Hi all,
Thanks for the various responses about positive things for which publishers should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized. I'm on the road for a bit (so won't be able to stay so actively involved in the discussion although I will continue to read/reflect with interest!), but thought it might be helpful to do a little round-up of some of the ideas that have surfaced. So in no particular order... Peter B - thanks for the constructive thought piece, and suggestion for an open access journal in remote sensing. I'm sure all the publishers on this list have taken note! In the interim if you would like your article to be published in one of our established journals you could make it freely available for non-commercial reuse through our sponsorship (i.e. hybrid oa) option. I note your (and David's and Jan's and Peter M-R's) preference for a CC-BY licensing option. We are currently in a test and learn phase and experimenting with a number of licensing options. Reme - you would like all publishers to allow immediate green oa posting. What do you think some of the potential concerns about this might be, and how might those concerns be alleviated? Stevan - You want the same. With our posting policy our intent is certainly not to confuse or intimidate authors, but to ensure the sustainability of the journals in which they choose to publish. Perhaps the Finch group will shed light on how to solve this challenge! Falk - you asked under what conditions Elsevier would be willing to change the business model from subscriptions to OA. I'm not quite sure about the scope of your question, so will answer at two levels of granularity. We already use both open access and subscription (and other!) business models and will continue to do so. If you are thinking of the conditions to flip the business model of an individual journal title, then we - and other publishers too, no doubt - will be very interested to participate in and learn from initiatives such as SCOAP3. Bernhard - you asked if our posting agreements involve payments to Elsevier by the funding bodies and/or authors and/or authors institutions. If an institution is willing to use an embargo period before the manuscript is made publicly available, then no payment is involved. Some funders/institutions prefer to make manuscripts available before the article's embargo period has expired, and in these cases sometimes a gold oa agreement or a blended gold/green agreement is more suitable. I'm happy to talk offline if you (or anyone else on the list) would like to explore further. Keith - one of your questions was how to get free access to researchers and the public everywhere. What are your thoughts on initiatives such as Research4Life (http://www.research4life.org/) or the APS programme to provide free access in public libraries (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=419118)? Good initiatives worth celebrating? Laurent - thank you for the suggestion that a clause allowing full data mining should be a systematic component of any subscription agreement, in particular in the case of big deals or national license programs. David - you provided helpful examples of publishers using gold oa publishing models (and this is another opportunity to draw attention to the wide array of signatories for the STM statement that publishers support sustainable open access http://www.stm-assoc.org/publishers-support-sustainable-open-access/). Also constructive are your comments that support publishers who make obvious which papers are oa, and your encouragement for publishers to invest in order to get their various back office processes in order. I also note your (and Jan's and Peter M-R's and Peter's) strong preference for CC-BY licensing. Dan - you noted schema.org and suggested that authors should not only post articles but standardized metadata for them as well. Is there a potential supportive role for librarians and/or publishers to play here? How might they be encouraged/incentivized to play it? Sally - great to see you taking active part in this discussion!! Peter M-R - You are frustrated by, and distrust, publishers. Despite this it may still be more practical to work with us to evolve the current system into one more to your liking than to create a completely new one. Either way we agree absolutely that content mining is essential to advance science, but perhaps will need to agree to disagree (at least for the time being) about the best tactics to enable this to happen more broadly. Jan - thank you for the constructive suggestion to make all the journal material available with delayed open access (CC-BY, fully re-usable and mine-able) after a reasonable embargo period. Why do you suppose it is that more publishers have not done just this, and are there any ways to offer reassurance or otherwise help to overcome any real or perceived barriers? Eric - thanks for the constructive posting just made as I'm finishing this text and the recognition that the major publishers have done a good job on the following: * Select good editorial boards of leading scholars * Develop effective systems for organizing peer review. * Produce articles/journals that look professional commensurate with the importance of the scholarship. * Produce an archivable historical record of scholarship. You ask why journal prices rise and this is because they are in part driven by increasing global investment in r&d. In the current economic climate r&d investment is seen as a way to drive growth, and of course it also drives an increase in the number of researchers and research articles that are written, submitted, reviewed, copyedited, marked-up, etc. This upward pressure on prices is of course offset by efficiency gains, and personally I think site licenses have been helpful in making the system more efficient. Libraries and their consortia are on the whole very professional negotiators. Finally, in parting please may I thank Richard for ensuring GOAL is a space where all voices can be heard and constructive discussion of different, yet generally complementary, views can take place. With kind wishes, Alicia Dr Alicia Wise Director of Universal Access Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB P: +44 (0)1865 843317 I M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: a.w...@elsevier.com I Twitter: @wisealic From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Eric F. Van de Velde Sent: 14 May 2012 19:39 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized" To Alicia: Here are what I consider the positive contributions by commercial publishers. For any of the positive qualities I mention, it is easy find counterexamples. What matters is that, on the average, the major publishers have done a good job on the following: - Select good editorial boards of leading scholars. - Develop effective systems for organizing peer review. - Produce articles/journals that look professional commensurate with the importance of the scholarship. - Produce an archivable historical record of scholarship. Publishers only receive a marginally passing grade for producing searchable databases of the scholarly record and journals. In the age of iTunes, Netflix, etc., it is inexcusable that to search through scholarship one must buy separate products like the Web of Knowledge in addition to the journal subscriptions. Publishers need to work together to produce alternative comprehensive systems. Most commercial publishers and some society publishers (like ACS) receive failing grades on cost containment. Because of their importance to academia, scholarly publishers have been blessed with the opportunity to reinvent themselves for the future without the devastating disruption other kinds of publishers faced (newspapers, magazines, etc.). However, instead of taking advantage of this opportunity, scholarly publishers are squandering it for temporary financial gain. Every price increase brings severe disruption closer. On the current path, your CEOs are betting the existence of the company every year. About the only company who understands the current information market is Amazon, and everything they do is geared towards driving down costs of the infrastructure. Your competition will not come from Amazon directly, but from every single academic who will be able to produce a high-quality electronic journal from his/her office. There may be only one success for every hundred failed journals in this system, but suppose it is so easy 100,000 try... Your brand/prestige/etc. will carry you only so far. (Amazon is focusing on e-books production now, but it is only a matter of time when they come out with a journal system.) To Jean-Claude: Blaming commercial enterprises for making too much money is like blaming scholars for having too many good ideas. Making money is their purpose. They will stop raising prices if doing so is in their self-interest. The real question is why the scholarly information market is so screwed up that publishers are in a position to keep raising prices. I am blaming site licenses (http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-probl em.html and http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html), but I am open to alternative explanations. --Eric. http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com Google Voice: (626) 898-5415 Telephone: (626) 376-5415 Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde E-mail: eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: Jean-Claude, This is a great analysis and says almost exactly some of what I was planning to say. We cannot de facto trust the publishers to work in our interests. There was a time when this was posssible - but no longer. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 <tel:%2B44-1223-763069> _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal Elsevier Limited. Registered Office: The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, United Kingdom, Registration No. 1982084 (England and Wales).
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