I'm glad this conversation was steered back to the original concern that Richard Jensen raised, because I too don't think it has been adequately addressed.
That said, it seems that his objection is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of open access mandates. It seems that he is reacting as if the mandate is for scholarly journals to provide their articles for free (or force them out of business as researchers switch to free access journals), but I think this is a gross mischaracterization. I don't claim to be know the details of every mandate that has been made, but here's what I understand a grant agency open access mandate to usually entail: *Instead of readers of scholarly articles paying for the privilege to read the articles, the cost of dissemination should be shifted to the grant funding agency.* Thus, whenever a grant funding agency mandates open access publication, it always (to my knowledge) provides funds to cover such publication. In the petition that Dario posted, there is a claim that "the highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process" [1]. In the referenced policy, NIH explicitly affirms that they pay publication costs as part of their mandate policy [2]. Thus, I understand the petition to request a mandate that all US-government funded research do the same: mandate open access publication plus provide the funds to pay journals for such publication. A common response to such policies is that an increasing number of publishers (including our beloved Elsevier [3]) are adopting a "hybrid" open access policy. Very simply, this means that they still charge regular journal access fees, but if anyone insists on open access, then the publisher is more than happy to oblige to make an individual author's article open access as long as the author (usually funded by their grant agency) forks over $2,000 to $3,000 to release their article from paywall bondage. In short, Richard Jensen, this proposed mandate does not attempt to undermine the funding structure of scholarly journals. The only significant change it would push on journals is to adopt a hybrid open access policy, in which they would ask authors to show them the money if their grant funder requires open access publication. While the high cost of open access publication might be debatable, I see no financial threat to scholarly journals, as long as they are willing to make basic changes in their funding structure to keep up with the times. On a related note, referring to the related thread "real scholarship is expensive", I have to question the description of the costs involved in producing /The Journal of American History/. On looking it up, I find that it is the flagship journal of The Organization of American Historians [4]. According to my general observation, a journal like that, in addition to its function as a leading scholarly publication, also serves as a cash cow for funding a non-profit scholarly society. I am not questioning a scholarly society's need for funding, but I question that the journal alone needs such a large full-time paid staff, beyond the volunteer "staff" of reviewers and editors that is typical of scholarly journals. I might be mistaken, but the staff described sounds to me like the (necessary) staff of a scholarly society office, not that of a standalone scholarly journal. Regards, Chitu Okoli Associate Professor in Management Information Systems John Molson School of Business Concordia University, Montréal http://chitu.okoli.org/pro [1] http://access2research.org/Petition [2] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#810 [3] http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/open_access [4] http://www.oah.org/publications/ -------- Message original -------- Sujet: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Access2research petition De : David Golumbia <[email protected]> Pour : Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]> Date : 22 Mai 2012 20:29:26
i'm sorry but this is a *complete* red herring with regard to the discussion Richard has raised. i know of *no* for-profit publishing in humanities journals, and a very few and marginal ones (SAGE, John Benjamins) in social sciences. that goes for books, too, which I am half-expecting to come under attack here next. what we are talking about here is /non-profit publishing/. that is what I and presumably Richard see as under attack on this list, for reasons that are both clear and very disturbing to me. not only not making "billions": making/no profit at all/. JSTOR, previously attacked here, is a complete non-profit, and nobody has yet cogently argued that JSTOR wasted the funds it was paid to archive over 100 years of academic journals. I do not know why it is somehow morally wrong for them to have been paid a reasonable, non-profit figure to do good work, or why that work is only morally OK if it is done for free. your arguments against Elsevier are probably sound, and I support the boycott of Elsevier you cite below, but the original petition that started this all did not name Elsevier, and on its face calls for the US Government to intervene in the business of charging for/not-for-profit/ academic publications. it could be taken to be asking the US government to outlaw the charging of subscription fees for non-profit journals. these things are not even in the same ballpark. Richard Jensen's carefully considered post named the *costs* involved with running an academic journal; i did not read any defense there of the idea that the journal should earn a profit. I am 99% sure that journal is a non-profit. I am at a loss to understand why the fact that people are paid a reasonable wage to recompense their non-profit labor should be a target of attack on this list. Is /any /wage labor OK? Do all of you somehow magically pay your rent, clothes, and food costs while earning no money whatsoever? If so, please show me where that gravy train is, as I would dearly love to get on it. On a side note, in the US, few if any colleges and universities are funded much if at all through tax dollars. Many institutions (Harvard, Yale) are almost entirely private; many public institutions (Michigan, Chicago, Berkeley, U-Virginia) derive 10% or less of their funding from taxes. Calling the work we professors do "taxpayer-funded" gives a very inaccurate picture of where the money comes from. The NIH policy cited earlier refers to research projects performed almost entirely with NIH funding--an entirely different kettle of fish from ordinary research done by professors on salary, the great majority of which does not come from taxpayer funds. there are crowd-sourced and self-organized journals; there are also not-for-profit ones. why is that a crime?
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