Comments on: White House announces new US ‘open access’ policy

By: asiwel

asiwel — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 06:15:27 +0000

This is an interesting list of good suggestions. I would suspect that #7 would be most controversial and might more or less eliminate the need for #2 and #3. I further suspect that it is a matter of prestige and university tenure that causes many researchers to seek publication in “highly-refereed” journals. Most large annual professional conferences (AERA, for instance) now offer means of electronically pre-publishing papers and presentation materials in conference and member libraries. Further, you can always publish for free in places like arXiv.org or ERIC, etc. An advantage often is that you don’t necessarily need to follow APA or other stylistic guidelines – you can do your own formatting and editing, as good as any journal. But the paper is there for reference and anybody to read. Often this is satisfying enough as a contribution to the knowledge base (while allowing one to get on with one’s research).

By: Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:50:31 +0000

THREE CHEERS AND EIGHT SUGGESTIONS

The new US OATP Presidential Directive requiring the largest US funding agencies to mandate OA within 12 months of publication is a wonderful step forward for the entire planet.

Here are some crucial implementational details that will maximize the mandates’ effectiveness.

(1) Specify that the deposit of each article must be in an institutional repository (so the universities and research institutions can monitor and ensure compliance as well as adopt mandates of their own).

(2) Specify that the deposit must be done immediately upon publication.

(3) Urge (but do not require) authors to make the immediate-deposit immediately-OA.

(4) Urge (but do not require) authors to reserve the right to make their papers immediately-OA (and other re-use rights) in their contracts with their publishers (as in the Harvard-style mandates).

(5) Shorten, or, better, do not mention allowable OA embargoes at all (so as not to encourage publishers to adopt them).

(6) Implement the repositories’ automated “email eprint request” Button (for embargoed [non-OA] deposits).

(7) Designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review, research assessment, grant application, or grant renewal.

(8) Implement rich usage and citation metrics in the institutional repositories as incentive for compliance.

If this is all done universally, universal OA will soon be upon us — and a global transition to affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (instead of today’s premature, double-paid Fool’s-Gold), plus as much CC-BY as users need and authors wish to provide — will not be far behind.

By: Dr. X

Dr. X — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:47:12 +0000

Publishers provide/pay for peer reviews. Plus they do preselection, ranking importance of the paper in particular field. Publishing in Science or Nature is much harder then in no name journal.

If everyone would be their own judge of how important paper is and select reviewers by themselves, we will get situation were 99% of papers on the market would be published by scams.

By: Dr. X

Dr. X — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:41:40 +0000

Most peer review publications in the world are published in US. Right now if you are working in any field and a foreigner, you had to buy a lot of US papers subscriptions. Pay $$$.

With this initiative anyone will get free access to US papers, while American researches/scientists would still had to pay for foreign papers.

By: asiwel

asiwel — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 05:36:13 +0000

I am not really opposed to this sort of “open access” policy either. I have always been fortunate to be able to access through university libraries. I really don’t like the very idea of me having to pay some journal a per-page rate just because it thinks it has deigned to publish a paper .. quite the contrary, I think I’m doing it a favor by submitting. But that is just personal. Having served on editorial boards and review panels, I know that there are legitimate costs that go beyond voluntary services and someone must provide these … or there is no journal, or website, or NGO, no newspaper (with independence of advertisers), etc. Even blogs and sites like Reddit, Wikipedia, etc., cost money. The Elsevier episode not withstanding, the idea of open publishing is a good one for many other reasons as well .. and so was/is Google’s book scanning project. And the public I think does deserve access. The politics of this may well be working out .. slowly.

By: Dennis R.

Dennis R. — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:25:19 +0000

I’m sure there are some who would argue that they shouldn’t be available to non-citizens. American science for Americans! (oh, wait, that might include Canadians, mightn’t it?)
As far as open records go, there’s a debate here in Wisconsin about open records law. You can ask for the records, but you’re currently charged for the redaction that takes place. So one could argue that what one gets for open records requests isn’t all that open.

By: Dennis R.

Dennis R. — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:15:00 +0000

Peers will perform the peer reviews– same as always Gorden. Journals can still publish works but they won’t have the monopoly– or the pricing power– that they now maintain.
Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the history and emergence of the movement towards open publishing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
My own take on the “open access” policy is that it really isn’t open. I would argue that’s it’s a compromise that gives up too much. But it’s a huge improvement over the current system.

By: eldras

eldras — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:19:39 +0000

Long needed. Not clear how fast the future is changing. If its double exponential growth as The Law of Accelerating Returns indicates, machines will soon be able to do blindingly fast R&D and they will publish to order on your communication device.

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:16:02 +0000

Right, asiwel. If the publishers go out of business, who will perform the peer reviews? Who will publish the papers? If they are just published online by their authors, how will you know what you’re getting when you find these papers? We’ve all had online searches turn up poorly written papers by high school students.

By: asiwel

asiwel — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:35:39 +0000

All the economic issues aside (and there are many – public pays for research, yes-in its own best interest, but not for all the rest, etc), the “scientific publishing industry” performs many valuable services, including content organization and topical focus, peer review, editing, archiving and bibliographical services needed for information retrieval and reference. It provides an “end-point” .. a product as it were or a node .. for research activities that represents a specific (written) “contribution” to the knowledge base. I could go on, but I really have not meet in my life scientific journal editors or “publishers” who “skim profits off others’ efforts” to any great extent. One can not really say that about some other types of journalistic or literary endeavors or about lobbying or advertising/marketing in general …

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:37:06 +0000

Then are they also available to non-citizens who did not pay for them? Not that they shouldn’t be. Just wondering.

Speaking of the right of citizen access to things they paid for, that would be all the actions, memos, phone calls, and conversations of public officials, unless public safety is directly and obviously at risk. Secrecy should be very rare. Right now its ubiquitous.

By: Bob Vasquez

Bob Vasquez — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:29:17 +0000

This is a step in the right direction, viz., that all federally-funded studies should be fully accessible to the public (taxpayer) immediately. So, in my judgment, this is one small step for “taxpayer-man-and-woman”.

By: Bri

Bri — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:19:18 +0000

It really is a parasitic business model that should be circumvented.

By: Locke

Locke — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:15:38 +0000

My thoughts exactly.

To me this seems like just a way to appease an existing industry instead of taking a chance on new innovation.

By: Walter Baltzley

Walter Baltzley — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:03:51 +0000

Please explain to me exactly what “…valuable contributions…the scientific publishing industry provides”? In this electronic era, I see publishers as middle-men who skim profit off others efforts and hinder the overall advancement of society.