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."

Google's "Policy by the Numbers" blog has this coherent summary of the argument for author self archiving rather than Gold. Written by Andrew Adams (Professor of Information Ethics in the Graduate School of Business Administration and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University in Tokyo). An earlier "Policy By the Numbers" post by Andrew Adams "Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Why It Matters" is at http://policybythenumbers.blogspot.com/2012/12/open-access-to-scholarly-literature-and.html.

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.

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".

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.

A Harvard Berkman Centre project to track and tag all things Open Access (and not just OA scholarly publishing) with Peter Suber the "ideas guy". Uses TagTeam, an open-source RSS (and atom) aggregator.

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."

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."

Commentary on Martin Eve's step-by-step guide to starting an open-access journal https://www.martineve.com/2012/07/13/starting-an-open-access-journal-a-step-by-step-guide-table-of-contents/.

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."

"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.

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

Somewhat ill informed attack on "the historians" asserting that the latter's hostility to Finch involved fear of "casting pearls before proles", and that it is the "cost of checking and editing" that has stopped the Internet bringing down the costs of scholarly publishing. [Some of the comments on the piece are interesting.]

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.

In 2012 over 80,000 articles were published by OASPA members under CC-BY licenses, more than double the number in 2010.

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