The Geeks and the Irrational
(For the fully hyperlinked version of this posting, with figures see:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/128-guid.html )
A promise: If it should turn out that the spontaneous author uptake
rate for the "hybrid gold open access" option -- i.e., journals that
give authors a choice between either conventional subscription-based
publication or paying to make their own article open access --
significantly exceeds the spontaneous author uptake rate for "green
open access" self-archiving (currently only about 15%, averaged across
all fields, even though 94% of journals have given authors their green
light for immediate OA self-archiving), then this weary archivangelist
will retire to his tent, in defeat and dismay, at having wasted a
decade and a half on trying to maximize the impact of human
rationality, only to discover that the sole thing that had been
missing all along -- as Thomas Walker had suggested in 1998, in the
proposal that launched the American Scientist Open Access Forum -- was
the option to purchase the extra visibility at a price!
http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0001.html
My guess, though, is that researchers are no more likely to do,
spontaneously, for a fee, what they would not do, spontaneously, for
free, for well over a decade now, despite its substantial benefits to
themselves and their research. As 95% of researchers sampled
predicted, repeatedly, when surveyed by Alma Swan (2006) of Key
Perspectives (all figures accompanying this posting are from Key
Perspectives) and others; and as researchers confirmed by their actual
behaviour when submission rates for IRs with and without
self-archiving mandates were compared (Sale 2006): Most researchers
will not bother to self-archive until and unless they are required to
do so by their institutions and/or funders : Not for free, and even
less likely for a fee!
Hence it is Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access (IDOA) Self-Archiving
Mandates by researchers' institutions and funders that will propel
self-archiving rates from their current spontaneous 15% rut into
unstoppable growth toward 100% -- given that Rationality and Rational
Self-Interest alone did not prove to be enough to inspire researchers to
self-archive, but did prove to be enough to inspire their institutions
and funders to extend their existing "publish-or-perish" mandates to
"publish-and-self-archive", and given that few will choose to pay for what
they could have for free but couldn't be bothered to provide it till
mandated to do so. The outcome would be 100% OA either way, of course,
but there would be some consolation if it turned out to be mandated
Rationality, rather than muddled Irrationality that prevailed!
(IF AND WHEN the urgent question should ever become (1) how to pay
publication costs (subscriptions having been cancelled) rather than
(2) how to end access-denial and impact-loss (as now), THEN the
windfall savings from the subscription cancellations will be the
rational source out of which to pay the publication costs. To pay for
OA now, in advance, when all the money is all still tied up in
subscriptions, when all costs are still being covered, and when
catastrophic cancellations are only a hypothetical possibility --
well, you find your own preferred i-word for describing it...)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm
Stevan Harnad
References
Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year
Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it
Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin
28(4) pp. 39-47.
Sale, Arthur (2006a) Researchers and institutional repositories, in
Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic
Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/257/
Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and
responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical
and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12428/
Received on Mon Sep 04 2006 - 21:40:40 BST