Hi Nick,
Yes, I like ideas of this kind, and there are many that I think are
eligible and good.
To me, though, it is a chess game.
For every visible and consequential change, such as a rule change or a
shift in orientation by a department or school, a lot of little
foundation-building has to be done behind the scenes to address all
the constraints and problems that have caused these changes _not_ to
be adopted in the past. An adequate pawn structure has to bet set up
before moves by the rooks or the queen are advantageous or even
feasible. That low-level stuff often is not visible, but unless it is
done to undermine the current pressures, the higher-level changes
never become available or desirable to those who need to make the
decisions.
I imagine a need to coordinate a kind of parallel assault, in which
libraries refuse subscriptions to high-cost journals so they can
allocate the funds to open-access fees (discussed earlier on this
list; but that too requires foundation-building because how do we make
articles available that currently live in those journals, and which
researchers depend on); in which academics are willing to take a
temporary hit to band behind Gowers and forego high-reward journals;
in which government agencies such as NIH (with its mammoth size) hire
computer programmers to do accounting on how much of the impact factor
in the CVs of proposers comes from journals that are specifically in
conflict with the agency's OA policy, and then require the program
managers to make a big noise to their panels (their "study sections")
to "ignore" high impact that conflicts with the agency's policy, and
so forth. (This is like telling a jury to "ignore" inadmissible
comments; of course they can't un-hear them, but by putting them on
notice maybe it is a step in the right direction.)
These institutions are interlocking like railroad ballast, and I think
understanding how to be _systematic_ about the problem of unlocking
them is where much of the complexity lies that we don't understand
well. But that makes it deserving of consideration as a science
problem as well as a social goal.
All best,
Eric
On Apr 17, 2014, at 1:02 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Hi, Eric,
What if Professional Societies were to declare that nothing is
"published"
until it has been made available to the public. I might permit a
reasonable
handling fee, such as a nickel a page, making the downloading of a
paper
roughly equivalent to the cost or Xeroxing it. And then Universities
follow suit by declaring that nothing goes in your personnel file
that has
not been "published".
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:20 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Open Access Publication
Hi Russell,
You know what would be a really useful datum, and which probably
exists
though I haven't tried to look for such:
Some simple two-color plot or list of the impact factors of journals,
grouped according to whether their copyright agreements do or do not
permit
open access. One could complement that by computing various
correlation
coefficients of impact factor with a dummy variable for open/not-open.
My suspicion, which one could start to try to test with such data,
is that
this is not a question of what is the advantage in an overall sense to
having research open access, but rather is about the mechanics of
where
entrenched power lies, and how that places constraints on choices
across the
system.
There have already been several discussions on this list (with useful
pointers to data) about why impact factors can be meaningless, or non-
comparable, or can have meanings that are far removed from the naive
advertisement, but none of that would be to my question here. My
assumption
is that, in the research institutional setting as I see it,
everything is
driven toward a boundary of as near pure thoughtlessness as the
system can
tolerate and still grind along, which means that what is rewarded is
what
accountants can accumulate at high volume, which means impact
factors and
things like them. If, even just for purely historical reasons, a high
fraction of high-impact-factor journals are held by publishers who
refuse
OA, then those journals have (for now) the power to force a trade-
off by
authors, between compliance with a grant regulation, and support by
their
universities for promotion/tenure, probably future grants where
program
managers or reviewers look at impact factor ratings without taking
into
account that they may be in direct conflict with the OA policy, for
younger
researchers, hiring decisions in the first place, or start-up support,
teaching loads, etc.
If that is the main driver, then it should be purely a matter of the
combination of institutional design and getting coordination among
enough
players in the system to provide power sufficient to push back
against the
effectively rent-power (a power inherent in existing
position) of Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, or whomever.
Like so many other things that seem to fail, it just seems easier to
get
coordination in some kinds of systems (firms, markets) than in other
kinds
of systems (academic communities, civil society), and the more-easily
organized tend to accumulate power advantages, which can sometimes
become
extreme.
But some data and analysis would probably say whether there is any
substance
in the above guesses.
Eric
On Apr 16, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
The question I have is what advantage is there in not having your
research work open access?
Given it is such a pain to download a non-open access paper, the open
access papers percolate to the top of my reading list.
The only answers I can think of
- publishing open access is more expensive (publishers often offer an
open access option for more dollars),
- prestigious journals prevent archiving of papers in arXiv or other
repositories,
- its a fag to upload your paper to arXiv or your institution archive
In my case, uploading my publications to arXiv and linked from my
website is my default option. I will usually amend any copyright
transfer agreement to allow this, if not already allowed. It's a
right
PITA when the publisher doesn't accept my amendment, as I then need
to
remember that that paper is a special exception :(
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
(http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
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