Group items tagged

Ross Mounce is a final year PhD Student at the University of Bath & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow. His well-linked response to the Inquiry has a pragmatic and sensible feel, though he down-plays the impact on learned societies of loss of income, and wrongly reduces their outreach work to "perks".

Science blog post in The Guardian by Mike Taylor which responds to the the arguments that are used to justify the conventional publishing model, under the strap-line "As a scientist you job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal's paywall is unacceptable"

Whether or not you agree with any or all of it, this superbly written 5 page PDF by Colin Jones and Peter Mandler provides a coherent and very comprehensive summary of H&SS concerns about current OA policy in the UK, and its impact. The nine aspects covered are: the gold question; green issues; publishers' business models; universities and gold/green; universities as publication gatekeepers; a way out of rationing; freedom to publish; internationalisation. All set against a backdrop of RHS reiterating its "strong support for widening access to publicly-funded academic work, in forms that sustain peer review and high-quality editorial work."

Here is the full transcript of an unprecedentedly speedily convened 28 February 2014 debate on the report of the House of Lords S&T Committee's Inquiry, with several of the members of the committee speaking. A key exchange takes place towards the end when Lord Krebs questions the Government Minister on what he sees as a key issue: Lord Krebs "My Lords, I thank the Minister for his very helpful response. However, will he confirm that RCUK will revise its policy and guidance statement to reflect what he has just said-namely that the research councils will follow the decision tree which has been adopted by BIS and was produced originally by the Publishers Association? The Minister said that that was the Government's position but I want to be clear that RCUK is following that and is revising its guidelines and policy statement." Lord Popat (Conservative - responding on behalf of the Government) "I thank the noble Lord for that question. To the best of the Government's knowledge, RCUK has accepted the decision tree. However, I will write to the noble Lord once we have the paperwork on the implementation, which I believe will be by the end of this month." [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201213/ldselect/ldsctech/122/12206.htm#a6 points to the diagram mentioned]

Jeffrey Beall highlights IEEE's announcement "IEEE has just announced that it will be starting a new gold open-access mega-journal to be called IEEE Access. In launching the journal, the publisher has also coined a new term for the journal's genre: Multidisciplinary Open AccessMega Journal (MOAMJ)."

Peter Coles (Head of Sussex University's School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences) blogging in a personal capacity comments on the RCUK policy, and on what could/should be done with the block grant. Excerpts: "Yesterday I was informed of the allocation of funds for Open Access to the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex arising from these block grants. The cash sum involved is too small to pay for Gold Open Access for more than a handful of papers produced within the School, so difficult decisions would have to be made about who is allowed to pay the Author Processing Charges if this pot of money is used in the way RCUK envisages." and "Even if I could force myself to grit my teeth and agree to fork out out the money in APCs to the Academic Publishing Racketeers, I can't think of any sensible basis for deciding which papers should be published this way and which shouldn't. In any case, at least in particle physics and astronomy, most papers are compliant with the RCUK policy anyway because they are placed on the arXiv. I therefore propose not to pay out a single penny of the RCUK OA funds for Gold Open Access, but simply to donate the entire sum as a contribution to the running costs of the arXiv."

Open letter from the editors of over 110 French language journals in the humanities and social sciences to the Minister of Higher Education and Research, the Minister of Culture and Communication, the presidents of universities and grandes écoles, and heads of major research institutions. Opening and closing paras: "We are calling for the urgent opening of dialogue on the issues associated with open access in the humanities and the social sciences. The definition of sufficiently long periods of embargo, allowing journals to choose their economic model (balancing what they offer for free and what they offer for payment), is the only way to guarantee diversity and independence in academic research and public debate." "Consequently, we urgently call for an independent impact assessment to be carried out on these matters. This study should take into account the specificities of the humanities and social sciences and of publications in French. We also expect without delay the opening of a genuine dialogue on these issues between the above-mentioned state actors, researcher organizations, scholarly organizations, the heads of journals in the humanities and social sciences, and editors."

Blog post by Martin Eve commenting on the "History Journal Editors' Statement" - http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access with particular emphasis on CC-BY and CC-BY-NC.

Scholarly kitchen article by Alice Meadows of Wiley amongst other things expressing surprise at the lack of strong opposition in science disciplines to the RCUK CC-BY requirement, and drawing attention to the 2012 ALPSP survey of libraries which, she says, shows "a six-month embargo period is likely to result in wholesale cancellations of arts, humanities, and social science journals".

Q&A session between Jessica Bland and David Willetts on which a range of people comment. The Government's need to keep the UK's 'world class' publishing industry onside shines through in Willetts's responses and is questioned by some of those commenting.

March 27 2013 piece by Jisc's Neil Jacobs summarising the changes that are afoot from 1 April 2013, and highlighting some of the complexities. Concluding paragraph: "Those involved in OA for some time see 2013 as a watershed moment in the UK. However, in reality, this is just the start of a long journey. When I first became involved in OA some 10 years ago, I thought the transition would take 20 years. I still think so."

An edited transcript of a talk by Shieber, who is Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard University. Provides an economic analysis of journal access as "complementary good", and argues that an APC based system is more efficient (from a market economics point of view) that a subscription based system.

Editorial in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research charting progress over the two years since JHR switched to Gold OA supported by modest APCs (Open Access Publication Fee (per page): EURO 15.00 (for members of the International Society of Hymenopterists); EURO 22.00 (for non-members), with a minimum fee of EURO 150 (EURO 220 for non-members) for papers smaller than 10 printed pages. Larger papers will be charged according to the following rates: 1-10 printed pages - EUR 150 (220 for non-members of ISH) 11-100 printed pages - EUR 150 (220 for non-members of ISH) + EUR 15 (22 for non-members of ISH) per page for the number of pages above 10.

300 page PDF on the Parliament web site, with nearly 70 responses including from Government (David Willetts), funders, publishers, individuals with knowledge of the field, learned societies, universities.

The URL points to a DOC file that is the SLSA's thoughtful though slightly "plague on both green and gold" evidence to the House of Commons Select BIS Committee Inquiry into Open Access, written from the perspectives of a learned society that does not publish a journal.

"It is a costly process, and the leading journals can be quite expensive for libraries to buy, but at least the research that does get published is reasonably reliable." writes Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, in this critique of Government policy on OA, ignoring, it seems to me, the extent of market failure in scholarly publishing.