Begin forwarded message [posted with permission]: On 2012-01-10, at 3:13 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> But the NIH-type mandate doesn't get you very far, does it? > Just Green OA after 12 months. That's right, it doesn't get you very far, and it's a bad model for others to imitate (though it's still better than no mandate at all!). It allows a 12 month OA embargo; it allows publishers (who have vested interests against overzealous compliance) to fulfill the requirement, rather than the fundee who is bound by it, and it requires institution-external deposit in PMC, perversely, instead of institutional deposit and automated harvest/import/export to PMC. > I'd rather see publishers voluntarily provide Green OA immediately > on publication, as many now do, as you know, I don't know what you mean, Sandy. Green OA is author OA self-archiving, and Gold OA is publisher OA archiving. A publisher is Green if it?endorses?immediate Green OA self-archiving by its authors, but it does not?do?the deposit for them! But we know now that publisher endorsement of Green OA is not enough: Authors won't actually do it unless it's mandated. (Over 60% of journals are already Green, but less than 20% of their articles are being self-archived.) > rather than have any government agency that has contributed nothing to > peer review mandate it. I completely disagree, Sandy! Apart from the fact that it is the?published research?that is at issue, not just the peer review, and the funders have certainly contributed a good bit to that, even with the peer review, it is researchers -- institutional employees and grant fundees -- that are providing the service gratis. So the government has every prerogative to mandate that the published research it has funded is made OA. And that's without mentioning the fundamental fact that everyone seems to keep ignoring, which is that as long as subscriptions remain sustainable for recovering publishing costs, the publisher's managing of the peer review is paid for in full (many, many times over) by the institutional subscriptions. (And if and when subscriptions are no longer sustainable, then we can talk about who will pay for the peer review, and how. And the answer is dead obvious: the author's institution, on the gold OA model, and out of a small fraction of its annual windfall savings from the collapse of the subscription model in favor of the Gold OA model.) > If mandates are needed, I'd prefer to see them at the university level, > like Harvard's, but without a waiver option. Mandates?are?needed (otherwise authors will not deposit), and they are needed from both the author's funder and the author's institution. But the locus of deposit, for both, should be the author's institution. That makes the two complementary mandates cooperative instead of competitive, and maximizes the author's motivation to comply (once) as well as the institution's ability to monitor compliance, Institutional deposit -- and by the author (not the publisher!). > My claim is not that other researchers do not need the peer-reviewed article > literature, > but that all those non-scientists who are taxpayers can have their needs > satisfied > by research reports, not by articles involving higher-level math and abstract > theory > that the vast majority of citizens will not even comprehend. I'm directing my > argument to that part of the anti-Research Works Act crowd. I agree completely that most refereed research articles are of no interest to the general public. The primary rationale for OA is to ensure that published research is accessible (online) to all of its intended users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happened to be published. That is what maximizes the return for the public on its investment in research. Cheers, Stevan
