at Hokkaido (given their respective size, the Otaru one was a larger proportion of their staff) with a mix of younger and older researchers including PhD students and even the odd non-University person. Hokkaido videoed their event and plan to put the video and associated slides in HUSCAP. I will post the URL here when I get a copy. My slides and PDF and SVG versions of the main graphics demonstrating the access problem and the OA solution, as available in the OpenDepot: http://opendepot.org/373/ So far, Japanese academic politics has resisted any university adopting a proper deposit mandate, so far as I know. Hokkaido University policy strongly recommends deposit, but so far as I can tell this is only achieving the usual 15-30% spontaneous deposit rates seen elsewhere. I have been invited also to talk at two further events in Japan this year, promoting Open Access and talking about my experiences at the University of Reading where I was one of a team of OA enthusiasts who eventually persuaded the university management to adopt a near-optimal mandate. These events are: DRF 7th Workshop 25th November 2010 Pacifico Yokohama, Yokohama SPARC Japan/JANUL joint symposium 10th December 2010 University of Tokyo -- 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: Role of arXiv
On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Joseph Esposito wrote (in liblicense): Considering the centrality of arXiv to the physics community, it is difficult to imagine that it would ever disappear (or that anyone would want it to). Stevan Harnad replied: No one wants Arxiv to disappear, but I'll bet that within a decade Arxiv will just be an automated harvester of deposits from authors' own institutional repositories, not a locus of direct, institution-external deposit. In the age of Institutional Repositories, it is no longer necessary -- nor does it make sense -- for authors to self-archive institution-externally. It is also a needless central expense to manage deposit centrally. It makes much more sense to deposit institutionally and harvest centrally. If it's not in there already, I would expect the SWORD protocol to allow authors to include their login details for central repositories in an encrypted element within the IR, and for a check-box during the deposit process to do a push from the IR to the central archive. -- 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: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
I wrote: Japanese universities are moving towards greater requirements on their academics to publish in international journals in English. Alongside these moves, we should be promoting the adoption of a deposit mandate to ensure the broadest impact of these articles. Syun replied: I don't think I can agree. Japaense research institutions were under severe pressure toward pulihishing their results in international journals in the 1990s and they, together with the never-stable government then, have succeeded in increasing the number of articles published in the impact-factor branded journals, which are international, in ten years. Last year, China overtook Japan in terms of the number of published articles and Japan's market share is gradually decreasing, but China has over ten times as large a population so I don't care. The pressure still continues, as you say in your posting, of course, but the researchers here apparently want to talk to those in rich enough universities worldwide through the impact-factor branded journals, whose number is far less than half of Stevan's 25,000 titles. And the pressure itself is equally strong all over the advanced societies including China. You say the Japanese universities are now forced to improve their international representation, and I agree. But if you look at the THE ranking or other rankings, the problem about our universities does not lie in their research impact but in their education impact. Research related scores, like the number of articles published in branded journals, have been going up, probably not because of the organic growth of the production but because of the improvement of the precision in counting, though the institutional summary is actually very difficult on account of the tough task of name disumbiguation(The University of Tokyo might have increased their score thanks to the many other Tokyo Universities of Scholary-Genre-Name which tend to be merged as part of Tokyo University, though the accuracy is getting better). So I should say that if the international thing is important in the Japanese context, that's not the issue around education rather than research. The university management is under higher pressure with respect to education than to research. Without good enough students, universities can not survive only with good researchers. I don't think this is any Nihonjinron but an objective view of the situation of the current Japanese higher education. So the talks about mandating can't get prioritized in terms of management and the faculty is passive not because of bureaucracy but because just sitting pretty. Of course, this does not mean I would not argue for the mandating in the good sense. Thanks anyway for rainsing such interesting but arguably important points. Thanks for your detailed reply. This helps me in writing my talk for HOkkaido to understand the differences between a top tier and second tier university in Japan. It may indeed be that those at top tier Universities are currently under pressure to improve their international teaching credentials in order to improve their ranking positions. However, outside the top 10 Japanese universities the pressure to improve international research as well as educational performance is very high. Even within the top ten, Keio University is putting strong pressure on staff to perform well internationally in research. If the belief that only high impact factor journals matter and that only those in other universities which can afford full tollgate access to these journals matter as readers, then that is an important point for me to address in my talk at Hokkaido. -- 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: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Andrew A. Adams wrote: AAA: During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan Splendid news from AAA, Asian Archivangelist! and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited, unless published in an OA journal) This is the familiar gold rush, which impels institutions to imagine, unthinkingly, that what they need to do in order to have OA today is to spend their scarce resources to subsidize the costs of Gold OA publication -- even though most of the potential funds to do so are still tied up in paying the institutional subscriptions that are covering the costs of journal publication today. And meanwhile these institutions are not adopting the cost-free Green OA self-archiving mandates that would provide OA to all their subscription journal articles too! Stevan has misinterpreted my admittedly very shorthand description of Hokkaido's situation. What I was referring to was the Hokkaido as a well-funded top-10 University in Japan subscribes to many of the publishers' complete access but also provides direct payment for individual item access costs when Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the existing subscription. Thus, researchers at Hokkaido themselves experience no access problems in their reading, but their writing misses out on readers just the same as everyone else's. They haven't succumbed to pre-emptive Gold Fever, but have not yet embraced a Green Mandate. My goal in speaking there will be to promote the benefits of mandating archiving to the authors and the institution in terms of visibility and impact. -- 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: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited, unless published in an OA journal), -- 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/
Mandates: Philosophical Questions
I'm not wishing to start or continue an argument with Jan, but to post some philosophical musings prompted by his comment that he dislikes mandates. I disagree that mandates are always wrong. The so-called publish or perish mandate has severe negative consequences for academic, that most here will know about (least publishable unit, skewing research progress, particularly in fields that require significant groundwork before a flurry of publications of results, etc etc etc. However, the mandates placed by institutions on their staff and on staff and institutions by funders are not always negative. It seems quite right to me that funders mandate that the work they fund has its results disseminated widely. This means that they require (or, mandate) that papers be produced and, when published, be made available as widely as possible. Without them, some staff would indulge in potentially world-changing research which had its impact delayed or denied. Academic freedom, like many other freedoms, is not unbounded, and comes with responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to disseminate the results of one's work widely, balancing the need/desire to do further work with the necessity of transmitting the results already done. -- 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: Against Promoting Pre-Emptive Gold OA Payment Before Mandating Green OA Provision
Stevan asks: I wonder if it is a good idea for Open Access forums to become the publicity vehicles for commercial deals? I think it is useful to have these deals announced on the lists for the same reason Stevan worries. When these deals are announced, they can be welcomed if the research institution in question already mandates deposit, and if not they can be criticised and encouraged to adopt a mandate. It's tiresome to have to do it, but it does seem that repetition of the Green First, then talk about Gold mantra is necessary if we're to speed the achievement of OA, and the announcement of these deals on AO fora provides that opportunity. -- 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: Incentives for encouraging staff to self-archive
Colin Smith (via Stevan Harnad): Open Research Online: A self-archiving success story. Smith, Colin; Yates, Christopher and Chudasama, Sheila (2010) The 5th International Conference on Open Repositories 6-9 July 2010, Madrid, Spain. http://oro.open.ac.uk/22321/ In this poster, we use the example of Open Research Online - the research repository of theOpen University - to show that dedicated management and active development and advocacy of an institutional repository can lead to very successful results under the self-archiving model, in this case capturing regularly an estimated 60% of peer-reviewed journal output. Also demonstrated is the significant rise in full text (i.e. fully open access) items in the repository since the implementation of this approach. I'm a little confused by the numbers in this paragraph. The separation of capturing regularly an estimated 60% and rise in full text items. I'm not sure if Colin is on this list, but if not perhaps Stevan could put my question to him. The OA (practice what you preach - well done :-) ) version of the poster linked to above has a slightly different line: In the case of ORO, this has also resulted in around 60% of peer-reviewed journal output being regularly self-archived. It would be nice to have it spelled out exactly what this deposit rate refers to. Is it 60% of the estimated refereed journal output of the OU that is deposited in full text format? From the way it has been put in the email and the paper it's unclear whether it's the full text deposit that reaches 60% (unmandated) or just meta-data deposit, with some proportion of those meta-data deposits including full text. From my own recent experience with a just-published paper, producing an author version of the final copy-edited text can actually be a fair amount of work, to reflect the final words (though not necessarily the formatting) of the published version (and it is the words that matter, so getting the words as published is quite important) and so although it might seem that if one is depositing meta-data that it's just a single extra key-stroke to deposit the full text, that's not always true if one wants to have the exact words as published, and not just the pre-copy-edited version. -- 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/
FWD: Please share your opinion on open access publishing
The EU-funded SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project sent me a request to take part in a questionnaire. Despite my misgivings of such a project including as one of the partners such a self-interested party as one of the world's largest academic publishers (foxes and hen-houses come to mind here - nothing wrong with such organisations being involved as research subjects but being core members of the research team is clearly a conflict of interest) and despite my dislike of even the title (open access publishing, instead of the real topic which needs research, i.e. open access) let alone the description of work, I've taken part in this survey. I included making my views on their wrong-headed and biased questioning focussing purely on Gold OA clear in the free-text fields available. See the details of the survey below. AAA. --- Forwarded Message Subject: Please share your opinion on open access publishing From: Springer springerale...@springer.delivery.net Your views on open access publishing are needed! Springer has partnered with CERN, The Max Planck Society, and others in the European Commission-funded project SOAP â Study of Open Access Publishing. Please support the project by completing a short survey on open access: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/soap_survey_a More about SOAP The Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) analyzes researchersâ attitudes towards, knowledge of and experiences with open access. The resulting insights and recommendations will be shared with the European Commission, publishers, research funding agencies, libraries and researchers. Your contribution will be very valuable in shaping the public discourse on open access, and we would be very grateful if you could take 10-15 minutes to complete this survey.? Thank you in advance for your help!? Best regards, Bettina Goerner Manager Open Access --- End of Forwarded Message
Re: Is the request copy button good for OA?
From:Jan Szczepanski jan.szczepan...@ub.gu.se Subject: Re: Is the request copy button good for OA? The problem with the green way is mainly that it is a parasitic and has no life of it's own. More like a virus. The way scientists has taken is the golden road. That is creating their own journals and a complete free new infrastructure that has nothing to do with the commercial. This has been created without threats, force or mandates. Jan, you have the relationship utterly reversed here. It is the publishers who are the parasites. They used to provide a necessary service to scientists and scholars, in the Gutenberg era. That service was the typesetting, printing and distribution of content. Editing and peer reviewing has always been done primarily by scientists and scholars themselves, not professional publishers. True, some editors moved across to become paid members of the publishing profession, but the vast majority of the academic work involved in publishing is done for free by scientists and scholars. In the Licklider/Berners-Lee era publishers role _should_ be only to administer peer review and perhaps copy editing (most type-setting is now done by the authors themselves, the rest of the typesetting being unnecessary work done to maintain Gutenberg-era house styles which are pointless now), if publishers are actually needed at all to organise this, since universities themselves and scholarly societies are probably better placed to take over this role. However, a variety of factors well laid out as the Zeno's Paralysis axioms by Stevan. Given this inertia, and the loss of access by researchers even at reasonably well-funded institutions (as a broad interdisciplinary researcher I am constantly finding access barriers not covered by even the expensive volume licensing arrangements the University of Reading subscribes to) the most efficient way forward, as demonstrated by the deposit rate for mandates and the low cost of maintaining repositories, is for universities to become the electronic distributor of the work of their researchers. Central repositories from ArXiv to the Depot can provide the locus of deposit for non-affiliated researchers. How, then, are repositories and mandates parasitic? They are only if your viewpoint is that the purpose of journal publishing is to fill the coffers of the publishing industry. If you believe that the purpose of publishing scientific and scholarly articles is for those article to be read by other researchers (and possibly a wider public audience) then mandates and IRs are the obvious solution to the access problem, not parasites on the poor beast of publishing (which has been leeching funds unnecessarily out of universities for twenty years). Mandates would be unnecessary without Zeno's Paralysis, but claims like yours on the parasitic nature of repositories are re-inforcing this paralysis. Gold OA is quite probably the future, but it will take far too long to arrive and cost far too much access. Green OA is both the solution to the immediate access problem and probably one of the best ways to ensure a smooth transition (for researchers, I really couldn't care less about publishers) to a working Gold OA system, because universal green OA (which has many side benefits for institutions themselves in terms of internal communications, personal publications lists, tracking of researcher outputs and hence is a sustainable distribution mechanism) then provides a basis on which the real work of Gold journals (providing robust peer review and editorial mechanisms) can be focussed. Without first acheiving near-universal green OA, Gold OA will most likely remain an expensive sideline by which the parasitic publishers maintain their grasp on scarce university budgets, and continue to insult scholars and scientists by insisting on a transfer of copyright instead of a license to publish. -- Dr Andrew A Adams, School of Systems Engineering The University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AY, UK Tel:44-118-378-6997 E-mail:a.a.ad...@rdg.ac.uk http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/ From 1st April 2010: Professor, Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo
Re: Is the request copy button good for OA? (3)
Colin, I think you are missing the point of the button here. The correct way to phrase a mandate is that the button is solely a back-up to ONLY be used when there is a publisher embargo. I think the OU is correct in keeping the information requested to a minimum - a statement that the requester is requesting it for purposes within the legal allowances for authors to distribute it, and a contact address. Anyone really concerned with privacy can use short-term single-use email addresses to make their requests. Personally, I find that I want other schlars to know when I am reading their work because it opens up the possibility of interaction, the next stage beyond just reading people's work is to discuss it in more depth with them, but this is a sideline compared to the mass access that is the purpose of OA. The solution to the original question is for mandates to make clear what the purpose of the button is, and to not allow depositors to place a barrier to access where one is not necessary. -- Dr Andrew A Adams, School of Systems Engineering The University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AY, UK Tel:44-118-378-6997 E-mail:a.a.ad...@rdg.ac.uk http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/ From 1st April 2010: Professor, Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo
oderation and Censorship
I fully support Stevan as moderator of the AmSci OA list. The job of a moderator is to censor. There is no other word to describe the job they are asked to do. Censorship is not always a bad thing, provided it is applied appropriately. Stevan has disagreed with me a number of times on the focus of the list and the movement but allowed those postings through while posting his disagreement openly. Keeping off-topic and insulting material off the list is exactly what the job as moderator entails and he retains my confidence. -- Dr Andrew A Adams, School of Systems Engineering The University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AY, UK Tel:44-118-378-6997 E-mail:a.a.ad...@rdg.ac.uk http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/
Two articles in the 29th May/5th June issues of THE of OA interest
In the 29th May and 5th June 2008 issues of the Times Higher Education magazine there are two articles of interest to OA advocates. One is a report on the costs of peer review to universities. This is of minor interest, however, as no one in OA is expecting peer reviewers to start being paid for, just the cost of administering peer review. This article can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/5oga67 The second is much more worrying (and indeed annoying). It is an utterly flawed attack on Open Access by Prof Philip Altbach (professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College). In it he trots out the tired old canard that there is no quality control on the internet and that Open Access must mean the demise of peer review and the scholarly journal as a concept (utter balderdash as we all know). Altbach's article can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/5outko Here is the letter I've sent to the THE decrying Altbach's deeply flawed article. Philip Altbach (Hidden cost of open access) displays a startling lack of understanding of what Open Access means. Open Access absolutely does not mean abandoning peer review and simply putting all academic work on the web without context, review or quality control. Open Access is simply making peer reviewed material officially published (in the academic sense) by journals, currently only available behind toll barriers (for print and/or electronic copies), freely available online. The simplest route to universal open access (by all researchers to all peer reviewed papers) is for authors to self-archive their peer-reviewed and published papers in an institutional repository. In order to achieve this quickly funders and universities require (mandate) academics to do this (in a sensible extension of the publish or perish approach to requiring the results of academic work to be given the greatest possible dissemination). No Open Access advocate suggests that self-publication of a paper without peer review constitutes academic publication in the traditional sense. Journal titles and standards are expected to be maintained (as has happened in High Energy Physics and Astronomy which have had near 100% Open Access for over a decade). Papers deposited in an institutional archive include details of the journal in which it was published, and skeptical readers can check that the paper they have downloaded has matching meta-data with the publisher's meta-data (already generally freely available online). It would be a serious (and easily spotted) academic fraud to deposit a paper in a repository with a claim to peer reviewed publication when it did not have that status. If, and it is a big if given the experience in Physics and Astronomy where mass print journal subscription cancellations have not happened, print subscriptions were cancelled in sufficient quantity to undermine the cost recovery model of administering peer review (note the other article in the same issues of the THE pointing out that the reviews themselves are carried out for free by academics themselves and it is only the administration costs that need paying) then the cost savings provided by these print subscription cancellations will more than cover the costs of administering peer review. These cost shifts would happen because it is not in the interests of academia to allow high quality journals to close down. Altbach's flawed argument in opposition to Open Access is a disgrace to his position as a professor of higher education. -- Dr Andrew A Adams, School of Systems Engineering The University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AY, UK Tel:44-118-378-6997 E-mail:a.a.ad...@rdg.ac.uk http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/
Re: The cost of peer review and electronic distribution of scholarly journals
His concluding paragraph says, 'A publish for free, read for free' model may one day prove to be viable. Meanwhile, if I have to choose between the two evils, I prefer the 'publish for free and pay to read' model over the 'pay to publish and read for free' one. Because if I must choose between publishing and reading, I would choose to publish. Who would not?' There is a significant fallacy in the assumptions here, though. In order to publish one must first have been able to read. All scholarly work, whether it is HE Physics or postmodern cultural theory, requires access to the existing body of work before sensible writing can be produced. The comment that we _have_ publish for free and read for free is so gross a simplification that it amounts to a lie. I don't care, as an individual, that my University subscribes to atmospheric physics and meteorology journals (and since my University has a highly rated Meteorology department they subscribe to many of these) because even in my highly interdisciplinary work I have never yet come across a need to consult one. However, I am regularly coming across journal from sociology, economics, computer science, history, and law that I need individual access to but for which my University has either never subscribed or does not have access to the particular issue (old or new) that I wish to read a paper in. I am then faced with fees of up to hundreds of dollars for access to one article. This is the reality of the monetary costs inhibiting research today. I do NOT have read for free. I am particularly disadvantaged by this because I work in a highly interdisciplinary field (social, legal and ethical impacts of computer and communication technology) and because I am building a new (to my university) research group. The blessed who work in large long-lived groups dedicated to a narrow field of research and who therefore never have an access problem themselves should recognise that they are losing impact because their deep research is an input to broad research such as mine, and that I'm losing out because the nature of my field militates against the few economies of scale that current publishing models generate. In the world before the internet I would have had no option but to spend my time travelling to other institutions to use their libraries or paying for some form of inter-library loan. But the internet is here and SHOULD provide me with the access I need but it is prevented by academic inertia and publishing vested interests, the former often generated by a combination of lack of understanding of scholarly communication in the broader community and a lack of courage in dealing with change all of which is exacerbated by publisher FUD. -- Dr Andrew A Adams, School of Systems Engineering The University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AY, UK Tel:44-118-378-6997 E-mail:a.a.ad...@rdg.ac.uk http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/
Re: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM Digest - 3 Dec 2007 to 5 Dec 2007 (#2007-243)
[ The following text is in the utf-8 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] From:Jan Szczepanski jan.szczepan...@ub.gu.se allow people to walk through your field Orwell would have liked this new meaning of mandate and what about the crops on my field? Can we mandate that we will have the right to take that also, in the name of common good? Without much success I have compared mandates with Stalin's collectivization. Instead to sell on a market You have to sell it to the state. In our case to the people that finance your activities on the field. What emerged during the first years of the sad French revolution was the abolishing of all author rights for the good of all. During the sad Russian one, you even lost your field. What is emerging during the OA Revolution? The same mistakes as usual. The mistakes that are emerging here are all Jan's. Academics are required (by exactly the same type mandates that the OA movement advocates for OA or ID/OA deposit) by funders and employers to disseminate the results of their research. I see no one complaining about this as a principle. There remain some arguments about details of this, but no one argues the principle that research without dissemination is selfish and not the reason why academics are paid by their institution nor why funding is provided by charities and governments (research funded by commercial organisations alone is subject to somewhat different pressures, but here it is usually the academics themselves who insist on a reasonable right to disseminate results while protecting other commercial interests such as patent rights and trade secrets). All that OA mandates do is require that the dissemination takes advantage of new technology to make these results more widely available. The cost to the author is of a very small amount of time comparatively. For example it takes me days or weeks of work (counting the hours spent directly writing) to write a paper of 3000 words, whereas it takes approximately 15 minutes to correctly deposit it in an OA archive. Everything else is FUD. We are mandated to do the dissemination of our research results. It is in our own (that is, the academic's) interest that our results are disseminated. That is why we do not require royalties from publishers on the sales of journals containing our papers (which is what makes academic papers a completely different beast to any other form of copyright work). OA mandates push academics into things in the best interests of themselves, other academics and society at large. The only possible losers here are the publishers currently making large profits out of academic publishing. An academic retains the right of authorship, the right of derivative work production and all the other rights embodied in copyright law, while granting the right to free copying. Analogies aside, this is no damage to the author who does not make money from restricting copying, but does gain academic kudos (which probably translates into higher salary and greater research funding) from wider dissemination. Any librarian opposing OA mandates either badly misunderstands the mechanisms of peer review (falling into the publisher trap of believing that publishers provide peer review when it is academics who provide it supported by an admin mechanism currently run by publishers) or is somehow caught in the trap of believing that only paper copies of texts are useful, and that the librarians' principle role is physical curation of stock (which is part of a librarian's role but not the whole of it and certainly not the most important part). -- *E-mail*a.a.ad...@rdg.ac.uk Dr Andrew A Adams **snail*27 Westerham Walk** School of Systems Engineering ***mail*Reading RG2 0BA, UK The University of Reading Tel*+44-118-378-6997*** Reading, United Kingdom **http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sis00aaa/**
