On 2011-11-06, at 5:58 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: > if it is a "great strategic mistake to conflate the exception-free subset > with the exception-ridden superset", it is also a great a strategic mistake > to present Open Access in such a way that humanists and social scientists may > feel unconcerned because their world works a little differently. Books are > the most prestigious publications in history, literature, philosophy, etc. > They are not written for royalties, even though paltry royalties may be paid > to authors sometimes... But the idea that if it is a book, it means that an > author does not want to give the content for free is not right.
I agree completely. But what I said is that unlike books, refereed-journal articles are *exception-free* author give-aways, every single one of them written exclusively for usage and impact, not for royalties. This is definitely not true of all books, in SSH or otherwise. It is for this reason that a blanket Green OA self-archiving mandate is possible for journal articles but not for books. > Like Stevan, I would be very happy to see mandates extend to monographs, > albeit a closed archive for a large proportion of them. Why not simply > include this in mandates? First things first. It has so far been devilishly difficult to get institutions to mandate green OA for journal articles, the exception-free give-away domain, seeking only impact, not rotalties. Only about 200 out of at least 10,000 research universities worldwide has yet adopted a green OA mandate. Trying to extend the reach if those mandates to the far more controversial and exception-ridden domain of books only makes the task of getting the mandates adopted at all more difficult. That is why I keep advising against needless over-reaching: First grasp what is already fully within reach. But, that said, if any institution can succeed in adding a Closed-Access book-deposit clause to their ID/OA mandate, I will be there to cheer them for it! What I deplore is no mandate at all, while debating about whether the non-existent mandate should be extended to books... > I know Stevan prefers a narrowly focused target as a way to get the whole > situation moving, but I go back to strategic mistakes: let us not lose SSH > researchers, especially as they represent large proportions of university > faculties. They can be powerful allies if they feel their needs are covered. Of course SSH researchers are important OA allies. But it is not at all clear whether they would be more enthusiastic allies if mandates required them to deposit their books (even only as Closed Access). After all, they are already free to deposit their books even unmandated, and they are not doing it. Besides, SSH researchers don't just write books, they write journal articles too. And like all other researchers, they are not depositing their articles spontaneously either, in anywhere near sufficient numbers. That's why the deposit mandates are needed -- across all disciplines. Grasp the immediately reachable, and then try to extend your reach. Don't just keep trying to extend your reach without first grasping what is already immediately within reach. > most SSH journals would not accept the kind of referencing he suggests. Most > journals, in fact, impose their citation and quotation referencing styles. As > they now also accept electronic references, it leads to what I said: > references to repository articles are beginning to appear in significant > numbers. This raise a new question, that of quality control of the versions > in the repositories, but that can be solved too. It is therefore true that > the lack of reliable pagination is probably a fading inconvenience. Yes, quote-location convention-updating is a minor and fading inconvenience. But not because we need (or are providing) peer review for already peer-reviewed author drafts, just so that quotes can have page numbers! There are simple ways to accomplish that. And what is cited is the canonical published version of record, not the specific document one actually accessed. (I don't cite a photocopy of an article, I cite the article -- journal, title, date, volume, page-span.) If a journal copy-editor, unsatisfied with the section-heading and paragraph number, insists on page numbers for the quotes, they can go look them up (when they look up the quote itself, whose wording, after all, even more important to get right than its pagination....) That said, of course it is important always to supplement the canonical citation with the URL of the OA version, if there is one! > Let us not be concerned about keeping the narrow focus of OA to the point > that it begins to feel ill fitted to the needs of SSH researchers. Broadening > these categories a little will not slow down OA, and it will bring in a much > greater number of interested people. Book deposit is welcome. Article deposit is mandatory. Who or what does this exclude? Stevan Harnad
