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On 25-Apr-09, at 9:48 AM, David Prosser wrote:
Interestingly, the main objection against the policy as
reported was:
"Open access will kill the journals you need during your
career," women's studies professor and university senator
Claire Moses said. "It's as simple as that."
That is not a gold/green OA misunderstanding. That?s just a
misunderstanding. It is not clear to me that this would have
been cleared-up if the Maryland resolution had removed all
mention of journals ? some academics fear that green OA will
destroy journals.
(David, I am assuming that what you meant was "all mention of Gold OA
journals" rather than "all mention of journals," because it is
impossible to formulate a Green OA self-archiving mandate at all
without mentioning that it is refereed journal articles that need to
be self-archived!)
But, yes, my reply is this: In formulating a Green OA self-archiving
mandate, the requirement itself should be stated clearly, distinctly,
and independently of any ancillary, speculative or other detail:
(1) Publish your articles in whatever refereed journal
you wish.
(2) Deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft in your
institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for
publication.
That's the core policy. If it is decided that access embargoes are
permitted, add:
(3) Most journals already endorse making the deposited
article Open Access immediately. For articles published
in journals that do not yet endorse immediately setting
access as Open Acces, you may set access to the deposit
as "Closed Access" for an embargo period of XX months
(specify).
(4) During the embargo period, the repository's
semi-automatic "email eprint request" button will allow
all would-be users who reach the metadata for your Closed
Access article and need the full text to insert their
email address and the reason for their request. One click
from the requester forwards the request automatically to
the author, who can, if he wishes, authorize the
automatic emailing of one individual eprint to the
requester for research purposes, again with one click.
The mandate can be accompanied by a FAQ, which can answer authors'
questions about such things as "will this kill journals".
The answer is definitely not: "No, because we are making research
money available to pay for the publishing fees of fee-based Gold OA
journals."
The correct answer is:
All evidence to date is that self-archiving does not
generate journal cancelations. Self-archiving and
self-archiving mandates do not affect individual journals
separately: they affect all journals at once. If and when
self-archiving ever generates enough journal cancelations
to make the subscription-fee model no longer sustainable
for cost-recovery, journals will convert to the Gold OA
publication-fee model for cost-recovery, and the money
used to pay for it will be the institutional windfall
savings from the very same institutional subscription
cancellations that generated the conversion to Gold OA.
About one-sixth of journals are already Gold OA, though
only a minority of them as yet charge for publication
because they are still being sustained by subscriptions
or subsidies.
That is all that need be said about Gold OA at this time.
I know that some feel that all the world?s ills can be layed
at the door of gold OA, but this really doesn?t look like a
case of so-called ?gold fever?.
Not all the world's ills, David, but a goodly portion of the world's
delay in achieving OA.
Click
http://tinyurl.com/dkgbtq to see some of the many other instances of gold fever that have been and are still slowing the progress of
Green OA (hence OA).
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat Apr 25 2009 - 17:03:47 BST