Re: Follow up of EC-commissioned "Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe"

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 18:11:49 +0100

> PH:
> For the future success of the Harnad model of scholarly communication the
> most urgent and overdue priority *is* the mandating of self-archiving, I
> agree, since without the mandate it seems likely that some other model of
> scholarly communication will pass this model by (considerably before the
> heat death of the universe). Clearly there is legitimate scope for the use
> of mandating policies in a number of areas (the deposit of theses for
> example), but as a general tool it is more than a little unattractive.

There is no Harnad model: there's just OA, and trying to get authors to provide it,
either by self-archiving (green) or by publishing in OA journals (gold). And there's
trying to get authors' funders and institutions to get their authors to provide OA...

But I would be exceedingly grateful to see the comparative rate-of-growth
data for this other "model" that has, is, or will overtake either
self-archiving or mandated self-archiving, and to see when the projected
100% will be reached according to those growth rates.

I've been at this for 15 years and I'm not terribly impressed any more by
flurries of excitement about this or that. The only thing that talks any
more is %OA: the percentage of annual journal article output that is made
freely accessible. As far as I can tell, both spontaneous (unmandated)
green OA self-archiving and gold OA publishing are far too slow (although
green is faster than gold), and mandates (like the ones introduced by four
of the eight UK Research Councils, plus the Wellcome Trust, plus a half
dozen institutions worldwide, including CERN, and now proposed by the EC
in Europe, as well as by the FRPAA in the US, supported by a large number
of US provosts) stand to accelerate green self-archiving substantially
(and some of the existing mandates are already approaching 100%).

So I'm working for mandates. I don't see anything (short of a windfall
infusion of cash to pay publishers' asking price for Open Choice) likely
to accelerate gold commensurately: Do you?

> > SH:
> > However, the research community needs all the help it can get in order
> > to induce it to do the right thing, in its own interests (and those
> > of research). ....100% OA has already been fully within the research
> > community's reach for over a decade now, and they still have not grasped
> > it. OA is already long overdue, hence the time has already passed for
> > sitting waiting expectantly for possible, eventual, dynamic changes that
> > may take until the heat death of the universe to come to come to pass,
> > if not helped along by a little practical good sense today...
>
> PH:
> The blame for the failure of the Harnad model (sans mandates) here is aimed
> fair and square at the research community, and the slow rate of institutions
> lining up to mandate their researchers to deposit their research is being
> presented as a resistance to help.

Exactly. And the premise is that OA is a good thing for research and
the research community. (If it's not, let's all forget it!)

If that premise is correct, then, yes, it was foolish in the extreme of
the research community not to do the few keystrokes per paper it would have
taken to get this all over and done with years ago, and to prefer instead
to do the keystrokes (34,000 of them, for example, by the signers of the
PLoS Open Letter of 2001, including me) threatening (idly) to boycott
their publishers if they don't do the keystrokes in their stead, and then,
failing that, signing Declarations and Manifestos -- anything but actually
providing for themselves the OA they purport to need and want so much.

Now they're waiting around for gold to fall from the skies of its own
accord, and lately (and understandably), when offered the option of
paying for the gold Open Choice, balking, because there's no extra source
of cash.

And yet the research community is not quite as foolishness all the way
down. They were right about one thing: "OA is [indeed] a good thing
for research and the research community". And at long last it is their
funders and employers who are putting two and two together. They have
been mandating publishing all along, and lately also rewarding not just
publication counts, but research impact. So why not maximise research
impact by mandating self-archiving too?

The token has fallen (though not yet quickly and widely enough).

So we keep working to get it to fall faster and wider: Not failure,
but not yet success either.

But what, one wonders, is Philip Hunter's point? Do you know of growth figures I am
not aware of?

> PH:
> This is an exasperation.
>
> Maybe you should be looking at your model again, rather than blaming others
> for its deficiencies in the field.

That is an exasperation. I count the progress towards mandate overdue, but as
progress just the same.

And there is no "model": this is about OA, and concrete action toward
providing 100% OA, as soon as possible. (The fact that it's already overdue
is too late to correct.)

The rest is speculative pies in the sky.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Oct 09 2006 - 18:18:20 BST