Stevan Harnad says "The idea is to find reasons why those researchers should provide OA (80% of them are not doing it) and why their institutions and funders should mandate that they do it."
Note the use of reason as a plural, not singular noun. There is no one reason to rule them all. Whenever I talk to university administrators, heads of school, individual researchers, or other library staff about Open Access I have to be strategic about it. I have to predict which of the many arguments in favour of Open Access will resonate most directly with the specific audience. I have learnt a lot from Stevan Harnad's tireless work in promoting Open Access. His presentation on "Mandates and Metrics: How Open Repositories Enable Universities to Manage, Measure and Maximise their Research Assets" http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/265693/ is a powerful tool in building persuasive cases for OA, but it contains 100 slides and there are few occasions where I have the luxury of having that much time to present the case for OA. Instead I need to be prepared to focus in on one or two arguments that will gain most traction with the audience I have. Cheers, Vanessa Barrett Digital Services Librarian The University of Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 5005 Ph : +61 8 8313 4625 e-mail: vanessa.barr...@adelaide.edu.au CRICOS Provider Number 00123M ----------------------------------------------------------- This email message is intended only for the addressee(s) and contains information which may be confidential and/or copyright. If you are not the intended recipient please do not read, save, forward, disclose, or copy the contents of this email. If this email has been sent to you in error, please notify the sender by reply email and delete this email and any copies or links to this email completely and immediately from your system. No representation is made that this email is free of viruses. Virus scanning is recommended and is the responsibility of the recipient. -----Original Message----- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 1 May 2012 12:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access On 2012-04-30, at 7:16 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > The idea that there is a set of "researchers" in Universities who > deserve special consideration and for whom public funds must > be spent is offensive. The idea is to find reasons why those researchers should provide OA (80% of them are not doing it) and why their institutions and funders should mandate that they do it. Peer access is a credible, practical reason, pertains to all research and researchers, and is based on their own self-interest. Public access is worthy, desirable, and automatically comes along with OA, but on its own it is not a credible, practical reason, pertaining to all research and researchers, and based on their own self-interest. That is the practical, strategic reason why peer access needs to be primary and public access secondary, in promoting rationales for providing and mandating OA. > I fall directly into SH's category of "the general public", Not at all. PM-R is a researcher, whether retired or not. He falls squarely in the category of peer access rather than public access. > I am a supporter of publicly funded Gold OA and of domain repositories. > I am not prepared for these to be dismissed ex cathedra. Eighty percent of researchers are not providing OA. That's why OA mandates are needed, from researchers' institutions and funders. Gold OA publishing cannot be mandated, only Green OA self-archiving can be. Only some research is funded, but all research comes from institutions. Hence funder mandates and institutional mandates need to be convergent and mutually reinforcing rather than divergent and competitive: The locus of mandatory deposit should be institutional: domain repositories can then harvest the data or metadata. None of this is ideological or ex cathedra. These are considerations of direct practical strategy, to get us out of the 20% OA where we have been stalled for a decade, to 100% OA. through institutional and funder mandates. > I have personally not many scientists who are highly committed to Green OA Quite. Only about 20% of researchers provide OA unmandated (about 2/3 of that via Green OA self-archiving and 1/3 via Gold OA publishing). That's why the mandates are needed from institutions and funders. Ideology and exhortations alone will not do the trick, > There is an increasing amount of scholarship taking place outside Universities > and without the public purse. Does it result in peer-reviewed publications? Then it falls under the strategic discussion about priorities that is underway here. Otherwise not. > Wikipedia is, perhaps, the best example of this and could - if minds were > open - > act as an interesting approach to respositories. Wikipedia is unrefereed and explicitly excludes primary research. What needs to be open is access to refereed, published research -- and it is evident that for 80% of that, effective mandates will be needed. > It's notable that uptake of publication-related tools such as WP, Figshare, > Dryad, > Mendeley, etc. is high, because people actually want them. I would like to see > effort on information-saving and sharing tools that people need and community > repositories. There is so far no evidence at all that OA is being provided by researchers, via these tools, unmandated, at a rate any higher than the unmandated OA baseline (20%). So we are still left with the practical, strategic challenge of getting OA mandated and hence provided. 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