I am proud to be able to count Stevan as one of my friends, but we don't always agree, as is normal for most people.
I really don't understand how Stevan manages to call the Titanium Road "a technologically supercharged version of the Green Road", but Stevan can explain that statement if he wishes. The more important issue is that I have failed to get across to him that the Titanium Road has nothing to do with researcher voluntarism. The Gold Road does, because unless the researcher is funded by the Wellcome Trust or its like, he or she is likely to have to volunteer to divert money from his or her research grant to pay the author-side fees. The Green Road also does, because the researcher has to volunteer to undertake unnatural extra work to deposit works in the institutional repository through a clunky interface. They even hate to deposit a version of the article that they have no confidence in (the Accepted Manuscript). So few of them do it, and they backslide so easily, that the only solution is to force them to do it (a mandate). Since mandates rely on persuasion of key executives who are themselves usually ex-researchers and are transitory, voluntarism is an intrinsic thread running through the Green Road. I liken the Titanium Road with the situation with Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Where universities mandate the deposit of an electronic copy of the thesis, the deposit rate easily reaches completeness (and I mean 100%, not the 80% or so ID/OA mandated articles sometimes achieve). It never retreats from that. Why? Because the action required of the graduating student is completely natural and they've always expected to do it. The university simply says "instead of depositing two bound copies of your thesis with the university before graduating, give us one and an electronic copy". Or in even more enlightened universities "just give us an electronic copy". The student does what is asked, and is even happy that copying the files to a CD or DVD is much, much easier than waiting for 100s of pages to print, finding a binder who can do black card covers and gold lettering, and paying for all of it. The success of ETD schemes is that they are natural, and simply electronicize a function that is already part of a PhD student's activity. So to the Titanium Road, which is directly aimed at existing researcher practice and psychology. Every researcher worth a cent keeps a record of all their publications (and sometimes their unpublished works too). Being a person who grew up with computers but still in the Gutenberg era, I still have an archive box under the house with paper copies of all my early publications, going back to my 1969 PhD thesis and several earlier publications. A list of all the publications also exists in my curriculum vitae (cv), and I keep both up to date. Did any serious researcher do differently then? But the times are changing. While I may have produced one of the world's early word-processed PhD theses (I wrote the word processing software myself too, and took over the university's mainframe to run it off on the console IBM typewriter in night-time hours), I did not keep a 'machine-readable copy' (it was in several boxes of 80-column punched cards). Nowadays that is exactly what I do. I rely on electronic apps to keep my recent records. The Titanium Road is predicated on researchers doing just this: keeping the records of their publications (full text and citations) online and in the cloud. The only tiny missing step is access to this huge resource, probably rapidly heading for 100% data coverage. Emails to the author asking for access are an 'almost OA' option, just like the ID/OA Green Road, but increasingly I predict we will see a researcher's personal corpus of work opened to the Internet. That's OA! Of course computer scientists have long done this on their own websites, but computer scientists are able to write html code and use web tools, whereas most researchers can't or won't waste the time to learn. The new generation of apps such as Mendeley that collect data make this as easy as creating a Facebook page, and as I said, it is simply electronicizing what they already do, better, simpler, and cheaper. There is no 'volunteering', Stevan. The researchers just keep on doing what they've always done, but optimize it a bit by using better tools that become available. I remain optimistic. Unfortunately I cannot point to big major gains to match where the Gold Road and the Green Road have reached, but then you know me also as a person with sensitive antennae for small signals of scholarly revolutions... It is early days yet. Best wishes to the list for the silly season. Keep yourselves safe. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=oNF2d24AAAAJ&hl=en From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Monday, 19 December 2011 1:10 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Bold predictions for 2012 My friend and comrade-at-arms, the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale, finds that Gold OA publishing is growing too slowly. (He's right.) Arthur also finds that both Green OA self-archiving, and Green OA self-archiving mandates (ID/OA) are growing too slowly. (He's right.) Arthur predicts that more and more researchers will spontaneously begin to use enhanced, interoperable, interactive electronic resources (much the way they now already use word-processing, email and the web instead of typing and paper) so that the writing, storing and record-keeping of their own articles, and exchanging them with one another, will become so rich and interdigitated and natural that it will be functionally equivalent to having deposited them in an institutional OA repository, free for all. He calls this the "Titanium Road" to OA (though it sounds rather like a technologically supercharged version of the Green Road to me!). And surely he is right that something along those lines is as optimal and inevitable as OA itself. The question is: Will its use grow any faster, of its own accord, than Gold or Green OA have done? Arthur's betting that it will -- and I of course wish he were right! But after 20 years, I have given up completely on researcher voluntarism, even when it is overwhelmingly in their own best interests. It was voluntarism that I assumed would bring us universal OA "virtually overnight" way back in 1994. Technology has been doing nothing but making it easier and easier, and more and more rewarding, for researchers to provide OA, year upon year, ever since. Yet the ever simpler and more powerful technology has never succeeded in inducing researchers -- or, rather, has not induced anywhere near enough researchers (for it has always induced some of them) -- to make their work OA in anywhere near sufficient numbers to reach that fabled OA "tipping point" that everyone keeps talking about year upon year. So I will make no predictions for 2012, except to say that if it's a pipe-dream that voluntarism will ever kick in among researchers of its own accord, there is still the hope that their funders and institutions will come to their senses and make OA compulsory, by mandating it, as a condition for being employed and paid to conduct and report research in the online era -- which ought long ago to have become the OA era. It is now a matter of tried, tested and demonstrated empirical -- and hence historical -- fact that OA mandates, if adopted, *do* accelerate the growth of OA for the research output of the funder or institution that mandated it -- soon approaching 100%, when it's the optimal mandate (ID/OA, Liege model, as the sole mechanism of submission for research performance assessment). So the open empirical question now is whether adopting OA mandates will succeed in kicking in among researchers' funders and institutions in sufficient numbers -- in the way that providing OA spontaneously failed to do among researchers themselves. Fortunately, the number of funders and institutions worldwide that need to be convinced of the benefits of mandating OA is an order of magnitude smaller than the number of researchers that need to provide OA. And a number of sizeable mandating initiatives among funders at the national level have already successfully led to mandate adoption (notably among all the major national funders in the UK, and some at the EU level: see ROAMAP), with the biggest of all (COMPETES) now under deliberation in the US. And at the global institutional level, there is now Bernard Rentier's and Alma Swan's EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), established to help guide the universal providers of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines -- namely, universities and research institutions -- in designing OA policies worldwide. So whereas there is no basis for crowing about "tipping points," there is reason to hope that we may not have to keep waiting for technology to put us over the top spontaneously via Arthur's "Titanium Road" -- though technology's help in providing OA and enhancing its benefits is always welcome (and being actively incorporated into the EPrints and DSpace repository software as well as into the implementation of OA mandates almost as fast as it is developed). Stevan Harnad Superannuated Archivangelist On 2011-12-18, at 4:12 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: Richard, you asked what we'd like to see in 2012. I'd like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to those that already exist. Who wouldn't? I'd also like to see more ID/OA mandated institutional repositories. Again who wouldn't? But I don't see either strategy as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a scholarly revolution becomes unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are too cerebral, too argumentative, too technological, and they require at present unnatural actions on the part of researchers. What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for example like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera. It used to be a collection of paper, but the social media tools like Mendeley now allow this to be electronic, and like the silent transition from typewriters to the admittedly superior word processing software, I predict we will see a silent transition to online in-the-cloud corpus collections. Making this open access is technologically trivial, and I have named this the Titanium Road to open access: light-weight, strong, robust and recognises what people actually do. If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year that we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal transfer of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to their 'ownership' and carry out minimal due diligence in their 'purchase' in return for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by dispensing copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week goes by when I do not see someone post to a list "Can anyone send me a copy of Xxx by Yyy in journal Zzz?" and it appears they almost always are satisfied by their later posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of scholarly articles has to change, and this might be the year that we begin to see cracks open up. Finally, let me make my last prediction - that 2012 might see us begin to address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being a major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The English-speaking world and the European language speaking world have been happy to live with English as the lingua franca (what a strange misnomer!), but the Asian-speaking world is not likely to be so accommodating. We shall have to begin to treat open access as a matter involving automatic translation, at first maybe just for metadata, but later for the whole article. Richard, you said you'd like to see short posts dominate this list, so I've been brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the previous four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable issues. I hope I have been controversial enough to get some responses. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL at eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20111220/54fab54f/attachment-0001.html
