Group items tagged

New (January 2013, but undated) policy from the MS Society is an interesting variation on the central theme. Excerpts: 3.1. It is a condition of grant award that peer reviewed research papers resulting from research funded, in whole or in part, by the MS Society are published in an Open Access environment and made available through Europe PMC. 3.2. Such papers must become Open Access as soon as possible following publication, and in all cases within 6 months of the publication date. 3.3. Where authors are required to pay an open access fee, the MS Society regretfully cannot cover these costs. == 4.2. In order to self-archive authors must ensure certain rights are reserved in any agreement with the publisher. Specifically, authors will need the right to deposit peer-reviewed manuscripts in Europe PMC immediately upon its acceptance for publication and to make it publicly available within 6 months after publication. == 5.1. In exceptional circumstances authors can publish in journals that are noncompliant with the MS Society's open access policy if it is considered to be the most appropriate journal to publish in. 5.2. In the event that authors decide to publish in a journal that is not compliant with MS Society's open access policy, authors should notify the MS Society of this when a manuscript is submitted, providing justification for the decision.

"Research results published through Open Access on the Internet are available for anyone to read and download. Researchers who receive funding from Formas from 2010 and onwards must guarantee that their research findings will be available through Open Access within six months of publication. Researchers may either publish in journals with an Open Access practice or those that archive published articles in large public access databases. The Open Access regulations currently only apply to scientifically peer-reviewed text published in scientific journals and conference reports. The regulations do not currently apply to monographs or book chapters. Funding to cover publication costs in Open Access journals can be included in research project applications as a direct cost."

Blog post by Mike Taylor charting what he sees as a gradual weakening of the RCUK OA policy since RCUK published its March 2012 draft. He concludes: "Can anyone doubt that the nobbling of a truly progressive policy was the result of lobbying by a truly regressive publishing industry? It's been a tragedy to watch this policy erode away from something dramatic to almost nothing. Once more, it's publishers versus everyone else. Again, I have to ask this very simple question: why do we tolerate the obvious conflict of interest in allowing publishers to have any say at all in deciding how our government spends public money on publication services?"

Joseph Esposito writes in the "The Scholarly Kitchen" about what he sees as an O'Reilly shaped (dominated) ecosystem in which the Safari Books approach to online publishing and all that it entails becomes an important model, that will spread into journal publishing too (PeerJ will be built on Safari, according to Esposito.

Cost-effectiveness of open access publications by Jevin West, Theodore Bergstrom and Carl T. Bergstrom. Tool: http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/ Abstract: "Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis | the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. However, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive publication charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choosing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their publication fees."

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."

Jeffrey Beall here highlights "OAJPA", a bogus new Open Access Publisher Association attempting to compete with the legitimate OASPA.

Piece in Nature about the "Episciences Project" which, with money from the French Government aims to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. See also Tim Gowers on the subject: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/

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."

Two key paras: "7. Moreover, our modelling shows that Green OA is cheaper. When the UK, or any individual country, individual university or research funder seek to make their research freely accessible and usable they must face the cost of doing so, and cannot reap the benefits of free access until others also move to Open Access. With article publishing charges at £1500, adopting Gold OA would cost the UK universities we studied in our "Going for Gold?" report 12 times the cost of adopting Green OA, and for the more research intensive universities going for Gold could cost 25 times as much as going Green. As article processing fees rise, these multiples rise too. 8. The BIS innovation agenda is best served by Green Open Access, which is affordable now. The Finch study lost focus on this because the composition of the Group meant there was a focus on the needs of the academic world and the publishers that serve that constituency. The expensive 'solution' proposed by Finch does virtually nothing for the innovative business sector."

Suber highlights the many misconceptions about Gold OA and APCs. Excerpt: "The survey definition of gold OA leaves two false and harmful impressions: first that all (or even most) OA journals charge APCs, and second, that all (or even most) APCs are paid by authors. But most OA journals charge no APCs, and most authors even at those APC-charging journals don't pay them. In fact, only 3.7% of authors who publish in OA journals overall (12% of 31%) pay APCs. I've been complaining since 2006 about interviews and surveys that misinform their subjects, on just this point, before questioning them. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4391309 In my book (Open Access, MIT Press, 2012, p. 140) I put it this way: "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: 'At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.'" http://bit.ly/oa-book "

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.

"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.

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."

Key points: * OASPA recognizes the interests of funders in seeking to maximize access to the results of research funded under their programmes. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy support for gold open access as the preferred model, with additional funds being made available. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy requirement for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to be used where Research Council funds are used to meet a gold open access fee. * The APC levels per article that are assumed by the RCUK policy following the Report by the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, are reasonable and in line with the experiences of open access publishers. * Infrastructural challenges exist (e.g. payment mechanisms), and are being addressed by the necessary stakeholders. OASPA is committed to engaging actively with stakeholders to resolve these.

Extract. Applicable across all fields: "The project leader must guarantee that the research findings are accessible to everyone (Open Access) within six months of publication. In cases where publishing involves parallel publication in open institutional archives, arrangements should be made at the time of publication for open accessibility within six months. The Council may prolong the allowed time period until Open Access or parallel publishing up to 12 months, provided that the project leader can present a clear documentation stating that all possible effort has been made to reach the six-month limit. Until further notice, the Open Access rules apply only to peer-reviewed texts in journals and conference reports, not to monographs and book chapters."

Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toront writes about the "Big Deal" packages in publishing, drawing on "Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce" by Andrew Odlyzko - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2211874

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."

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."