I agree completely that 'green' and 'gold' (however tightly or loosely defined) are the means, not the end But I still feel that the BOAI definition may be an unnecessarily tight/narrow definition of the end: optimal scholarly exchange, as you put it (or unimpeded access to research articles for those who need to read them, as I would perhaps more narrowly describe it)
Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk _____ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: 12 December 2013 13:44 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly CompromisesCredibilityofBeall's List But Sally, so-called 'green' and 'gold' are the means. The BOAI definition is an articulation of the end, the goal. Of course, if you navigate the ocean of politics and vested interests of science publishing, you need to tack sometimes to make progress against the wind. That's permissible, even necessary. But it doesn't change the intended destination on which a good sailor keeps his focus. If that's religion, anything is. (Which may be the case :-)). One mistake made by some OA advocates is to elevate the means to the goal. Another one is to confuse the temporary course of tacking with the overall course needed to reach the destination. In the larger picture, OA itself is but a means, of course. To the goal of optimal scholarly knowledge exchange. And so on, Russian doll like. But that's a different discussion, I think Jan Velterop On 12 Dec 2013, at 12:03, "Sally Morris" <sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote: What I'm saying is that OA may have done itself a disservice by adhering so rigidly to tight definitions. A more relaxed focus on the end rather than the means might prove more appealing to the scholars for whose benefit it is supposed to exist Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk _____ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of David Prosser Sent: 12 December 2013 08:37 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises CredibilityofBeall's List Let me get this right, Jean-Claude mentioning the Budapest Open Access Initiative to show that re-use was an integral part of the original definition of open access and not some later ('quasi-religeous') addition as Sally avers. And by doing so he is betraying some type of religious zeal? One of the interesting aspect of the open access debate has been the language. Those who argue against OA have been keen to paint OA advocates as 'zealots', extremists, and impractical idealists. I've always felt that such characterisation was an attempt to mask the paucity of argument. David On 11 Dec 2013, at 22:30, Sally Morris wrote: I actually think that J-C's response illustrates very clearly how OA has been mistaken for a religion, with its very own 'gospel'. This, IMHO, is part of its problem! Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk _____ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: 10 December 2013 15:26 To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility ofBeall's List In response to Sally, I would remind her that re-use was part of the original BOAI declaration. Scholars and teachers need more than eye-contact with articles. So, this is not a secondary point. The immediacy issue concerns deposit; it is simply a pragmatic and obvious point: capturing an article at time of acceptance is optimal for exposure and circulation of information. If the publisher does not allow public exposure and imposes an embargo - thus slowing down the circulation of knowledge -, the private request button allows for eye contact, at least. This button solution is not optimal, but it will do on a pragmatic scale so long as it is needed to circumvent publishers' tactics. Cost savings are not part of BOAI; it is a request by administrators of research centres and their libraries. This said, costs of OA publishing achieved by a platform such as Scielo are way beneath the prices practised by commercial publishers (including non-profit ones). And it should become obvious that if you avoid 45% profit rates, you should benefit. The distinction between "nice" and "nasty" publishers is of unknown origin and I would not subscribe to it. More fundamentally, we should ask and ask again whether scientific publishing is meant to help scientific research, or the reverse. Seen from the former perspective, embargoes appear downright absurd. As for why OA has not been widely accepted now, the answer is not difficult to find: researchers are evaluated; the evaluation, strangely enough, rests on journal reputations rather than on the intrinsic quality of articles. Researchers simply adapt to this weird competitive environment as best they can, and do not want to endanger their career prospects in any way. As a result, what counts for them is not how good their work is, but rather where they can publish it. Open Access, by stressing a return to intrinsic quality of work, implicitly challenges the present competition rules. As such, it appears at best uncertain or even threatening to researchers under career stress. So long as evaluation rests on journal titles, the essential source of power within scientific publishing will rest with the major international publishers. They obviously believe research was invented to serve them! The interesting point about mega journals, incidentally, is that they are not really journals, but publishing platforms. Giving an impact factor to PLoS One is stupid: citation cultures vary from discipline to discipline, and the mix of disciplines within PLoS One varies with time. Doing a simple average of the citations of the whole is methodologically faulty: remember that scientists in biomed disciplines quote about four times as much as mathematicians. What if, over a certain period of time, the proportion of mathematical articles triples for whatever reason? The raw impact factor will go down. Does this mean anything in terms of quality? Of course not! Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 10 décembre 2013 à 13:36 +0000, Sally Morris a écrit : At the risk (nay, certainty) of being pilloried by OA conformists, let me say that whatever ithe failings of his article I thank Jeffrey Beall for raising some fundamental questions which are rarely, if ever, addressed. I would put them under two general headings: 1) What is the objective of OA? I originally understood the objective to be to make scholarly research articles, in some form, accessible to all those who needed to read them. Subsequent refinements such as 'immediately', 'published version' and 'free to reuse' may have acquired quasi-religious status, but are surely secondary to this main objective. However, two other, financial, objectives (linked to each other, but not to the above) have gained increasing prominence. The first is the alleged cost saving (or at least cost shifting). The second - more malicious, and originally (but no longer) denied by OA's main proponents - is the undermining of publishers' businesses. If this were to work, we may be sure the effects would not be choosy about 'nice' or 'nasty' publishers. 2) Why hasn't OA been widely adopted by now? If as we have been repetitively assured over many years OA is self-evidently the right thing for scholars to do, why have so few of them done so voluntarily? As Jeffrey Beall points out, it seems very curious that scholars have to be forced, by mandates, to adopt a model which is supposedly preferable to the existing one. Could it be that the monotonous rantings of the few and the tiresome debates about the fine detail are actually confusing scholars, and may even be putting them off? Just asking ;-) I don't disagree that the subscription model is not going to be able to address the problems we face in making the growing volume of research available to those who need it; but I'm not convinced that OA (whether Green, Gold or any combination) will either. I think the solution, if there _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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