Dear all,
> Many thanks to Andrew for pointing out my pre-emptive error (in
> sniffing out Gold Fever)! No, Hokkaido University is not paying
> pre-emptively for Gold Open Access. It is merely (like all
> universities) paying for subscription access and (like all but 100
> universities so far) limiting the potential impact of its own
> research output as well its own users' access to the research output
> of other universities published in journals to which it cannot
> afford to subscribe. So (like all universities that have not yet
> done so) the only thing Hokkaido needs to do now is to mandate the
> Green OA self-archiving of its own research output. That done, all
> else will take care of itself, as a natural matter of course...
If I may, I would like to add, as part of the Japanese repository
community, that it has consciously kept away from Gold Open Access
Fever or whatever you make call it. It has been working on "voluntary
though assisted" self-archiving through collaboration with the faculty
and reseachers rather than implementing the mandated depositing . Yes,
it has maybe just reached the baseline deposit rate but we believe
that it is not tactically wise to rush and shout for the mandate in
the atomsphere of the Japanese campus politics, which I don't to like
to detail in a short message. We still believe that advocacy should
work. Hokkaido is, in a sense, unique that mandating is openly
discussed on campus for reasons I don't know.
A couple of factual comments: Generally speaking, Hokkaido University
has virtually no problem about accessing but it not confirmed yet that
it has lost impact because the researchers there have not deposited
enough or because they have not published in OA journals. Last year
and this year, journals have been much cheaper in JPY than in
USD/EUR/GBP if the quotations are in the latter currencies, by the
way.
One of Andrew's statements is not correct. He says that the university
provides direct payment for individual item access costs when
Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the
existing subscription, but this is not true. The university directly
only pays for site licenses. When a researcher needs an article in an
unsubscribed journals, he can request a photocopy of the article
through the library just in the same way as in the rest of the world.
The cost for the photocophy and postage(!) is not covered by the
library budget, though. Each researcher has pay from their own
research fund. Students may have to pay from their own
pockets. Needless to say, the univesity or library does not pay for
any pay-per-view articles downloaded.
Syun Tutiya
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Syun Tutiya
Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, Chiba University
Address: Faculty of Letters, Chiba University
1-33 Yayoicho, Inageku, Chiba, Chiba, 263-8522 JAPAN
Email: tutiya _at_ kenon.l.chiba-u.ac.jp
Web:
http://cogsci.l.chiba-u.ac.jp/~tutiya/
Received on Sat Sep 18 2010 - 14:37:25 BST