Progress to OA is slower than it could be but Stevan's description of a mere
8 years since BOAI as "glacially slow" is rather exaggerated! And my
experience is that the small amounts of money currently going into OA
publication charges have not hindered repository deposit. If the speed of
progress were a matter of money, "green OA" would already be racing ahead,
as (certainly in the UK) much more money has been committed to repositories
than to OA publication charges. The OA movement has always allowed for both
"green" and "gold" OA, and there is no evidence that one is slowing down
progress on the other. Most mandates, funders' policies and potential
national legislation tend to favour some form of repository deposit, and if
they do support the payment of OA publication charges, it is not at the
expense of repositories.
So what are the reasons for the slow transition to OA? The time taken to
influence university presidents and provosts is certainly a major factor,
but they are now becoming convinced about the value of OA and are
introducing mandates, not least because of national policies on research
assessment which look for the impact of research publications on the economy
and society. University leaders need their institution's research to have a
high impact value and they are seeing that OA will give them that result.
Government are also coming to understand that OA results in higher value
from research expenditure. Institutions are still reluctant to enforce
mandates, which would certainly be a fast way to grow OA, but could embroil
OA in unnecessary disputes about academic freedom. A more effective route
could be through authors noticing - or having it drawn to their attention -
that repository copies of their peers' articles are receiving much heavier
use than their own articles in conventional journals. Academic rivalry both
at an institutional and at a personal level has the potential to speed up
the progress towards OA.
Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <[email protected]>
To: "SPARC Open Access Forum" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 2:50 PM
Subject: [SOAF] Open Access: The Historic Irony
** Apologies for Cross-Posting **
[Hyperlinked version of this Commentary:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/727-guid.html ]
Historians will look back on our planet's glacially slow transition to
the optimal and inevitable outcome for refereed research dissemination
in the online era -- free online access webwide -- and will point out
the irony of the fact that we were so much quicker to commit scarce
money to trying to reform publishing ("Gold OA") through projects like
SCOAP3 and COPE than we were to commit to providing free online access
("Green OA") to our own research output (by depositing it in our
institutional repositories, and mandating that it be deposited) at no
extra cost at all.
Here is just the latest instance:
"SCOAP3 support in the United States almost complete!… So far,
over 150 U.S. libraries and library consortia have pledged a total of
over 3.2 Million dollars to the SCOAP3 initiative. This is almost the
entire contribution expected from partners in the United States.
Worldwide, SCOAP3 partners in 24 countries collectively pledged around
7 Million Euros. These pledges represent about 70% of the SCOAP3
funding envelope, and the initiative is getting close to its next
steps to convert to Open Access the entire literature of the field of
High-Energy Physics." http://www.scoap3.org/news/news77.html
Yet (mark my words) it will be Green OA self-archiving -- and Green OA
self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders -- that actually
bring us universal OA at long last, and not the limited and
ineffectual "gold fever" that is "freeing" (already-free) high energy
physics (SCOAP3) -- already effectively OA for almost two decades now!
-- nor the COPE commitment on the part of universities to pay to make
a small portion of their own research output Gold OA -- without first
committing to make all of it Green OA, cost-free.
[University presidents and provosts especially seem to be quite quick
to sign open letters in support of their government's adopting an open
access mandate, yet much slower to adopt an open access mandate for
their own institutions!
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/04/27/presidents-and-provosts-present-an-open-letter-supporting-frpaa/
]
"Never Pay Pre-Emptively For Gold OA Before First Mandating Green OA"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/714-guid.html
"On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green
OA-Provision Horse"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/630-guid.html
"SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/421-guid.html
"Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity [COPE]: Mistaking
intent for action?"
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/09/compact-for-open-access-publishing.html
"Putting Principled Support Into Practice: What Provosts Need to
Mandate"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/117-guid.html
Stevan Harnad
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