Excerpted from Peter Suber's Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_05_07_fosblogarchive.html#114720037252548059
Here's the key OA recommendation from the [South African Academy
of Science] report:
http://blues.sabinet.co.za/images/ejour/assaf/assaf_strategic_research_publishing.pdf
Recommendation No 6: that the Department of Science and Technology
takes responsibility for ensuring that Open Access initiatives are
promoted to enhance the visibility of all South African research
articles and to make them accessible to the entire international
research community. Specifically:
* online, open access ("Gold route") versions of South
African research journals should be funded in significant part
through a per-article charge system (linked in the case of
higher education institutions to an agreed fraction of output
publication subsidies, and in the case of other research-
producing institutions to adapted budgeting practice), but
publishers should still sell subscriptions to print copies
and should maximise other sources of income to lower the
article-charge burden;
* a federation of institutional Open Access repositories,
adhering to common standards, should be established ("Green
route"), with resources made available to help institutions in
the preliminary stage, this virtual repository to be augmented
by a central repository for those institutions which are unable
to run a sustainable repository;
* national harvesting of South African Open Access repositories
should be undertaken as a matter of urgency, preferably by the NRF
[National Research Foundation]; and the importance of affordable
bandwidth for research communications for this purpose be drawn
to the attention of DST [Department of Science and Technology]
officials negotiating for better rates.
...The virtual repository would capitalise on institutional
efforts, provided agreed standards were adopted, and provide a
publication route for researchers in institutions without such a
repository. The emphasis should be on "leapfrogging" the present
turmoil and confusion in the system. The clear need for caution
in assessing the presently somewhat vaguely defined business
models for open access systems should not prevent the country
from moving forward resolutely with a well-resourced programme
for expanding its electronic access to the global and national
scientific literature.
PETER SUBER: "Kudos to the South African Science Academy
for this bold proposal. I hope the South African government
will take it up quickly.
"(1) The Academy is exactly right that OA to the nation's research
output will significantly increase its visibility and impact.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
"(2) The green part of the recommendation stops short
of an OA mandate for publicly-funded research. Why? The
report strongly recommends creating a national network of
OA repositories, and then harvesting them, but it neglects
the key step of ensuring that researchers deposit their
work in them. South Africa should learn from the NIH,
which has proved that making deposit discretionary, even if
strongly encouraged, leads to a dismally low compliance rate.
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/Final_Report_20060201.pdf
"(3) The gold part of the recommendation is unique as far
as I know. I like the way it proposes to make the subsidy to
OA journals direct, unlike the current taxpayer subsidies to
subscription journals, which are so well hidden that publishers
like to deny them and pretend that government subsidies for OA
"tilt the playing field" and represent unlawful interference with
the "market". I like the way it tries to mitigate the size of
the article processing fees, though I'd like to hear more about
that plan. I like the way it avoids the problem of some naive
recommendations that would require publicly-funded research to
be published in OA journals."
ttp://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_05_07_fosblogarchive.html#114720037252548059
Received on Tue May 09 2006 - 23:42:38 BST