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Begin forwarded message:
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: October 5, 2009 10:19:31 AM EDT (CA)
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Cc: JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Parallel journals
On 5-Oct-09, at 4:49 AM, Talat Chaudhri wrote:
> This attitude is also reported quite widely in Britain, certainly in my
> experience as an ex repository manager. I believe that Stevan Harnad in
> particular considers this to be wrong-headed, from his earlier posts on
> this subject, but we may wish to bear in mind that repositories are a
> service for academics and need to take account of their views.
Academics' views can only be taken into account if their views are known. If
one asks them a question without providing the realistic contingencies, one
is not addressing their practical views or needs but just their
hypothetical fantasies.
The status quo is that academics want access to peer-reviewed articles to
which they lack subscription access, and most publishers do not allow
authors to provide free online access to the publisher's PDF -- only to the
author's own final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft.
Hence hypothetical preferences for PDF are irrelevant. The question that
needs to be asked of academics today is whether they would rather have (and
provide) access to peer-reviewed final drafts or no access at all (in the
absence of subscription access to the PDF).
> Nonetheless, there seem to be two main counter arguments:
>
> 1) having the content free to access, even if not in the publisher's
> format, is better than not having it (especially for the many that cannot
> afford journal subscriptions, notably but increasingly not limited to the
> developing world)
That is correct.
> 2) the insistence on the canonical publisher's PDF is created out of a
> culture in which publishers possess a kind of magic wand that gives the
> aura of academic acceptablity, when in fact that acceptability should
> properly derive from peer review, not from the page setting and other
> publisher services.
This is a red herring. It is the author's final *peer-reviewed* draft that
we are talking about.
> Thus, we idealists can happily point out (as I suspect Stevan would) that
> there is always a means to cite by section, paragraph etc
This changes the topic from the fundamental OA problem of access-denial
itself, to the far more minor problem of how to cite page-spans when quoting
from an author's postprint that lacks the published PDF's page numbers. (As
noted, there is a simple solution, even there.)
> and that the academic herself/himself could, if they were so minded,
> contribute to a culture where they themselves set what is the canonical
> version. Perhaps we may feel that this ideal is something worth pursuing.
> We may remember that the earliest academics had full control over the
> dissemination of their papers, and publishers originally came to exist as
> a service to make that task easier. That, of course, was in a world where
> there were very few academics, so our view of this ideal must be tempered
> by the knowledge that contemporary systems must always scale up to a world
> in which there are many times more academics.
This is all worthy, but pie-in-the-sky, again. We were talking about what
academics need and want (and lack) today, and what can be done, practically,
to remedy that immediate need today. The only culture-change required for
that is Green OA self-archiving mandates. The rest of the cultural change,
far less urgent, can be allowed to take its own natural course once the
immediate, urgent problem -- the fundamental problem that OA was conceived
in order to solve -- is solved.
> In reality, it seems that academics are like most other people in wanting,
> for the most part, to work within the methods usually practised within
> their profession, rather than to radically change them.
The real practical issue at hand is not about radical changes, but just
about a few keystrokes by authors to deposit their final drafts in their
IRs.
It is the bigger cultural scenarios that are talking about "radical" changes
-- worthy and welcome, no doubt, but not within immediate reach, as the
self-archiving of author postprints is. Yet it is the latter that will solve
academics immediate access/impact problems -- and hence the OA problem,
today. The rest is superfluous notional over-reaching at the expense of the
immediately reachable, practical goal.
> If they feel that other academics will not take the non-publisher PDF
> seriously (and they are in a good position to judge this),
If they have been given to feel that the question is whether academics will
"take non-publisher PDF seriously" then not only have they been asked the
wrong question, but the objective evidence on which the correct reply to
even that irrelevant question depends is already known, and academics who do
not know that objective evidence are indeed in no position to answer:
Authors' final refereed drafts are being deposited, downloaded, accessed and
used all over the web, for years now, in all disciplines. (What is cited,
once it has appeared, is of course always the canonical publication itself;
the bibliographic information is freely accessible to all; it is only the
content itself that needs to have the parallel access route -- n.b. not a
"parallel journal" -- for all access-denied nonsubscribers.)
(The fact that the proportion of scholarship's total annual article output
of 2.5 million articles that is thus being made OA is still only 15% today
is the reason OA needs to be accelerated by mandates -- and not retarded by
PDF tomfoolery. It is certainly not evidence that "academics will not take
the non-publisher PDF seriously." The relevant academic to keep in mind
there is the access-denied nonsubscriber, not the author or user fantasizing
about the ideal formats for journal articles accessible to all.)
> then we must employ advocacy but expect that it may well take a while to
> alter the views of the majority. After all, their primary interest is
> naturally in furthering their research, not necessarily in solving the
> world's ills. What is perhaps most frustrating is that the fear that
> others will judge a non-publisher's PDF less favourably is ultimately
> self-fulfilling, which may be the reason that it is difficult to break the
> circle and convince academics that it need not necessarily be so.
You are quite right that advocacy is needed. But the needed advocacy is for
Green OA self-archiving mandates, not image-management for non-PDF!
There are many groundless reasons (at least 34 on last count
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32-worries ) why not enough
authors are depositing yet -- and not enough institutions/funders are
mandating deposit of -- OA's target content (refereed research). "Version
control" --
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#23.Version -- is
one of the least of them. Once that's the sole obstacle left, we will
already have long reached 100% OA...
> I accept the point made in the previous post that the situation may vary
> between different countries, although in this case he describes attitudes
> that are familiar to me. In practice, the demands of offering a service
> probably mean we have to balance these opposing views and seek to hold
> whatever content upon the basis of which we can offer a useful service to
> the academics whom systems like repositories are supposed to serve,
> however idealistic or otherwise a view we may take as individual
> commentators.
There is no variation -- by country or by discipline -- in the fundamental
fact that in order to use peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research
findings, scholars and scientists need to access them. OA is about ensuring,
at long last, that those peer-reviewed findings are accessible to all users
and not just to those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the
publisher's PDF.
Put the contingencies clearly to any scholar or scientist, in any country or
discipline, and you will get the same answer: If it's a question of non-PDF
access vs. access-denial, give me non-PDF access any day (preferably
today!)...
Stevan Harnad
> Talat
>
> Kuil, van der Annemiek wrote:
> > Apparantly there are differences between countries (although acadamia
> > goes beyond borders) and therefore it is difficult to generalise and say
> > that ....
> > (4) The difference between the publisher's PDF and the author's
> > self-archived final refereed, revised draft are completely trivial. This
> > is not something a researcher would worry about. Researchers are worried
> > about access denial, not PDF.
> > ... this is certainly not the case in the Netherlands. What I hear from
> > people in the field (and among them are important decsionmakers) is that
> > a large group of researchers does not want to bother with different
> > versions. There is only one version they are concerned with, and that is
> > the publisher's PDF.
> > Met vriendelijke groet,
> > Annemiek
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *From:* Repositories discussion list
> > [mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK] *On Behalf Of *leo waaijers
> > *Sent:* vrijdag 2 oktober 2009 19:24
> > *To:* JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > *Subject:* Re: Parallel journals
> >
> > Sorry that I did have an idea of my own.
> >
> > Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > > (1) We don't need "parallel journals": we just need parallel ACCESS to
> > > the articles in the journals that already exist.
> > >
> > > (2) That's what green OA self-archiving of the author's final
> > > refereed, revised draft provides.
> > >
> > > (3) Green OA does not provide "parallel articles" either. It just
> > > provides parallel access to the same journals.
> > >
> > > (4) The difference between the publisher's PDF and the author's
> > > self-archived final refereed, revised draft are completely trivial.
> > > This is not something a researcher would worry about. Researchers are
> > > worried about access denial, not PDF.
> > >
> > > (5) A journal issue is just a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated
> > > articles; no need to "reconstruct" that; open access to all the
> > > articles plus good boolean search power is all that's needed.
> > >
> > > (6) The PostGutenberg journal is just a peer-review service provider,
> > > for quality assurance, plus a tag (the journal name) certifying the
> > > outcome as having met the quality standards for which the journal has
> > > an established track record.
> > >
> > > (7) The rest is just the journal-tagged, peer-reviewed file, sitting
> > > safely in the author's institutional repository (suitably backed up,
> > > mirrored, preserved, etc.), plus central harvesters providing powerful
> > > search capability across the entire distributed corpus.
> > >
> > > (8) Gutenberg print editions, and even para-Gutenberg publisher-PDFs
> > > will only last as long as there is still a user demand for them; with
> > > 100% Green OA, I promise you that that demand will not be coming from
> > > researchers, nor from students...
> > >
> > > Stevan Harnad
> > >
> > >
> > > On 2-Oct-09, at 12:50 PM, J.W.T.Smith wrote:
> > >
> > > > Leo,
> > > > You can approximate this by using Google Scholar Advanced Search.
> > > > Search for a specific journal title and limit to a time period.
> > > >
> > > > The result of a search for articles in ?Journal of biological
> > > > chemistry? for 2008 looks like this:
> > > >
> > > > http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=&as_publication=%22Journ
> > > > al+of+biological+chemistry%22&as_ylo=2008&as_yhi=2008&btnG=Search
> > > > <http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=&as_publication=%22Jour
> > > > nal+of+biological+chemistry%22&as_ylo=2008&as_yhi=2008&btnG=Search>
> > > >
> > > > Of course the results are not clustered by issue but ranked by
> > > > number of citations. However I am sure there are people reading this
> > > > list who could write some code to reorder this results list and
> > > > cluster by issue or page number range. A little more coding and
> > > > maybe we could cluster by issue and then by page number within each
> > > > issue thus giving exact copies of contents pages.
> > > >
> > > > What could we call this new form of journal, ah yes, it would be a
> > > > ?Reconstructed Journal? :-) .
> > > >
> > > > John.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > ---
> > > > *From:* Repositories discussion list
> > > > [mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > > > <mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK>] *On Behalf Of *leo
> > > > waaijers
> > > > *Sent:* 02 October 2009 14:39
> > > > *To:* JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > > > <mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES_at_JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> > > > *Subject:* Parallel journals
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > Today, thinking hard again about the (dis)advantages of Green OA the
> > > > following idea flashed through my mind. Green OA leads to ?parallel
> > > > articles?, i.e. the post prints of the pdf?s in official journals.
> > > > Why not having ?parallel journals? as well? It?s not so difficult I
> > > > think. Someone has to generate a list of journal titles and issues
> > > > with empty article records. And then every repository can complete
> > > > these records with the metadata of the post prints that they hold.
> > > > Just like we created union catalogs in the old days.
> > > > As I see it, the main advantage is that we can integrate the worlds
> > > > of Gold and Green OA at journal level. Wouldn?t that be a relief to
> > > > readers, funders and authors?
> > > >
> > > > Cheers,
> > > > Leo.
> > > >
> > >
>
> --
> Dr Talat Chaudhri
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Research Officer
> UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, Great Britain
> Telephone: +44 (0)1225 385105 Fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
> E-mail: t.chaudhri_at_ukoln.ac.uk Skype: talat.chaudhri
> Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.chaudhri/
> ------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tue Oct 06 2009 - 10:50:13 BST