Group items tagged

A. Townsend Peterson, Ada Emmett and Marc Greenberg article in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Excerpt: "By seeking 'author-pays' models as a main means of making OA journals viable, academia creates another problem: a scholarly communication world in which access is open to readers, but not to authors. Academia is globalizing rapidly, with a growing proportion of top researchers working in developing countries. If public monies are to be used to finance shifts to completely OA journals ('Gold' OA systems) via taxpayer subsidy (see, e.g., Finch, 2012), for example, business models will have to be examined carefully to assure that global wealth distribution does not translate into new imbalances in access to scholarly communication. That is, commercial gold OA journals will not necessarily solve this problem for less-prosperous individuals, institutions, or countries. As scholars struggle to open access globally, they must avoid the trap of assuming that all competent authors will have resources for publication charges (or the gumption to request fee waivers), such that some authors with important insights end up effectively excluded from this system."

Summative and optimistic overview from Tony Hey (now with Microsoft, but previously a key player in Jisc and an academic at the University of Southampton), singling out Stevan Harnad for special praise, and pointing forward to the may 2013 meeting of the Global Research Council: "The second summit meeting of the GRC will take place in Berlin from 27 to 29 May 2013, hosted by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Brazilian CNPq agency. The main goal of this summit will be to 'agree on an action plan for implementing Open Access to Publications as the main paradigm of scientific communication in the following years'. Such unanimity on Open Access between the major global research funding organizations will surely bring about both a more sustainable model of scholarly communication and a more efficient research process for solving some of the major scientific challenges facing the world."

Abstract of 'field report' in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog : "The Open Library of Humanities is a newly-launched project aiming to provide an ethically sound and sustainable open access model for humanities research. By coordinating the discussion and implementation of a community-grounded approach to academic publishing, OLH aims to create an outlet better able to serve academics, libraries, and the wider research community. Co-founder Martin Eve describes the current "ideas phase" of the project and outlines his vision of where it will go from here."

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."

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.

Tony Hey, now with Microsoft, was in the thick of things in the UK when the original push for (repository based) OA began, so his very balanced observations on Finch and the RCUK OA policy are particularly germane. Key paragraph: "What should RCUK do now? In my opinion, RCUK could make a very small but significant change in its open access policy and adopt a rights-retention green OA mandate that requires 'RCUK-funded authors to retain certain non-exclusive rights and use them to authorize green OA'. In the words of Peter Suber, this would 'create a standing green option regardless of what publishers decide to offer on their own.' In addition, RCUK should recommend that universities follow the Open Access Policy Guidelines of Harvard, set out by their Office of Scholarly Communication. Under this policy, Harvard authors are required to deposit a full text version of their paper in DASH, the Harvard Open Access Repository even in the case where the publisher does not permit open access and the author has been unable to obtain a waiver from the publisher."

Blog post with dialogue in the comments section between the author and Stevan Harnad. Concluding para: "Open Access publishing is itself a complex, and currently controversial, issue. The "Green" versus "Gold" debate, though, is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent - excellent - posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard's Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication."

Abstract of the Abstract of this research paper:  This study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about green Open Access (OA). It synthesises previous studies of green OA and covers issues of publishers rights, long-term preservation and the technical foundation for green OA. It concludes that the number of articles within the scope of OA mandates, which strongly influence the selfarchival rate of articles, is nevertheless still low.

Key passage: "But, achieving open access is not easy. Professional maintenance and distribution of large digital archives, guaranteed for the long term, does incur significant cost. The most promising model for recovering such costs under an open-access regime is an author-pays (or, in effect, a funding institution pays) model. Such a scheme introduces issues of its own. If publishers generate revenue by producing more content (paid for by authors) rather than quality content (paid for by subscribers), then the natural tendency in the system will be for the generation of large quantities of low-quality content. Indeed, we have seen the rise of predatory publishers, actively seeking authors to pay for publication in venues devoid of the exacting scrutiny of conscientious peer review. The result is a glut of third-rate publications that add noise rather than insight to the scientific enterprise. The important question is: Can we establish a sustainable economic model for publication that serves the interest of both authors and the reading public? We submit that non-profit professional societies must play a critical role in this regard. They are the hallmark of quality in publications, and must remain so to serve the interests of the reading public. But, how do we transition from the current subscription model to a new financial model enabling open access in a way that does not bankrupt the organization in the process? This question has occupied the attention of the ACM Publications Board for several years. Because the stakes are high, the Board has chosen to move with caution."