Below are excerpts from a useful news article about which no reasonable person can have any cavils (but I have a few comments!):
Southampton Uni goes Open Access By Lucy Sherriff Monday 10th January 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/10/southampton_academic_research/ > Southampton University has made all of its academic and scientific > research output available for free on the web. The University said > the decision marks a new era in Open Access to research in the UK; > it will host workshops for other academic institutions thinking of > making a similar transition. http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3D13 > Southampton describes the self-archiving project's purpose as > "to make the full text of the peer-reviewed research output of > scholars/scientists and their institutions visible, accessible, > harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access > to the Internet". This is not a bypass of the traditional publishing > mechanism, but another form of access to already published material. Lucy Sherriff makes it clear here that author/institution self-archiving is not a substitute for publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, but a supplement to it, in order to provide wider access. This is followed by several paragraphs (which I omit here) with quotes about about GNU Eprints and Southampton. Then this: > Southampton's ePrints database has run as an experiment since 2002. It > was established as part of a project to explore issues around Open > Access publishing. The repository provides a publications database > with full text, multimedia and research data, and it will now become > a core part of the university's publishing process. The issues explored were not around Open Access *publishing*; they were around Open Access *provision* (via the self-archiving of supplementary verions of published articles). The database of published Southampton University articles will now be a core part of the university's infrastructure for maximising worldwide access to -- and thereby alsothe worldwide usage and impact of -- its published research article output. > The question of public access to scientific research has become > increasingly controversial in recent years, particularly since the > summer of 2004, when the House of Commons Science and Technology > committee published its report... "Scientific Publications: > free for all?". http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm > The situation can be rather simplistically described as follows: The > more prestigious a journal, the more important it is for scientists > that their work is published in that journal. This means that the best > work goes to few journals, whose publishers have free rein to charge > what they like for subscriptions. But not many people can afford to > subscribe to journals that can cost overĀ£2,000 per year, each. This is all true, but not quite the point: About 2.5 million articles are published annually in 24,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide. There is certainly a problem with the affordability of those journals, some of which are quite pricey. But that is not the research access problem, for even if all 24,000 journals were sold at-cost (zero profit) there would still be the research access problem -- which is that not all would-be users of those articles could access them because no institution could afford all, or most, or even many of the 24,000 journals, even then. http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats (It is mostly institutions that subscribe these days, by the way, with online site-licenses for all their users; individual subscriptions have been dying away for some time.) > In addition, once the article is accepted and published, the > journals own the copyright. Unravel this one: we have a situation > where government-funded research is being published in proprietary > journals. For other public bodies to subsequently access this > research, more government funding is needed [to] pay for subscriptions > to these same journals. True, but it is also true that 93% of the nearly 9000 journals surveyed so far (and that includes all the top journals) have given their official "green light" to author/institution self-archiving. So those authors and institutions that wish to provide supplementary access to their research article output for those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford access to them can already do so (and that is what the Southampton workshops are about -- and what the GNU Eprints software is for.) http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php > The House of Commons reports [sic] says the Institutional Repositories such > as the one being permanently funded at Southampton, will "help improve > access to journals, but a more radical solution may be required > in the long term". The report points out that re-publishing papers > accepted for publication in journals does have copyright implications > - although at the beginning of the enquiry, 83 per cent of publishers > did allow authors to self-archive after publication. That figure has since risen to 93% (and self-archiving a supplementary copy of a publication does not mean re-publishing it). Moreover, it is not clear what requires a more radical solution! If 100% of authors self-archive, no would-be user is denied (online) access, anywhere. The trouble is that not even 93% of authors are self-archiving yet: at most 15% are. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php > In June last year, Reed Elsevier, one of the biggest academic > publishers, dipped a toe into the choppy waters of open access. It > said that authors may put a plain text version of their papers up > on their own websites or websites of their non-commercial research > institutions. However, Reed insists that the sites link back to > its own front page, and say there must be no external links to the > re-published text. Campaigners in favour of author-pays publication > denounced the move as a cynical public relations stunt, pointing > out that research articles often consist of more than just text. It is only good scholarly practice (and costs and loses no one anything) to link the self-archived supplementary copy to the publisher's official version. Moreover, Elsevier did not stipulate a "plain text" version, and it is not even clear what "no external links to the re-published text" might mean! (Can anyone be stopped from linking to or from anything on the Web?) I suspect that some of this confusion was inherited from a prior newspaper article already that has already been commented on in this Forum: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3780.html Rather than denouncing Elsevier and the publishers of the other 93% of journals that are green for behaving responsibly in the interests OA, should we not rather prod the remaining 7% to follow suit? Or, more important, prod the authors of the remaining 85% of articles to go ahead and self-archive them? > The internet provides an obvious alternative venue for publishing > research. But making information freely available online has > its downsides: where is the peer review, for example? How can a > person accessing a research paper online judge the merits of the > research? The problem now is not too little information, but too much, > and of varying quality. It is not clear how we have segued from self-archiving to re-publishing to publishing, but clearly there is no problem judging the merits of a self-archived article if it has already been published in a peer-reviewed journal! > Various solutions to this have been proposed, such as author-pays > publishing systems, or a scoring system where papers are ranked by > how many other research papers cite them, and so on. But peer review > is a cornerstone of the scientific process, and many researchers > would be loathe to bypass it altogether. Right: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. What's broke is access, not peer review! > The debate on this issue does not look like fading anytime soon. The > House of Commons report recommended that all academic institutions > establish repositories of their research, and admonished the > government for doing so little to support such action. "The UK > government has failed to respond to issues surrounding scientific > publication in a coherent manner," it said. "We are not convinced > that it would be ready to deal with any changes to the publishing > process. The Report recommends that the government formulate a > strategy for future action as a matter of urgency." The government has already formulated a strategy, and has expressed it clearly: All UK research article output should be self-archived. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm It remains only to put that strategy into practice, as a matter of urgency. That is what the Southampton workshops are about. ---- See also: http://www.elearningscotland.org/SnippetAccess.aspx?id=275