On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director, AGU, wrote:
> Were open access in the best interests of advancing science societies
> would be supporting it now.
The purpose of OA is to maximise research access, usage and impact,
thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests
of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research
funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the
tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted.
> It is as hard for a society executive to know what to oppose as it is
> to know what we should be supporting on the OA side.
AGU is completely Green on author self-archiving. That means it is on
the side of the angels -- except if it is also lobbying against Green
OA Mandates such as FRPAA.
http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html
> Please don't characterize us with the commercial publishers.
The Society publishers that are Green on author self-archiving and are
not lobbying against the FRPAA Green OA mandate are certainly not like
the publishers -- commercial or society -- that are.
> There is no other way those most interested in assuring that the
> record of a discipline is not lost can assure that will not happen
> except to do it themselves and that is why there are societies.
I hope there are more reasons for learned societies to exist than just
preservation, because preservation can and will be taken care of in the
digital era quite expeditiously. I would say that there are still other
reasons for learned societies' existence, such as to implement peer review
and certify its outcome (with their journal name), to host meetings,
perhaps to fund scholarships, to lobby (but not to lobby against OA!) --
and possibly also to sell a paper edition of the journals as long as
there is still a demand for it.
> government can not be trusted to do so.
Government need not be trusted for digital preservation. Research
institutions will preserve their own (published) article output,
self-archived in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs). And for
good measure (and backup) the distributed and mirrored IR contents can
be harvested into various Central Repositories (CRs), including learned
society repositories, if they wish.
But lest there be any misunderstanding, the purpose of the FRPAA
Green OA mandate is not research preservation but research access and impact.
And the Green OA mandates that require direct central self-archiving in a
CR (such as PMC, or a funding agency CR) are not sensible or optimal. All
self-archiving should systematically be done in the researcher's own
institution's IR, the primary research provider. (The only exceptions
should be unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't
yet have an IR; for them there are CRs to deposit in directly for the
time being.)
CRs like PMC can then harvest from the IRs.
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
> Funding agencies of all kinds operate in their own interest...
> None have a primary mission in the protection of the knowledge base;
The locus of deposit is a relatively minor issue; and, to repeat,
OA self-archiving is not being mandated for the sake of preservation but
for the sake of access and impact.
> Academic institutions standing alone do not have the capacity to
> guarantee all knowledge.
No one institution (or society) can, but a distributed network of them,
with back-up and redundancy certainly can.
> Societies are one vital resource, academic institutions are another...
> One without the other is the woof without the warp, a flop.
Agreed, but neither here nor there, insofar as the substantive issue
under discussion is concerned, which is the passage of Green OA
self-archiving mandates such as the FRPAA -- and overcoming publisher
lobbying against them, whether from commercial or society publishers.
> Instead of shouting about the moral rectitude of OA and other irrelevant
> issues how about looking at the whole problem. The development and
> protection of the knowledge base needs to be optimized. Optimizing one
> aspect is likely to be deleterious in other parts of the system.
No one at all is shouting about moral rectitude. The purpose of OA is to
maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research
productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers,
their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry,
students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose
benefit research is funded and conducted.
> Time, Price, Quality - Pick any two.
Yes indeed: And at the same time: Mandate self-archiving, and self-archive.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Apr 01 2007 - 03:35:33 BST