On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Barry Mahon wrote:
> One comment in the report which I found interesting -
> "Regarding the main factors hindering efficient knowledge transfer
> to industry, almost all respondents highlight cultural differences
> between the business and science communities and a lack of
> incentives.
Differences about what, and incentives for what?
The only pertinent matter here is whether or not there are any
differences between the business and science communities about
mandating that published, peer-reviewed journal articles must
be self-archived in Open Access Institutional Repositories.
There is no difference whatsoever on this matter -- for all business
communities other than (parts of) one: the journal publishing business.
All the rest of the business sector -- all the vast numbers of R & D
industries that produce, use and apply published research -- benefit,
along with the research community, from OA mandates, both in terms of
access (to the published research output of others) and in terms of impact
(of their own published research output).
But please note that OA self-archiving mandates apply only to *published*
research. They have nothing whatsoever to do with unpublished, proprietary
research.
> In order to address this issue, a number of options
> are proposed, ranging from guidelines or financial incentives to
> legislative initiatives (similar to a Bayh-Dole act for Europe).
Guidelines for what? And financial incentives for what? If there is any
incentive to *publish* at all, then there is exactly the same incentive
to maximise the access to and the impact of those publications. The
science and business community have exactly the same kind of stake in
both.
> Respondents generally supported non-legislative approach, with model
> contracts, charters, guidelines and financial incentives being firmly
> supported as long as they remain purely voluntary."
Non-legislative approach to what? Contracts for what? and to whom?
> This would seem to conflict with the view that research results
> should be 'open'
As far as I can tell, this is completely orthogonal to the question of
whether *published* research results should be openly accessible to all
their would-be users, rather than just to those whose institutions can
afford to subscribe to the journal in which they happen to be
published. Where is the business interest in that (apart from the
business interest of the publisher of the journal in which the research
happens to be published)?
> Does 'financial incentives' mean that if research is (part or whole)
> funded by industry then the results might be restricted??
To repeat: If "restricted" means *not published*, then the OA
self-archiving mandate proposals have absolutely nothing to do with
that question.
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 Wed Dec 19 2007 - 14:46:43 GMT