On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
> Intervention on cost of open access:
>
> arXiv, SSRN and RePEc estimate their 'first copy costs' at $1-5...
> They do not organise peer review, editing and copy-editing.
Repositories provide access to papers, before and after
peer-reviewed publishing. Comparing access provision to peer-reviewed
publishing is comparing apples and oranges (or Karaoke to Caruso...)
> Surely several hundred dollars per article will on
> average be enough to provide sophisticated certification and
> editing services currently not available from repositories.
Yes. But that service-provider is called a peer-reviewed journal.
> it would be possible to save libraries millions of
> dollars if open access publishing reform were done right.
The right way to do it is to mandate Green OA. Then cancellations,
downsizing, and conversion to Gold OA may eventually follow. But the
urgent part is the OA, for research and researchers, not the
dollar-saving, for libraries.
> Many proponents of the green and the gold road have lost sight of
> what open access was meant to strategically accomplish: enhance
> access, inclusion and impact.
Green OA certainly has not lost sight of that: It's what brought it into
focus in the first place; and it's the only thing Green OA is for.
> - Green OA by means of institutional repositories (expensive
> digital doubling of research articles that aren't even originals
> but only 'dirty' copies)
Nonsense. The digital "doubling" is neither expensive (costs a few
keystrokes) nor "dirty" (the author's final, revised, accepted,
peer-reviewed draft is every bit as useful to researchers who cannot
afford access to the publisher's PDF as the PDF itself).
> Mandates may be legitimate as collective action if they secure
> the further progress of science (and this includes establishing a
> more efficient publishing system).
Green OA mandates may or may not transform the publishing system, but
they will certainly provide OA, which is all that research and
researchers need.
> Mandates may also be in the
> best interest of the author (consider as analogy mandatory
> car/driver insurance).
They certainly are. (And Alma Swan's analogy to mandated seat-belts is
even better, because it does not refer to payments, but just to buckling
up -- which is very much like the keystrokes that are the only thing
standing between us and 100% OA.)
> research funding councils, universities
> and research libraries have an understandable and justified
> collective interest in altering the standard copyright contract
> to ensure that the research literature becomes available more
> cheaply and with extensive use and re-use permissions (e.g. for
> text and data mining).
Mandating copyright policy is a much taller order than mandating
the immediate deposit of all postprints. Do the latter first, then
try to get agreement to adopt a copyright mandate if you like...
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Thu Nov 01 2007 - 01:56:36 GMT