Re: [GOAL] OA Overview January 2017
Keep up the emphasis, Stevan, as appropriate. I totally agree that the double-payment argument is absurd, as I wrote. And yes there is added value in published books, including but not limited to preservation. I did not need the spray. As a result of the OA movement (including your and my efforts) all Australian universities have 100% of their articles self-archived. Yes all and 100%, for audit purposes. That’s been the case for many years now. Unfortunately they are not all open access immediately, but they are available within the institution on one server, and the academics all comply. Their departmental standing and funding would otherwise suffer. It is a small victory, to be sure, but the inability of people to think outside the box of their scholarly training is a huge problem. It helps that we have a few people at the decision levels in Australia who are ICT-savvy and more flexible. I think the same is true of Canada. Best wishes Arthur Sale From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Wednesday, 11 January 2017 06:05 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: scholc...@lists.ala.org; jisc-repositories Subject: Re: [GOAL] OA Overview January 2017 Not to put too fine a point on it (and this reminds me why I've tired of the fray): If double-payment for subscriptions (first pay for the research, then pay again to buy it "back") had been a valid argument against having to pay for subscriptions, it would have applied to books too, just as to journals: "Why should institutions pay the cost of researching and writing their books, only to have to buy them "back"? Answer: because books, unlike journal articles, are not author give-aways, written solely for usage, uptake and impact. Books are also written for (potential) royalties (and there might possibly still be some added value in producing and purchasing a hard copy). If the double-payment argument is not valid for books, then it's not valid for peer-reviewed journal articles either. (And this is true no matter what perspective one takes on the "double-payment": the institution, the funder, the funder's funder (the tax-payer) or the whole planet.) The valid argument is that peer-reviewed journal articles are give-away research: No one should have to pay for access to it, neither its author nor its users. The only thing still worth paying for in the OA era is the peer review (Fair-Gold OA). (Preservation is a red herring in this context. So is "journal impact factor.") No lengthy "re-education" program for scholars is needed to enlighten them that they should self-archive all their papers. The message is too simple (and over 20 years seems more than enough for any scholarly "re-education" progamme!) If the diagnosis of laziness, timidity or stupidity does not explain why they don't self-archive, find another descriptor. It's happening, but it's happening far too slowly. And institutional (and funder) self-archiving (Green OA) mandates still look like the only means of accelerating it (and forcing publishers journals to downsize and convert to Fair Gold). (Paying instead pre-emptively for Fool's Gold is unaffordable, unsustainable and unnecessary -- and that's the real double-payment.) Stevan Harnad On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> wrote: This is angels dancing on the point of a pin!. Universities subscribe to journals or buy books to either (a) get other people’s research outputs, or (b) to acquire a canonic authorized version of their own research in print. Yes, it sounds silly, but librarians value preservation. If a subscription gives you back some of what you’ve already got, well who cares? Not the author, nor the institution, nor the publisher. I often get freebies that I don’t need, but that does not invalidate my original purchase, nor reduce its value to me. Arthur Sale Also tilling other fields, but not asleep either. Think functionally! ------ Arthur Sale PhD Emeritus Professor of Computer Science School of Engineering and ICT | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology University of Tasmania Private Bag 65 HOBART TASMANIA 7001 M +61 4 1947 1331 <http://orcid.org/-0001-7261-8035> http://orcid.org/-0001-7261-8035 cid:CA66235E-F79F-4ECD-A612-0376BD33B152 CRICOS 00586B From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Monday, 9 January 2017 23:14 PM To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: OA Overview January 2017 On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 5:30 AM, David Prosser <david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk> wrote: SH: (2) No, the institution that pays for the research output is not paying a second time to buy it ba
[GOAL] Review of Australian Copyright Law
Can I alert this list to an impending review of Australian Copyright law: 'We are seeking your feedback on draft changes designed to simplify and modernise our copyright laws to make them easier for the disability, educational, libraries and archives sectors.' Further (my highlights): "Consultation Period: December 23, 2015 15:00 AEDT to February 12, 2016 17:00 AEDT Currently, libraries, archives and educational institutions face difficulties in making legitimate use of copyright material because of outdated, prescriptive and overly complex legislation. Reforms to the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and related regulations are needed to ensure these institutions and the Australian community can reasonably access content. The changes are designed to: . Streamline the educational statutory licence provisions, making it easier and simpler for educational institutions and copyright collecting societies to agree on licensing arrangements for the copying and communication of copyright material. . Provide simple, clear rules for libraries, archives and key cultural institutions to make preservation copies of copyright material. . Align the terms of protection for unpublished works with those for published works to provide libraries, archives and other cultural institutions with greater opportunities to use, and provide public access, to unpublished works. . Ensure that search engines, universities and libraries have 'safe harbour' protection if they comply with conditions aimed at reducing online copyright infringement." Although we are a remote country from Europe and the USA, you can bet that publishers will be making (or have made) submissions. Open access is facing a critical test. Can we build in better provisions? Any submissions from GOAL readers would be welcome. You may need to read the Copyright Act https://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2015C00586. Please see: https://www.communications.gov.au/have-your-say/updating-australias-copyrigh t-laws?utm_content=buffer35444 <https://www.communications.gov.au/have-your-say/updating-australias-copyrig ht-laws?utm_content=buffer35444_medium=social_source=twitter.com _campaign=buffer> _medium=social_source=twitter.com_campaign=buffer Arthur ------ Arthur Sale PhD Emeritus Professor of Computer Science School of Engineering and ICT | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology University of Tasmania Private Bag 87 HOBART TASMANIA 7001 M +61 4 1947 1331 <http://orcid.org/-0001-7261-8035> http://orcid.org/-0001-7261-8035 cid:CA66235E-F79F-4ECD-A612-0376BD33B152 CRICOS 00586B ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?
Straw man of no relevance From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Wednesday, 6 January 2016 03:59 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere? Dana, the question is not about whether pay-per-view or interlibrary loan should be available (they are, and should be). The question is whether all subscriptions canbe cancelled in favor of a complete reliance of PPV/ILL + Gold OA fees. I think the answer to is probably a resounding "no," but the option has never been tested -- not by U Tasmania and not by CalTech! Stevan On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 10:00 PM, Roth, Dana L. <dzr...@caltech.edu> wrote: I fully agree with Arthur Sale. We initiated a 'photocopy request' service over 40 years ago, and quickly found that researchers primarily wanted to 'take care' of the request and were, over the years, quite willing to accommodate a one to two delay in actually receiving the photocopy. Dana L. Roth dzr...@caltech.edu Special Projects Librarian Caltech 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 _ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org <goal-boun...@eprints.org> on behalf of Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Monday, January 4, 2016 2:19 PM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere? I don’t have access to the raw data now apart from knowing that we fulfill 13,000+ requests a year, but the University of Tasmania has operated a free unlimited-quantity service for 15 years, funded pay-per-view centrally (ie in replacement for subscriptions). It is very much used, and regarded as a keystone of library research support. It simply is not true that academics are devoted to instant access, and they are prepared to wait a day or two to read the papers they think are relevant. Of course they use alert services, metadata, etc in making the judgment, but if they think a paper is worth reading in full (it may not be after they have read it but nobody cares) they have no hesitation in using the university’s service. The economics do stack up, and I am proud to have introduced it in about 1998. See http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery and http://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/65611/Document-Delivery-Service-online-guide-v10.7.12.pdf. <http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery> <http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery> Document Delivery - Library - University of Tasmania ... www.utas.edu.au Document Delivery You are here. UTAS Home ; Library ; Researchers ; Document Delivery; Over 13,000 requests are submitted via our Document Delivery service per year. For context, the University is in the top ten Australian universities for research, and in student size modest (27,000 students, 18% of whom are from outside Australia). If someone wants to mine the data, contact the University Librarian. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 5 January 2016 02:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere? On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Christian Gutknecht <christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch> wrote: Stevan, [ahjs] … But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much, is to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free money the library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA fund (incl. hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs resulting getting access to documents that are not longer available via subscription (like costs for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual subscription of a really important journal).. Because librarians constantly overestimate the importance of their subscriptions and especially the Big Deals where they buy/rent a lot of stuff that is never used by their community. I think most libraries would find out that researchers would get along quite well with this option Christian, I strongly suggest that you look into the actual costs of such a proposal (replacing subscriptions by pay-to-view costs, per paper). We are in the online era, when scholars are accustomed to reaching content immediately with one click, and browsing it to see whether it's even worth reading. A scholar may look at dozens of papers a day this way. That's what they do with their institutional licensed content. You are imagining (without any data at all) that the cost of doing this via pay-per-view, at the usual $30 or so per paper, would amount to less cost for an institution than its current licensing costs. Please repeat this proposal once you h
[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?
I don’t have access to the raw data now apart from knowing that we fulfill 13,000+ requests a year, but the University of Tasmania has operated a free unlimited-quantity service for 15 years, funded pay-per-view centrally (ie in replacement for subscriptions). It is very much used, and regarded as a keystone of library research support. It simply is not true that academics are devoted to instant access, and they are prepared to wait a day or two to read the papers they think are relevant. Of course they use alert services, metadata, etc in making the judgment, but if they think a paper is worth reading in full (it may not be after they have read it but nobody cares) they have no hesitation in using the university’s service. The economics do stack up, and I am proud to have introduced it in about 1998. See http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery and http://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/65611/Document-Delivery-Service-online-guide-v10.7.12.pdf. For context, the University is in the top ten Australian universities for research, and in student size modest (27,000 students, 18% of whom are from outside Australia). If someone wants to mine the data, contact the University Librarian. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 5 January 2016 02:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere? On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Christian Gutknecht <christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch> wrote: Stevan, [ahjs] … But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much, is to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free money the library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA fund (incl. hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs resulting getting access to documents that are not longer available via subscription (like costs for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual subscription of a really important journal).. Because librarians constantly overestimate the importance of their subscriptions and especially the Big Deals where they buy/rent a lot of stuff that is never used by their community. I think most libraries would find out that researchers would get along quite well with this option Christian, I strongly suggest that you look into the actual costs of such a proposal (replacing subscriptions by pay-to-view costs, per paper). We are in the online era, when scholars are accustomed to reaching content immediately with one click, and browsing it to see whether it's even worth reading. A scholar may look at dozens of papers a day this way. That's what they do with their institutional licensed content. You are imagining (without any data at all) that the cost of doing this via pay-per-view, at the usual $30 or so per paper, would amount to less cost for an institution than its current licensing costs. Please repeat this proposal once you have done the arithmetic and have the evidence. (It won't be enough to find out the license costs and the pay-per-view costs. You will also have to monitor the daily usage, per discipline, of a sufficient representative sample of researchers. Until then, subscription cancellation is not an option for institutions today. (But with universal immediate-deposit <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/> it will be.) As Thomas mentioned it’s really easy these days to get to the papers by simply asking the author. Also Researchgate and academia.edu close the gap where IRs fail to provide access. The ease and immediacy of online access to which institutional authors are now accustomed is for licensed (+ OA) content. Find the actual user data for unlicensed, non-OA content. And prepare to discover that copy-requests -- for which you have expressed pessimism when they are Button-based -- may turn out to be much less immediate or reliable if they must be mediated by email address search and waiting to see whether the author responds then when they are requested. With immediate deposit and the Button, the request is just one click for the user and one for the author... [ahjs] … ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex
Heather It is not as easy as that, unfortunately. The university is a party to what happens in the case of copying/deposit/publication by virtue of creating an institutional repository, not to mention a mandate policy. (Different for deposit in Arxiv.) The situation is made more complex when the person committing the alleged misdemeanor is an employee, thereby invoking the rights of other employees to a safe and secure workplace. Students have different rights. While many academics think they own copyright as of right, if they check they often find this is a convention by the employer (and in these days of long author lists, all of the employers jointly), not a legal right. Unfortunately, universities have become more managerial in the last decades, and with this comes bureaucracy, caution, conservatism and unwillingness to risk any form of litigation. Sad, but true. If you want researchers to be personally responsible for copying and/or deposit (in a legal sense), this opens up a huge can of worms much larger than open access! Of course, I know that copyright laws are not the same worldwide, but I think I am on safe ground asserting that most researchers are happy to maintain the accuracy of their publications, but they would not wish to support this with cash for legal fees. Arthur Sale From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Wednesday, 24 September, 2014 6:39 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex Universities do not, and should not, assume liability for what others may do on their premises, whether physical or virtual. If someone commits a crime on campus such as stealing personal property, it is the fault of the thief, not the university. Responsibility for copyright should rest with the person copying. One reason I think this is especially important with scholarly communication is because if publishers wish to pursue their copyright it will be more effective to achieve change if the push is direct from publisher to author, not with library or university as intermediary. Publishers may be more reluctant to threaten authors than universities. However if they choose vigorous pursuit of their copyright directly with authors I expect that this will help authors to understand the system and channel their frustration where it belongs, to transform the system instead of shooting the messenger (library / university). best, Heather Morrison On Sep 23, 2014, at 3:43 PM, Stacy Konkiel st...@impactstory.org wrote: +100 to what Richard said. they should not interfere with the process of self archiving on the basis of such considerations as scientific quality or any kind of personal judgement. Ah, but what about when the review step is put into place to ensure that copyright is not violated? IR Librarians have, unfortunately, become the enforcers of copyright restrictions at many universities. Somehow, we ended up with the responsibility of ensuring that we're not opening our uni's up to liabilities when paywall publishers come a-threatening with their pack of lawyers because a researcher has made the publisher's version of a paper available on the IR. Contrast that with the Terms of Service of websites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, who put the onus on the researcher to understand and comply with copyrights for the papers they upload--and *trust* the researchers to do so. No wonder we're getting beat at our own game! But I digress. I agree that library-based IR workflows need a lot of improvement. Librarians need to start pushing back against legal counsels and administrators who make us into the gatekeepers/copyright enforcers. But I take exception to the assertion that we librarians need to step back and let the grownups figure out OA workflows. We often know just as much as researchers at our institutions about copyright, OA, IP, etc. What we need is a partnership to eradicate the barriers to OA that exist at the institutional/library policy and workflow levels. Oftentimes, library administrators take what groups of informed researchers have to say much more seriously than what their rank and file librarians say about things like OA. We could use your support in tearing down these barriers and getting rid of awful legacy workflows that restrict access, rather than this sort of divisive language that suggests we're just dopes who don't get OA and are making things harder for researchers. Respectfully, Stacy Konkiel Stacy Konkiel Director of Marketing Research at http://impactstory.org/ Impactstory: share the full story of your research impact. working from beautiful Albuquerque, NM, USA http://www.twitter.com/skonkiel @skonkiel and https://twitter.com/ImpactStory @Impactstory On Tue, Sep 23
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Unanimity (Re: Monographs)
Sorry I part company with you Anthony. There is little reason to redeposit an OA item just in case the firm goes bust or is sold. It is simply wasted effort and almost every researcher will see it as such. The URL/DOI/handle is far superior as it guarantees correctness and no hacking or deception. Imagine posting a revised version of an article to a repository (unrefereed) in order to deceive. BTW, the cost of maintaining a redirection is minimal for a publisher. One might as well manufacture citations to refer to your preferred version. Now if you mounted an argument on archival preservation through multiple copies, that at least has some legs. Not a lot, but the argument is valid. I discard the argument about OA checking because that assumes that you need to know this and you demand to know it simply - a totally second order issue of interest only to administrators, which a competent computer scientist can solve. All this is more important if the OA version is not a pdf, as it could be and sometimes is (HTML, XML, etc). The Australian research councils agree with me. Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Wednesday, 27 November 2013 11:41 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Jan Velterop Cc: Rick Anderson; scholc...@ala.org; LibLicense-L Discussion Forum Subject: [GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Unanimity (Re: Monographs) Jan, There are reasons for requiring green deposit even where an article is already OA on the journal. First, that canchange - one of my articles was published in a new Journal (Vol 2(2)) which a couple of years later was sold by bepress to iley and became closed - very annoyingly to me on two grounds - I was not informed of the change and the original URL stopped working. Second is the very practical measure that it is easy for an institution to check whether every article deposited has a full text paper in the repository (simply by checking that a suitable document is there - the fact that it would be possible for an author to upload a blank document requires an assumption of malfeasance far beyond the likelihood of it ever happening - the chances that sooner or later someone would spot and report such an upload are so high that very few would be foolish enough to do this). Compare this to checking (regularly because of my first point) that the URL (which is more likely to a web page rather than adeep link tothedocument) gives open access, which takes a ridiculous amount of work. Institutions almost universally already collect for very good reasons the meta-data of their researchers' output. Adding the requirement to submit the full text of the accepted version is a very small amount of extra work done in a scalable manner. Everything else does not properly scale. On the point about libre OA and gratis OA, I'm afraid you are wrong about open in English meaning the same as libre. Open has exactly the same problems as free in terms of being overloaded. I'm working on a paper at the moment on this issue, but the simple pointer to this is the use of the word open in the two phrases: Open Educational Resources (OERs), in which open generally means libre Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), in which open generally means gratis None of the main MOOC platforms have libre licensing of the content, not even the non-profit ones. MIT's OpenCourseWare (not the first or the only OER resource but a major instance of it) specifically provides for a CC-BY-NC license. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Re: Fight Publishing Lobby's Latest FIRST Act to Delay OA - Nth Successor to PRISM, RWA etc.
Stevan I am glad we agree that both activities can and should proceed in parallel. All we disagree on is a judgment as to whether mandates for open data or open articles will be first. I continue to assert that achievement of 100% mandated open data is much nearer in time than 100% open articles. If I am right, then open data will help drive open articles, rather than the other way around. It's worth considering. The problems with open data are not what you write. The Harvard mandate solution of reversing the onus onto authors to justify why open access should not be provided is just as applicable, and is general Australian policy. The immediate deposit argument does not hold water, because even articles are not immediately deposited by depositing the Accepted Manuscript, but at a point in time when their content virtually freezes. Some research data never freezes and may indeed continue to grow with time, as for example from sensor networks. Others may need to be preserved until publication of the associated articles (but no later). Some journals I know insist on the research data and the software being made open before they will referee the article (in genetics and bioinformatics). In addition, in the hard sciences there is a strong tradition of sharing anyway within a clique, which is excellent. This is not as strong in the social sciences (survey) fields, and there are privacy matters to be taken into account also. Part of that difference is due to the strong group / collaborative / laboratory association of many of the hard sciences. You will have observed that much research data is already open, for example weather, tidal, climate, oceanic, polar, hydrological, much genetic and molecular biology information, economics, Internet traffic, and indeed the Internet content generally. I am not interested in assessing whether 20% of the world's data is open to compare with articles, since this is a pretty meaningless question. We would need to agree what the % was of. Projects? Bytes? Records? The Australian Code of Conduct in Research governs the storage of and access to research data, and for example insists on defined preservation times and procedures. All Ethics Committees demand to see research data plans before approving a project involving humans or animals. Many (all?) Australian universities mandate compliance with the Code of Conduct. Many researchers (not authors) see open data repositories as a simple way of complying with the requirements imposed on them thereby. The ones with huge datasets (and their own repositories) are generally even more amenable to open access to their data. Best wishes Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Tasmania From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Friday, 22 November 2013 11:11 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Re: Fight Publishing Lobby's Latest FIRST Act to Delay OA - Nth Successor to PRISM, RWA etc. On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 1:07 AM, Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au wrote: S.H.: Can we wait, please, until [mandates] at least cover (journal article) text, rather than demanding even more when we don't yet even have less? A.S.: There is no need to wait. Open access data is within our easy reach, because there are no publishers involved. Details need to [be] resolved and open access of research data is not fully implemented, but it is a long way ahead of scholarly published text.. Software is only different because [of] the potential profit ... Voluntary provision of OA to anything -- articles, data, books, software -- can of course proceed apace. But when it comes to mandates, there are obstacles. With articles, the obstacle is publishers. (Authors are willing but worried, and need their institutional and funder mandates to support and embolden them. But the mandates must contend with publisher embargoes of various lengths.) In contrast, with data and software the obstacle is authors. And with books the obstacle is both authors and publishers. Researchers are not data-gatherers. They gather data in order to analyze it and publish their findings, and they want (and deserve) first-expoitation rights. How long access to data should be reserved to the data-gatherer is the detail to be resolved with data. This will vary from discipline to discipline and study to study. Unlike with articles, instant OA is not a fair solution that fits all. But I of course agree that immediate-deposit (with the option of restricted access) does fit data just as well as articles. What I am cautioning, however, at a time when article OA mandates are still few, and mostly needlessly weak -- most of them not yet being the optimal Liege-model immediate-deposit mandates with optional immediate-OA -- is that it will not accelerate but retard progress to try to make OA mandates do
[GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Re: Fight Publishing Lobby's Latest FIRST Act to Delay OA - Nth Successor to PRISM, RWA etc.
Stevan There is no need to wait and indeed we are not. The scholarly community is completely capable of acting on both text and data at the same time, and indeed has been for at least five years. This is to be praised not denigrated. Open access data is within our easy reach, because there are no publishers involved. I would have to check, but I believe that all of the 30+ Australian universities are already signed up to open access of research data through the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) project. Details need to resolved and open access of research data is not fully implemented, but it is a long way ahead of scholarly published text. I would be surprised if the UK and the USA were much different. Let's take the apples in our reach while we continue to struggle to pick the high ones on the top branches. Software is only different because the potential profit symbol winks mesmerizingly but deceptively into the eyes of universities. It is largely mythical. It does not apply to data. Best wishes Arthur From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Friday, 22 November 2013 10:26 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: scholc...@ala.org; open-acc...@lists.okfn.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Re: Fight Publishing Lobby's Latest FIRST Act to Delay OA - Nth Successor to PRISM, RWA etc. On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Bjoern Brembs b.bre...@gmail.com wrote: [Arthur] . I would expand green mandates to cover not only text, but also data and software. Can we wait, please, until they at least cover (journal article) text, rather than demanding even more when we don't yet even have less? [Arthur] . Stevan Harnad ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Open Access in Australian Quarterly
The latest issue of Australian Quarterly (Vol 84 Issue 4, ISSN 1443-3605) has just appeared in Open Access Week. AQ appears both in print and digitally, by subscription. It is a The following is extracted from the masthead: AQ (Australian Quarterly) is published by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. This project is supported by the Commonwealth Government through a grant-in-aid administered by the Department of Finance and Deregulation. The AIPS is an independent body which promotes discussion and understanding of political, social and scientific issues in Australia. It is not connected with any political party or sectional group. Opinions expressed in AQ are those of the authors. The lead article (featured on the cover) is Revolution in the Wings - Recent Developments in Open Access by myself, pp 3-11. Arthur Sale ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits
Very true, Jean-Claude. It is the sole value of the subscription publishing industry is that it does not cost the author or his/her institution anything. Cost burdens are pushed on those who can pay (but have second-order interest in paying). Institutional presses and professional societies address this situation differently, with subsidies. I believe that Gold journals will behave like page-charge journals always have: make exemptions for authors and countries that are impecunious. This does not distort the market too much. The market is less that of journals competing for author copy, but more of authors seeking value for money in journal dissemination. But, of course, we arent there yet. I decline to extend this discussion to objective measures of journal quality such as JIF, SJR, SNIP or Eigenvector. Best wishes Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: Monday, 7 October 2013 6:08 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits And the result of this effective market is that wealth will become an important factor in the determination of scientific prestige. In fact, this coupling of prestige and financing is exactly what the Grand Conversation of science should never accept or accommodate. If, moreover, you measure prestige through impact factors, you sink into a completely absurd world. There is a French song that would fit this scenario perfectly: Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise... Jean-Claude Guédon Le dimanche 06 octobre 2013 à 08:28 +1100, Arthur Sale a écrit : I fully agree Sally. Where there is an APC for fully Gold journals (or free which is simply a limiting case) in a fully Gold publication industry, the normal economic processes will kick in to make an effective market. They dont with institutional subscription journals where the payers are non-beneficiaries, or only at second remove. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: Sunday, 6 October 2013 5:12 AM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits Dear Heather The point I was trying to make is that - unlike with subscriptions - there is a direct connection between the person who benefits from the value offered (the author) and the publisher. Thus the marketplace should operate normally. 'Profits' are not in themselves bad - they are what businesses (including nonprofits) need to keep going 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 Heather Morrison Sent: 05 October 2013 17:48 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits There's nothing odd about companies wanting to profit off of the work of others. What is unusual about scholarly publishing is that the costs are not connected with the impact of the costs in an obvious way. For example it would be most surprising if, at the University of Alberta, discussions about the deep cuts and the need to cut academic programs and jobs occurred at the same meetings where people at the university need to figure out how to pay even more for the big deals of publishers already enjoying 30-40% profit margins in an inelastic market where the deep cuts to their authors, reviewers, and customers have no impact on their bottom line. The situation for universities today really is difficult. That is why I am working to help us all connect the dots. If a university is looking for voluntary severance from faculty members while at the same time paying even more above inflationary cost increases to publishers with high profit margins, that is wrong and needs to stop. Many not-for-profit publishers never did gouge universities. At one time, Sally, you were the Executive Director of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and represented the interests of this group. best, Heather Morrison On 2013-10-05, at 11:25 AM, Sally Morris sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote: Many of you have argued that Gold OA - at last - creates a genuine marketplace between publishers and authors. In any marketplace, sellers price according to what they consider their offer is worth to buyers. Some journals are worth more than others to authors (indeed, publishers generally follow this principle when pricing subscriptions - I don't know of any publishers who price all their subscription journals the same). So what's odd about it? Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham
[GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits
I fully agree Sally. Where there is an APC for fully Gold journals (or free which is simply a limiting case) in a fully Gold publication industry, the normal economic processes will kick in to make an effective market. They dont with institutional subscription journals where the payers are non-beneficiaries, or only at second remove. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: Sunday, 6 October 2013 5:12 AM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits Dear Heather The point I was trying to make is that - unlike with subscriptions - there is a direct connection between the person who benefits from the value offered (the author) and the publisher. Thus the marketplace should operate normally. 'Profits' are not in themselves bad - they are what businesses (including nonprofits) need to keep going 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 Heather Morrison Sent: 05 October 2013 17:48 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits There's nothing odd about companies wanting to profit off of the work of others. What is unusual about scholarly publishing is that the costs are not connected with the impact of the costs in an obvious way. For example it would be most surprising if, at the University of Alberta, discussions about the deep cuts and the need to cut academic programs and jobs occurred at the same meetings where people at the university need to figure out how to pay even more for the big deals of publishers already enjoying 30-40% profit margins in an inelastic market where the deep cuts to their authors, reviewers, and customers have no impact on their bottom line. The situation for universities today really is difficult. That is why I am working to help us all connect the dots. If a university is looking for voluntary severance from faculty members while at the same time paying even more above inflationary cost increases to publishers with high profit margins, that is wrong and needs to stop. Many not-for-profit publishers never did gouge universities. At one time, Sally, you were the Executive Director of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and represented the interests of this group. best, Heather Morrison On 2013-10-05, at 11:25 AM, Sally Morris sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote: Many of you have argued that Gold OA - at last - creates a genuine marketplace between publishers and authors. In any marketplace, sellers price according to what they consider their offer is worth to buyers. Some journals are worth more than others to authors (indeed, publishers generally follow this principle when pricing subscriptions - I don't know of any publishers who price all their subscription journals the same). So what's odd about 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 Dana Roth Sent: 04 October 2013 20:00 To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits In defense of Jeffrey Beall the extreme variability of Hindawis APCs is, at the least, interesting especially the large number of free and relatively low priced APCs for many of their journals. http://www.hindawi.com/apc/ Dana L. Roth Caltech Library 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzr...@library.caltech.edu http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of David Prosser Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 1:27 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits Jeffrey Ignoratio elenchi? That's from Harry Potter, right? Spell meaning 'facts be gone'? Heather is interested in the flow of money out of academia. If that is your area of interest then the profit margins of large commercial, legacy publishers are clearly of more interest than the profit margins of other players. From the figures I quote (from your blog), Hindawi takes $300 of profit from each paper it publishers. A large commercial, legacy publisher takes about $1200*. From where I sit (and I admit my knowledge of economics is almost as bad as that of Latin) it is clear that $1200 per paper is a significantly larger amount than $300 per paper
[GOAL] Re: Disruption vs. Protection
Perhaps Stevan, I should have added that our Document Delivery improves our level of use of OA too. The Document Delivery people make a check that the requested article is not available OA before they place a per-article order. They know all the tricks. If found to be OA the requester is advised of the location by email and enlightened about services such as DOAJ, BASE and Google Scholar. We don't then give them the article, but make them get it themselves. Thus we increase the skills and use of OA by our researchers (in reading articles) and hope some of this rubs off on author behaviour. It also automatically focuses on the more active researchers. I agree about your Green and Gold characterization, because clearly this is still in default a toll-access route, though a pay-per-article rather than a pay-per-journal or bundle subscription. In person I would argue with you about it being as much almost-OA as The Button, and certainly much more reliable. This is an important factor for researchers. However, I do not see any value in arguing that by email. You are of course absolutely correct that viewed from Australia and New Zealand (and China and Japan), Button requests are almost never instant because of time-zones. With only 3% of the world's scientific literature being Australian, it cannot be otherwise, even with 100% Green. However, I will note that the policy encourages online usage by researchers, and because it diverts money away from subscriptions towards the service, it contributes to make the 'Kuhnian revolution' that we all desire in the thinking of librarians and academics and the management of their budgets. The service is funded by extra cancellations, of course - we don't have any extra money. You can therefore rely that is run efficiently, of course. It is then a small step to using the same or similar funds for APCs, and the researchers need never notice! Well not much - they would have to forward the APC invoice to the Library to pay. We also begin to think more about article-quality rather than journal-quality, and that surely is a good thing, for research,, peer-review functions, scientometrics, and OA. Just thinking ahead, sensibly, really. A modest step, but it seems to work well. Arthur From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 2:25 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Disruption vs. Protection On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au wrote: At a severe risk of offending Stevan, I write to say that my University has practised an almost-OA policy for at least 15 years that falls into neither the Green nor Gold category we offer a free (to the researcher) automated document delivery service to any researcher... for an article we do not subscribe to. No offence at all! But individual article access via pay-to-view https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=crei=q9A3UsyqMcjgyQHitICAAw#q=amsci+(subscri ption+license+pay-per-view)+harnad (e.g., interlibrary loan) -- like subscription access and license access -- are simply variants of the toll access, in contrast with which open access was coined and to remedy which the OA movement was launched. It's toll access no matter who is paying the access tolls. And OA means toll-free online access. There's nothing almost-OA about any kind of toll access. The button is almost-OA because although it may not be immediate, and although it may not be certain, it is certainly toll-free. But none of this has anything to do with the Green/Gold distinction, which is about whether the toll-free access is provided by the author (Green) or the journal (Gold). (I'm sure Arthur won't do it, but I hope no one else will come back with but the Gold OA APC is a toll, so Gold OA is toll-access too. For pedants we could write out toll-access as access-toll to the user or to the user's institution. When an author (or his institution) pays to publish (whether Gold-OA or non-OA) the payment is not a user access toll. Everyone agrees that the true expenses of publishing have to be paid by someone. But only subscription/licence/pay-per-view pays them via access tolls, denying access if the toll are not paid. Gold OA does not. And for Green OA, subscriptions -- while they remain sustainable -- have already paid the publication costs, so Green OA is just supplementary access, for those whose institutions can't afford the subscription toll. -- What the true expense of publishing is is another matter. By my lights, we won't know till universal Green OA has prevailed. And I'm betting they will turn out to be just the cost of implementing peer review.) There is a delay sure, but it is the same delay as the Request-A-Copy button, and more certain. Agreed that paid pay-per-view is more certain than the button (just as paid subscription access and paid licensed access are). Bur I would
[GOAL] Re: Open access research: some basics for scientists
Serge I did not make the distinction. Heather did. And there is a difference between the sort of research that she was describing (survey and interview-based) vs research that does not involve human ethics permissions and involvement. What words would you use to describe the differences? I have no idea what I am supposed to infer from your comment about etymology. I thought I was pointing out that many traditional (physical? mathematical? biological?) scientists are not very statistics-literate. There are exceptions, and you have just extended my examples. Good statistical ability is an essential in the human ethics style of research, as are other branches of mathematics. Arthur Sale Computer scientist, electronics engineer, bioinformatician, and OA advocate -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of BAUIN Serge Sent: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 6:50 PM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open access research: some basics for scientists Arthur, I am amazed... Do you mean that social scientists are not scientists? You might recall the etymology of the word statistics (e.g. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=statistics ). A (regrettably) large majority of economists are actual mathematicians. Demographers... what do they do all day long? Quantitative sociologists, geographers? Are they all in literature? Serge Bauin Formerly sociologist, initial training in engineering CNRS -Message d'origine- De : goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] De la part de Arthur Sale Envoyé : mardi 17 septembre 2013 00:42 À : 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Objet : [GOAL] Re: Open access research: some basics for scientists Heather I agree with you and endorse your comments. However, there is a caveat: some questions addressed in open access are indeed scientific, and not social scientific. I think of measuring adoption rates, deposit delays, bibliometrics, etc from analyses of public data on the Internet or services such as ISI and Scopus. To be sure (and this I think you missed and should have mentioned) a reasonably good knowledge of statistics is also necessary (generally). Many agricultural scientists and medical scientists would meet this criterion far better than most social scientists. Many engineers would also have a better grasp of using complex mathematical tools such as chaos theory, fractals, and fourier analysis. It isn't black vs white. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 2:04 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Open access research: some basics for scientists As the OA movement continues to gain steam, we are seeing scholars with a background in sciences take a keen interest and even develop surveys and such. While the enthusiasm is welcome, from what I am seeing in several instances now, is that scientists do not necessarily understand how to go about social science research. A scholar with a background in chemistry doing social science research with no training is not unlike a social scientist with no training in chemistry walking into a lab and playing about (although the potential damages are generally of a different nature). Scientists doing social science research: - should be aware of research ethics requirements - at universities in North America, for example, you must get a research ethics clearance to conduct survey or interview research - should understand the methodology used and its limitations - should know the area. A poorly conducted survey by someone who is not an expert on the topic surveyed may be more damaging than helpful. For example, the way questions are framed shapes how people understand the topic. Before you develop a survey on open access, you should be aware that there are least two basic approaches (green and gold), and if asking questions about gold, you should be aware that this is not equivalent to the article processing fee business model best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca ALA Accreditation site visit scheduled for 30 Sept-1 Oct 2013 / Visite du comité externe pour l'accréditation par l'ALA est prévu le 30 sept-1 oct 2013 http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/accreditation.html http://www.esi.uottawa.ca/accreditation.html ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open access research: some basics for scientists
Heather I agree with you and endorse your comments. However, there is a caveat: some questions addressed in open access are indeed scientific, and not social scientific. I think of measuring adoption rates, deposit delays, bibliometrics, etc from analyses of public data on the Internet or services such as ISI and Scopus. To be sure (and this I think you missed and should have mentioned) a reasonably good knowledge of statistics is also necessary (generally). Many agricultural scientists and medical scientists would meet this criterion far better than most social scientists. Many engineers would also have a better grasp of using complex mathematical tools such as chaos theory, fractals, and fourier analysis. It isn't black vs white. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 2:04 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Open access research: some basics for scientists As the OA movement continues to gain steam, we are seeing scholars with a background in sciences take a keen interest and even develop surveys and such. While the enthusiasm is welcome, from what I am seeing in several instances now, is that scientists do not necessarily understand how to go about social science research. A scholar with a background in chemistry doing social science research with no training is not unlike a social scientist with no training in chemistry walking into a lab and playing about (although the potential damages are generally of a different nature). Scientists doing social science research: - should be aware of research ethics requirements - at universities in North America, for example, you must get a research ethics clearance to conduct survey or interview research - should understand the methodology used and its limitations - should know the area. A poorly conducted survey by someone who is not an expert on the topic surveyed may be more damaging than helpful. For example, the way questions are framed shapes how people understand the topic. Before you develop a survey on open access, you should be aware that there are least two basic approaches (green and gold), and if asking questions about gold, you should be aware that this is not equivalent to the article processing fee business model best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca ALA Accreditation site visit scheduled for 30 Sept-1 Oct 2013 / Visite du comité externe pour l'accréditation par l'ALA est prévu le 30 sept-1 oct 2013 http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/accreditation.html http://www.esi.uottawa.ca/accreditation.html ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: Disruption vs. Protection
At a severe risk of offending Stevan, I write to say that my University has practised an almost-OA policy for at least 15 years that falls into neither the Green nor Gold category. (BTW did you know that these are the two Australian sporting colours?) We subscribe to the online journals our researchers make a great deal of use of (that's free to them, but not to the University), but the difference is that we offer a free (to the researcher) automated document delivery service to any researcher (includes PhD candidates) for an article we do not subscribe to. There is a delay sure, but it is the same delay as the Request-A-Copy button, and more certain. The University meets the cost, so the researcher sees it as free. This is not a solution for developing countries, but for an intelligent first-world university it sure is. I have used the service at least 100 times. It enables us to unsubscribe little used journals and win, and it makes it easier to be right up to date at the far end of the world's communication lines. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania. Australia From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson Sent: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 2:15 AM To: David Solomon Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Friend, Fred; LibLicense-L Discussion Forum; SPARC Open Access Forum Subject: [GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: Disruption vs. Protection Would you really consider dropping a journal with say 70% percent of the content available after a year? I'm not a librarian but I just wonder how much of a difference allowing immediate archiving of the accepted version really makes in subscription decisions. It depends. Obviously, a subscription provides enhanced access over green repository access. But as I mentioned before, the less central a journal is to my institution's curricular and research focus, the more willing I'll be to settle for less-than-ideal access. If I had a generous materials budget, the calculus would be different-but the combination of a relatively stagnant budget and constantly/steeply-rising journal prices means that I have to settle for solutions that are less than ideal. One less-than-ideal solution is to maintain a subscription despite the fact that 70% of the journal's content is available immediately (or after a year). That solution is attractive because it provides more complete and convenient access, but it's less than ideal because it ties up money that can't be used to secure access to a journal that is not green at all. Another less-than-ideal solution is to cancel the subscription and rely on green access. The downside of that approach is that repository access is a pain and may be incomplete; the upside is that it frees up money that I can use to provide access to another needed journal that offers no green access. These issues are complex. The subscription decisions we make in libraries are binary (either your subscribe or you don't), but the criteria we have to use in making those decisions are not binary-we're typically considering multiple criteria (relevance, price, cost per download, demonstrated demand, etc.) that exist on a continuum. One thing is for certain, though: the more a journal's content is available for free, and the quicker it becomes available for free, the less likely it is that we'll maintain a subscription. I think that's the only rational position to take when there are so many journals out there that our faculty want, and that we're not subscribing to because we're out of money. --- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources Collections Marriott Library, University of Utah Desk: (801) 587-9989 Cell: (801) 721-1687 rick.ander...@utah.edu ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] 1st-Party Give-Aways vs. 3rd-Party Rip-Offs
Please read the definitive article on the button http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268511/ and elsewhere, given by Stevan Harnad but not written solely by him, rather than coming up with new interpretations. Yes the document is slightly oriented to Canada because it is in press as a book chapter, but it is applicable to jurisdictions across the world (the authors live in four countries and have links to at least three more). It demonstrates clearly how the button is based on the fair use and fair dealing provisions of the copyright acts around the world, coordinated by the Berne Convention. Its status is hardly dubious. 'Personal use' is irrelevant, whatever it is. Research is not 'personal', or at least only in minimal senses. Arthur Sale Tasmania -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of P Burnhill Sent: Thursday, 8 August 2013 6:59 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum; Lib Serials list Subject: [GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] 1st-Party Give-Aways vs. 3rd-Party Rip-Offs Good post. P On Wed, 7 Aug 2013, Sandy Thatcher wrote: Technically, it probably is better to regard the eprint request Button as a function facilitating personal use rather than fair use. (Stevan once used to call this the fair use button.) The Copyright Act of 1976 does not directly address personal use, as it does fair use in Sec. 107, except in an addition that was later made to deal with home audiotaping. The concept has arisen in some court cases, most notably the Sony case involving time-shifting of videotaping of TV shows for later viewing. But there remains a lot of debate about what personal use covers. It will likely be a subject of much discussion in the forthcoming hearings in Congress over comprehensive reform of copyright law. Sandy Thatcher At 10:37 AM -0400 8/7/13, Stevan Harnad wrote: If supplying eprints to requesters could be https://theconversation.com/neuroscientists-need-to-embrace-open-acc ess-publishing-too-16736#comment_198916delegated to 3rd parties like Repository Managers to perform automatically, then they would become violations of copyright contracts. What makes the https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopyeprint-request Button legal is the fact that it is the author who decides, in each individual instance, whether or not to comply with an individual eprint request for his own work; it does not happen automatically. Think about it: If it were just the fact of requesters having to do two keystrokes for access instead of just one (OA), then the compliance keystroke might as well have been done by software rather than the Repository Manager! And that would certainly not be compliance with a publisher OA embargo. Almost OA would just become 2-stroke OA. No. What makes the https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopyeprint-request Button both legal and subversive is that http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0671.htmlit is not 3rd-party piracy (by either a Repository Manager or an automatic computer programme) but http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/262893/1/resolution.html#9.11st-party provision of individual copies, to individual requesters, for research purposes, by the author, in each individual instance: the latter alone continues the long accepted tradition of reprint-provision by scholars and scientists to their own work. If reprint-request cards had been mailed instead to 3rd-parties who simply photocopied anyone's articles and mailed them to requesters (with or without a fee) the practice would have been attacked in the courts by publishers as piracy long ago. The best way to undermine the Button as a remedy against publisher OA mandates, and to empower the publishing lobby to block it, would be to conflate it with 2-stroke 3rd-party OA! That practice should never be recommended. Rather, make crystal clear the fundamental difference between 1st-party give-away and 3rd-party rip-off. [Parenthetically: Of course it is true that all these legal and technical distinctions are trivial nonsense! It is an ineluctable fact that the online PostGutenberg medium has made technically and economically possible and easily feasible what was technically and economically impossible in the Gutenberg medium: to make all refereed research articles -- each, without exception, an author give-away, written purely for research impact rather than royalty income -- immediately accessible to all would-be users, not just to subscribers: OA. That outcome is both optimal and inevitable for research; researchers; their institutions; their funders; the RD industry; students; teachers; journalists; the developing world; access-denied scholars and scientists; the general public; research uptake, productivity, impact and progress; and the tax-payers who fund the research. The only parties
[GOAL] Re: Hybrid OA/subscription journals
My thanks Jan, for such a succinct and accurate analysis. I am heartened to know that others think the article has priority over its packaging. I also want to disseminate these concepts more widely in my institution. Best wishes Arthur Sale From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Thursday, 4 July 2013 6:15 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Hybrid OA/subscription journals Eric, You talk about market-distorting practices. The biggest market-distorting factor in a subscription/licence model is of course that the party who pays is not the party who choses (at least 'gold' models put the choice in the hands of those who can sensibly choose: the authors). The question that I have is whether it is right at all that peer-reviewed literature is subject to choice when it comes to unfettered availability. Should peer-reviewed literature not be regarded as a kind of 'infrastructural' provision, like the road network? Paid for out of common funds, to enable everyone to reach the knowledge they need or like to have? The BigDeal - the site-licence supreme - was intended for just such a purpose. A national (perhaps regional) 'infrastructural' provision of access to all peer-reviewed literature to all academics. Paid out of 'top-sliced' funds. Unfortunately, the wish to choose scuppered that idea. Rather than having access to everything, many librarians and their universities wanted to revert to selection of journals available electronically. Even where it meant paying the same, or even more, for a smaller selection of journals. I regard that as a historical mistake. In the modern world with technologies like the web at our disposal, selecting what should be available to researchers and students seems completely out of order; a remnant of an old order. Individual researchers and students should be enabled to decide what they need in terms of peer-reviewed literature, not having to rely solely on librarians and their local budgets. In my opinion notions like 'double dipping' and other denigrating comments about hybrid OA/subscription journals are not warranted. That said, I am no great fan of hybrid journals. Actually, I am no great fan of journals. They are a way of organising and stratifying the peer-reviewed literature that has had it's time. The article is the meaningful entity; the journal just a label that is attached to an article, like a branded clothes label to a jacket. Nobody would read (or not read) an article just because it is in a particular journal. Nobody would cite (or not cite) an article just because it is in a particular journal. Researchers worth their salt read and cite articles that are relevant to their research, irrespective of the properly peer-reviewed journal they are published in. Which brings me to your remark about bundling. A journal is a bundle, too. I see the journal disappear over time. Articles will more and more often appear in repositories of sorts, 'platforms' if you wish, such as arXiv and PLOS One. (These platforms, by the way, can lay claim to being 'journals' - daily accounts - much more than most so-called journals that are anything but. Indeed, PLOS One is called a 'journal', yet it is essentially different from most traditional journals). Efforts to bring back the situation as it was in the 1950's are futile and no more than rearguard battles. Jan On 3 Jul 2013, at 21:30, Eric F. Van de Velde eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com wrote: Jan: I agree with you that pricing journals for a publisher is complicated, at least when looking from the inside out. But that is no different from any other supplier of a product. The problem with the academic journal market is price transparency. With Hybrid Gold OA publishers essentially tell us to trust them to do the right thing. The problem is that the market is already so distorted because of other business practices that there is no way for buyers to check they are doing the right thing. Hybrid Gold OA is just one other part of market-distorting practices, which include: 1. Site licenses a) They force a university to make uniform decisions for a large and diverse group, rather than let individuals decide what exactly they need, which would be a far more realistic indicator of usefulness of a journal than impact factor or surveys. It forces universities to buy more than they need. b) Publishers try to hide the costs of journals through nondisclosure clauses in contracts, thereby reducing transparency. It is impossible for universities to evaluate how good a negotiator their library is, as there is no way to compare the results with other universities and libraries. 2. Bundling a) Publishers use the market power of one journal to force universities to subsidize new and marginal journals. b) Forces universities to subscribe to more than they need, exacerbating 1.a) c
[GOAL] Paper at Theta 2013
If anyone is interested, I delivered a paper entitled 'Recent Developments in Open Access' at the Theta 2013 Conference last week. This is a biannual meeting of ICT and Library staff working in Australasian universities. The paper is available (open access) at http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16321/. Of course there were even more developments since I wrote the paper, which I managed to work into the presentation. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Universities Australia OA timetable
This post may be unbelievable, so if you don't like reading unbelievable things before breakfast, delay reading further until you think you can cope with it. Universities Australia (which is a body composed of all Australian Vice-Chancellors) has released a paper in February, entitled 'An agenda for Australian Higher Education 2013-2016'. In it the vice-chancellors express their collected intentions and wisdom regarding open access. I quote from the section subtitled 'Open access to research' on page 44: Universities Australia believes that there is enormous public benefit in increasing access to the outcomes of all research, especially research that has been publicly funded. There are a number of logistical, practical and commercial issues that need to be addressed to achieve this goal and Universities Australia, with the support of government, is committed to making Australia's high-quality research output freely accessible to all. So far, so good. Indeed, great! Now turn to 'Actions: Expand research outreach' on p45 to see how motherhood statements become reality: To increase the visibility of university outputs and make them more useful for the broader community, universities will include metadata on research publications in their institutional repositories.' Really? The metadata is already in the open domain. Metadata is a routine by-product of publishing. Mind you, the universities will add Socio-Economic Objective codes and Field of Research codes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics classification, which publishers don't. .and will expand the proportion of full text publications available to 50% by 2030. 50% of what? Current annual output? 2013-2016 output? Measured how long after publication? Why 50% which is not a stable position? And 17 years into the future to achieve even this paltry target, by which time no current vice-chancellor will still be in office; indeed in some cases there will be two changes of CEO! This is just procrastination - poorly thought out, and a fob-off. One could have hoped that Universities Australia could have been more decisive. I suggest as an alternative: Universities will provide the full text of all their research publications, or a link to where such a full-text can be found, in their institutional repositories no later than the end of 2016. Compliance should be measured six months after publication in the case of biological and medical research, twelve months in the case of all other sciences, and two years in the case of humanities and fine arts. Notes: 1. This is an achievable timetable, and within the planning timeframe of the report. 2. The embargoes mirror those of the RCUK. 3. The content provision matches the requirements of the Australian research councils, except the humanities and fine arts are given some extra embargo leeway. 4. While the statement states 'all' as a target, achievement of say 95% should be regarded as acceptable by 2017. 5. The universities can then press even harder for an efficiency dividend, with the Australian Government simply harvesting data from the repositories for both HERDC (data collection) and ERA (research evaluation), and relieving themselves of unnecessary work. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ' ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
+1100, Arthur Sale wrote: Thanks Tim. No I don't think I missed the point. I agree that certification of all *repository* documents for REF (or in our case ERA) is the same, whether the source is from a subscription or an open access source. The point is that repository documents are divorced from the source, and are therefore suspect. Researchers are as human as everyone else, whether by error or fraud. However, Gold is slightly easier to certify (see next para), even leaving aside the probability that the institution may not subscribe to all (non-OA) journals or conference proceedings. One of the reasons I argue that the ARC policy of requiring a link to OA (aka Gold) journal articles (rather than taking a copy) is that one compliance step is removed. The link provides access to the VoR at its canonical source, and there can be no argument about that. Taking a copy inserts the necessity of verifying that the copy is in fact what it purports to be, and relying on the institution's certification. May I strongly urge that EPrints, if given a URL to an off-site journal article, at the very least *inserts* the URL (or other identifier) into a canonic source link piece of metadata, whether or not it bothers about making a copy (which function should be able to be suppressed by the repository administrator as a repository-wide option). One of the problems that the take-a-copy crowd ignore, is that the link to a Gold article might in fact not be direct to the actual VoR, but to a guardian cover page. This cover page might contain publisher advertising or licence information before the actual link, or it might require one to comply with free registration maybe even with a CAPTCHA. It may be protected with a robots.txt file. No matter, the article is still open access, even though repository software may not be able to access it. (Drawn to my attention by private correspondence from Petr Knoth.) Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org goal-boun...@eprints.org [ mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Tim Brody Sent: Tuesday, 19 March 2013 9:19 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate Hi Arthur, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. The statement I was responding to was that gold includes everything you need to audit against (UK) funder compliance and the same can not be said for Green. I have no wish to debate the merits of gold vs. green, beyond pointing out that publisher-provided open access is no easier to audit than institution-provided open access. Indeed, if institutions are doing the reporting (as they will in the UK) an OA copy in the repository is easier to report on than a copy held only at the publisher. I don't know where Graham got the idea that gold will make auditing easier. Whether the publisher provides an OA copy or the author, all the points you make apply equally. -- All the best, Tim. On Tue, 2013-03-19 at 08:40 +1100, Arthur Sale wrote: Tim, you oversimplify the auditing of green. Try this instead, which is more realistic. For green, an institution needs to: 1) Require the author uploads a file. Timestamp the instant of upload. (1A) Check that the file gives a citation of a journal or conference published article, and that the author is indeed listed as a co-author. You might assume this, but not for auditing. EPrints can check this. (1B) Check that the refereeing policy of the journal or conference complies with the funder policy. This is absolutely essential. There are non-compliant examples of journals and conferences. More difficult to do with EPrints, but possible for most. (1C) Check that the file is a version (AM or VoR) of the cited published article. This requires as a bare minimum checking the author list and the title from the website metadata, but for rigorous compliance the institution needs to be able to download the VoR for comparison (ie have a subscription or equivalent database access). [In Australia we do spot checks, as adequate to minimize fraud. Somewhat like a police radar speed gun.] [Google Scholar does similar checks on pdfs it finds.] EPrints probably can't help. 2) Make it public after embargo. In other words enforce a compulsory upper limit on embargos, starting from the date of upload of uncertain provenance (see 3). EPrints can do this. 3) Depending on the importance of dates, check that the upload date of the file is no later than the publication date. The acceptance date is unknowable by the institution (usually printed on publication in the VoR, but not always), and then requires step 1C to determine after
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
Sorry Stevan. My recent reply to Tim answers most of these points. Please remember than I am an ICT professional. The ones that are not refuted by that reply (or require emphasis) are: . All author deposits must be audited. They may be in error and may even be fraudulent. There is plenty of incentive for the latter, given the lax controls. I could even see phishing repositories developing. Even author identity can be hacked, perhaps by students. . There may not ever have been an AM (refereed draft in your terminology) as a single file. To deliberately make one up for the local repository is extra effort (aka work) by the author, or imposes extra work on the reader if that the integration is not done or not possible. . Physicists produce pretty simple papers in ICT terms. Few animations, 3D models, videos, audio, etc. In other words physicists produce clunky pdf-reducible objects, whether in astronomy or particle physics. That's why they were and are good candidates for OA. Computer scientists were, but no longer are as much. . The request-a-copy button is not perfect. Especially with the direction that scholarly publication is likely to go. For example, sending 50 files by the button is not catered for. I can provide advice if wanted. If we preface your mantras by [if convenient] or [if immediately possible], they are perhaps barely acceptable. Frankly, I think that academics are cleverer than you give them credit for. In reading your comments, I have mentally deleted the perjorative 'sensible', 'cautious', 'timid' and 'foolish'. For your information, I do (1) when I can [not always]; (2) almost never since I don't know the publication date in advance, (3) I never ask the publisher for a date for reasons in (2), (4) I've never actioned this, because I am an OA advocate and I won't publish unless I can make my article OA, or feel safe being illegal. I regard the REF deposit requirement to be absurd, and will continue to support the Australian authorities in their better grasp of the situation than the UK. Best wishes Arthur Sale From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013 1:55 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum Subject: [GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate An immediate-deposit mandate moots most of this discussion. Versions and rights need not be checked if the mandate simply says: Deposit the refereed draft immediately, and make it Closed Access. So all this discussion is about what *else* you can do, and when. Here's a list: 1. A sensible author will make the immediate-deposit OA immediately, just as physicists have been successfully doing for decades with no problems. 2. A cautious author will look up the publsher's embargo policy as well as the funder's embargo limit, and make the immediate-deposit OA at whichever date comes first. 3. A timid author will look up the publsher's embargo policy and make the immediate-deposit OA at whatever date the publisher indicates. 4. A foolish author will simply make the immediate-deposit and leave it as Closed Access (attending to reprint requests generated by the request copy Button on an individual case by case basis). The speed with which we reach 100% Green OA and beyond depends on the relative proportion of foolish, timid, cautious and sensible authors. But please, while we keep speculating, let us all mandate immediate-deposit. I don't mean just: Deposit the refereed draft immediately, and make it Closed Access. Improve on that in any way you like: and make it OA immediately and make it OA immediately or after X months at the latest But in any case, deposit immediately! Stevan Harnad On 2013-03-21, at 9:40 AM, Hans PfeiffenbergAer hans.pfeiffenber...@awi.de wrote: Am 21.03.13 10:35, schrieb Tim Brody: By comparison, taking a copy is little extra effort and the institution can say unambiguously that they have an open access copy. wrong: if somebody uploads a PDF the institution - may have a copy if the identity of the file submitted or its equivalence with the version of record can be established - may have an OA copy. But to establish that, someone at the institution (the library?) must check the copyright notice in it (if any) and possibly consult with the authors about his/her contract with the publisher (because, legally, something found on the web pages of the publisher or ROMEO does not count), ... I just insisted on bean counting because it was done to the other side as well. I think this could go on indefinitely and should therefore be stopped. Seen from a non-British perspective, the discussion has morphed from being about Open Access to a discussion about controlling of science. And setting up of mandates and policies which are the least
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
Thanks Tim. No I don't think I missed the point. I agree that certification of all *repository* documents for REF (or in our case ERA) is the same, whether the source is from a subscription or an open access source. The point is that repository documents are divorced from the source, and are therefore suspect. Researchers are as human as everyone else, whether by error or fraud. However, Gold is slightly easier to certify (see next para), even leaving aside the probability that the institution may not subscribe to all (non-OA) journals or conference proceedings. One of the reasons I argue that the ARC policy of requiring a link to OA (aka Gold) journal articles (rather than taking a copy) is that one compliance step is removed. The link provides access to the VoR at its canonical source, and there can be no argument about that. Taking a copy inserts the necessity of verifying that the copy is in fact what it purports to be, and relying on the institution's certification. May I strongly urge that EPrints, if given a URL to an off-site journal article, at the very least *inserts* the URL (or other identifier) into a canonic source link piece of metadata, whether or not it bothers about making a copy (which function should be able to be suppressed by the repository administrator as a repository-wide option). One of the problems that the take-a-copy crowd ignore, is that the link to a Gold article might in fact not be direct to the actual VoR, but to a guardian cover page. This cover page might contain publisher advertising or licence information before the actual link, or it might require one to comply with free registration maybe even with a CAPTCHA. It may be protected with a robots.txt file. No matter, the article is still open access, even though repository software may not be able to access it. (Drawn to my attention by private correspondence from Petr Knoth.) Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Tim Brody Sent: Tuesday, 19 March 2013 9:19 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate Hi Arthur, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. The statement I was responding to was that gold includes everything you need to audit against (UK) funder compliance and the same can not be said for Green. I have no wish to debate the merits of gold vs. green, beyond pointing out that publisher-provided open access is no easier to audit than institution-provided open access. Indeed, if institutions are doing the reporting (as they will in the UK) an OA copy in the repository is easier to report on than a copy held only at the publisher. I don't know where Graham got the idea that gold will make auditing easier. Whether the publisher provides an OA copy or the author, all the points you make apply equally. -- All the best, Tim. On Tue, 2013-03-19 at 08:40 +1100, Arthur Sale wrote: Tim, you oversimplify the auditing of green. Try this instead, which is more realistic. For green, an institution needs to: 1) Require the author uploads a file. Timestamp the instant of upload. (1A) Check that the file gives a citation of a journal or conference published article, and that the author is indeed listed as a co-author. You might assume this, but not for auditing. EPrints can check this. (1B) Check that the refereeing policy of the journal or conference complies with the funder policy. This is absolutely essential. There are non-compliant examples of journals and conferences. More difficult to do with EPrints, but possible for most. (1C) Check that the file is a version (AM or VoR) of the cited published article. This requires as a bare minimum checking the author list and the title from the website metadata, but for rigorous compliance the institution needs to be able to download the VoR for comparison (ie have a subscription or equivalent database access). [In Australia we do spot checks, as adequate to minimize fraud. Somewhat like a police radar speed gun.] [Google Scholar does similar checks on pdfs it finds.] EPrints probably can't help. 2) Make it public after embargo. In other words enforce a compulsory upper limit on embargos, starting from the date of upload of uncertain provenance (see 3). EPrints can do this. 3) Depending on the importance of dates, check that the upload date of the file is no later than the publication date. The acceptance date is unknowable by the institution (usually printed on publication in the VoR, but not always), and then requires step 1C to determine after the event. Doubtful that EPrints can do this. 4) Require every potential author to certify that they have uploaded every REF-relevant publication they have produced. Outside EPrints responsibility, apart from producing lists on demand for certification. I
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
The Australian situation is interspersed - nothing to do with REF and HEFCE, but our equivalent research evaluation process. I provide this for comparison. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Saturday, 16 March 2013 1:15 PM To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Graham Triggs grahamtri...@gmail.com wrote: On 14 March 2013 22:14, Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: Why is it an absurd requirement to deposit immediately in the author's IR, regardless of whether the journal is subscription or OA and of whether the deposit is embargoed or immediate OA? That simple, natural, uniform local deposit procedure is precisely what makes it easy for an institution to monitor compliance. [Arthur] But of course it is totally irrelevant. Compliance has no link with deposit in the case of already OA articles, and indeed is not even easy to determine. Any senior manager (I was one) would want much better compliance certification than a deposit! Some IRs have so low visibility on the Internet as to be below the radar. I don't want to publicise them, because they are incompetent. imho, there are some significant unanswered questions regarding the HEFCE/REF proposals, which ultimately boil down to a couple of points. The main one actually being covered by what you've said above. Sure, an institution can monitor compliance. In fact, as they run the repository, they are the only ones that can effectively monitor compliance. So how exactly are the requirements going to be audited and enforced? There is no requirement to make the metadata public. There is no requirement to have the metadata harvested (whether public or not). There isn't even a requirement to have a request a copy feature (without which, the usefulness of immediate deposit is rather lost). And nor can there be in any useful time period for the first post-2014 REF. These things will take time to build and/or implement. So there isn't any effective way to audit that deposits were made, much beyond actually being fully open access when the embargo ends at best, and possibly even only at the time of the return at worst. I think you are mistaken -- and that you are vastly under-estimating the reach of this simple REF/HEFCE policy: (1) It is institutions that have always shown intense eagerness and initiative in ensuring that their researchers comply with all RAE and REF conditions. [Arthur] Australian institutions have shown zero eagerness, but respond to compulsion. Otherwise they would not get grants. Strong incentive. Low initiative. (2) The proposed REF mandate makes it very explicit that REF submissions are ineligible if they are not deposited immediately upon publication. (No waiting till near the end of the 6-year REF cycle to deposit.) [Arthur] Australian universities have sent annual publication data to the Australian Government for well over 20 years. Not full-texts sure, but the reporting cycle is entrenched in HERDC. Compulsory. (3) Compliance is based on two objective, verifiable data-points: publication date and IR deposit date. [Arthur] No comment. A REF issue. Not relevant to Australia. In our case, publication in a freely chosen OA outlet = OA. An IR deposit date is not needed and indeed completely irrelevant. I have pointed out that IR deposit is equivalent to double work in such cases. (4) Institutions, in monitoring and ensuring compliance will simply require -- at least annually -- a list of articles published, together with publication date and deposit date. [Arthur] As I said we've done this for 20+ years, without the deposit. The returns are provided to Canberra each March or thereabouts. (5) If the publication date and the deposit date are not the same, the article is ineligible for REF. [Arthur] An arcane REF rubric. Clumsy and simplistic, like smoke from the Sistine Chapel. An author publishing in an OA journal (if ignored) might be able to sue REF/HEFCE as their article was OA immediately on publication, or otherwise if they deposited before publication or a day or two after. The author could even be temporarily on the other side of the world, and living in a different day! (It happens to me every day as I am currently 11h ahead of GMT.) (6) With deposit, the metadata are immediately accessible web wide (though the full-text might be embargoed for the allowable interval). [Arthur] Even without deposit, this could be true. Though I concede, unlikely to be actioned very often. However I routinely put drafts on OA even before publication, updating them later. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Monday, 25 February 2013 11:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. Deposit locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than trying to mandate different deposit loci for the various authors in an institution. Peter Murray-Rust replied: This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to deposit sequences communally - and they do. The genome community requires genes deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require crsytal structures and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers... The community requires? How, exactly? I do not dispute that there are a smal number of subfields where OA of papers has been successful without mandates, and in some areas instead of in addition there is deposit of certain types of research data unmandated. However, they are a tiny minority of academia. Do you disagree with this assessment? The question then becomes how we get the rest of academia to do so. Despite the possibilities having existed for over twety years, the vast majority have yet to do so, despite it being in their interests. Who can require them to do so? Their employers and funders. What is the most efficient way for employers and funder to mandate deposit (a mandate requires at least some level of compliance checking otherwise it's really just a suggestion). Since: A. The funder alrady knows the institution of the researcher (in most cases the institution receives some funds as wlel as the individual) and virtually all funded research is to researchers within an institutional context. B. the institution knows who the researchers are and knows what grants they hold. C. Interdisciplinary research has no single natural home - does medical physics go to arXiv or PMC? Do we deposit in one and push to the other or deposit in both? D. There are other institutional benefits to local deposit (all local papers are acessible locally without worrying about embargoes; publication lists for projects, researchers, departments, and the whole institution can be automatically generated) which can't so easily be gained from local harvesting from diverse central repositories. From a mathematical standpoint central and local deposit and harvesting are functionally equivalent if the technology is sufficiently advanced. But this abstracts away the very practical issue that researchers have a known (and in the vast majority of cases singular) institutional affiliation which the research, institution and funder all know about already, whereas in a large number of cases disciplinary affiliations are murky and hard to define. It is entirely possible to set up a national repository instead of local ones with the log-in credentials of the researcher set to include their affiliation. This is very different from subject repositories and can easily be regarded as a set of institutional repositories sharing a back-end service. Discipline boundaries are too fuzzy to be efficient as a mechanism for mandating and monitoring mandate-compliance. THey are much better situated as overlays providing viewpoints on the data sets (whether holding the full-text or just the meta-data at this point is a minor issue, since the problem at present is not incoherence but lack of content). My published papers include references to, and/or publication in journals of computer science, mathematics, education, artificial intelligence, law, governance, history, psychology, sociology and others. What subject
[GOAL] Re: question about co-authors and self archiving
Stephen That used to true a long time ago, but may not be still. Two concepts have developed, at least to me here in Australia. The first is the 'corresponding author'. This is the person that the journal corresponds with, and the journal requires that person to acquire all signatures and assent to the copyright agreement, as well as assent to refereeing changes, galley proofs, etc. The corresponding author is the one the journal regards as primary and legally responsible author. In the case of articles by PhD students, the corresponding author may be them, or may be the supervisor. The second is the 'responsible author'. This is the person responsible for the accuracy of the article, and usually also for complying with the conditions of the grant which funded the research. The responsible author is usually the Chief Investigator listed on the grant application. The university and the research council loads the responsible author with (guess what?) responsibility. This concept transcends inter-institutional research. Having written that, not all research arises from grants. There is still some wriggle room for the 'all authors are equal' view, but it is shrinking. Think also of the 100+ co-authors of some publications. The legal situation would probably be described as that 'all authors must agree since they hold the copyright jointly'. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stephen X. Flynn Sent: Tuesday, 5 February 2013 12:31 PM To: Stevan Harnad Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); sparc-ir Subject: [GOAL] question about co-authors and self archiving If I may resurrect this question about joint authors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that joint authorship is very much like a joint bank account. You, as the joint account owner, has just as much the ability to withdraw money, write checks, initiate wire transfers, etc as the other account owner. Isn't joint authorship very similar? One co-author has the ability to exercise his or her rights to self-archive the work in an IR (provided the journal's policies allow this). Why should one co-author be able to prevent others from self-archiving? Stephen X. Flynn Emerging Technologies Librarian The College of Wooster Wooster, OH (330) 737-1755 On Dec 4, 2012, at 11:31 AM, Stevan Harnad wrote: On 2012-12-04, at 10:44 AM, Elizabeth Kirk elizk...@gmail.com wrote: All, We have a group of faculty very interested in promoting an OA policy for faculty deposit of journal articles. People are very interested in knowing in advance how other institutions with such policies handle cases where one of multiple authors of an article refuses/is not able to allow the posting of an article to an IR. 1. Deposit the article anyway, but set access as Closed Access instead of OA: metadata are OA, article is not. 2. Implement the email-eprint-request Button. Do you . --embargo the deposited article? You can set the Closed Access to elapse after the embargo period, if you wish. . --allow a pass and not ingest the article? Definitely do *not* omit the article altogether. Stevan Harnad . --other possible solutions? Thanks so much for your assistance. Please feel free to respond privately. All the best, Eliz Elizabeth E. Kirk Associate Librarian for Information Resources Dartmouth College Library 6025 Baker Library, Rm. 115 Hanover, NH, USA tel: (603) 646-9929 fax: (603) 646-3702 elizabeth.e.k...@dartmouth.edu -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups SPARC IR group. To post to this group, send email to sparc...@arl.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sparc-ir+unsubscr...@arl.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-ir You may need to log in to view the archive. If this is required, you will need a Google account associated with the email address under which you are subscribed to this group. For more information on creating a Google account see http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=27441 For information on associating an existing Google account with your subscribed email address see http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=enanswer=86635 answer=86635. For information on logging into an ARL sponsored group see https://sites.google.com/a/arl.org/techguides_arl/login. https://sites.google.com/a/arl.org/techguides_arl/login.%C2%A0 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups SPARC IR group. To post to this group, send email to sparc...@arl.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sparc-ir+unsubscr...@arl.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-ir You
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Before this goes too far, let's establish that commercial re-use is possible and is used. Scholars may not be averse to it. I have in mind monitoring organisations, which for a subscription, will survey the literature and provide subscribers with relevant data that they have culled. Think of newspaper cutting services and current awareness services which provide politicians and senior scholars with relevant data that they might have missed. Asking them to click on a download link is poor service, in this context. Another is Medifocus: attention to current info on your medical condition. Yes they don't yet seem to provide the full text, but they might. Moral rights are not affected, of course. None of these services pretends that it is their work. What they have done is to bring it to your attention to read. Then there is the second echelon of re-using parts of the publication, such as images, charts, tables, etc, and the whole field of data mining. If one puts together various studies can one come up with something bigger and new? For example a longitudinal study of tooth decay rates over centuries? Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Tuesday, 29 January 2013 8:45 AM To: Marcin Wojnarski Cc: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price? On 2013-01-28, at 12:29 PM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Commercial use is a broad and vague term. For example, displaying a paper on a website together with advertisements - is this commercial use or not? I think most people hope for add-on services to flourish on top of CC-BY literature, they rather don't expect the papers to be directly re-sold. Question: are you saying that allowing any third party to make use of a scholar's work to advertise their own products and/or to sell their advertising services is one of the reasons people are advocating for CC-BY? If so, I would suggest that such a use is far more problematic than beneficial to scholarship, and I doubt very much that scholars who prefer to publish their work as open access are keen to permit such uses. Even if this were desirable, such a practice is also questionable with CC-BY, as this grants commercial rights but retains the author's moral rights. best, Heather Morrison ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Please distinguish what is and is not relevant to mandating Green OA self-archiving
I think we are now getting into an off-target area: not open access but archiving. It is really unfortunate that open access repositories were ever called archives. Heather is right. In the past print publishers of books and journals just had to print them onto papyrus, vellum, or paper, using a non-ephemeral ink, and rely on dissemination (and libraries) to do the preservation. Preservation in the digital era is a different matter, having to cope with ephemeral media and error-resistant information (the opposite of the Gutenberg era). But this is not central open access stuff, important though it is. Of course, to forestall comment by someone who wants to carp, the lifetime of research outputs does vary. In some disciplines it is of the order of a year or two on average, in others perhaps of centuries, to use the extremes. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Monday, 21 January 2013 10:11 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Please distinguish what is and is not relevant to mandating Green OA self-archiving On 20-Jan-13, at 2:25 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: (excerpt) Some forms of Gold do not require any more payment than what is needed to maintain a repository. In fact, an OA Gold journal is a repository of its own articles. Comment: a gold OA journal serves as a repository, however it is important to understand that any journal, or the open access status of a journal, may be ephemeral in nature. Journals are archived and preserved by libraries, not by journals and publishers. This is important to understand because gold open access without open access archives is highly vulnerable. Journals can simply disappear, or be sold by open access publishers to toll access publishers. For this reason I argue that open access archives are absolutely essential to sustainable open access. best, Heather ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Statement: Australian Open Access Support Group applauds new ARC open access policy
Thanks Jean-Claude Guédon and Falk Reckling for your comments. It is difficult to answer them succinctly, but I will try. 1. There is a substantial difference between books and articles in the current situation. Almost no researcher reads the printed copy of a journal article any more: they access the online version. Journal publishers who continue to print paper journals are largely wasting money, or doing it for archival purposes. On the other hand, until very recently, no-one read a book in any other format than paper. This is beginning to change with Kindle, iPad and other tablets, but the paradigm change is far from complete. 2. Editorial work on journal articles is mimimal (and often counter-productive), while refereeing (selectivity of articles) is a major issue. With books the situation is reversed. Editorial work is often extensive, and acceptance (the parallel for refereeing) is largely in-house and there are fewer proposals. 3. I used ibooks as my example because they offer the best example of where electronic books are going: interactive. The conventional ebook that one can see in novels or .pub format is just a slightly souped-up pdf of text and a few pictures. An ibook is an interactive object, albeit at present in a proprietary format. I could also have cited Wolframs CDF (Computable Document Format). Have you used an ibook or CDF? Tried to write one? I have done both and the experience tells me that this is going to be an influential development. 4. Why do academic presses produce open access books? Because they are subsidized to do so, and their performance indicators are not profit-oriented, but academic prestige. I know that Jean-Claude realizes this, because he says so. The same for some professional societies. Good for them too, but it is not the norm. 5. Printing, stock and distribution is largely wasted effort for journals. My own university library frequently simply trashes unwanted print copies sent to them as not worth the costs of cataloguing or shelving. 6. A book is not just a long article, any more than the Golden Gate Bridge is just a long log across a creek. Scale changes things. Every engineer knows this. So do the publishing industries. Books have much smaller purchasing groups and much greater costs, in general, than a journal house. They also are not serials and cannot rely on continuing business. 7. Yes, I agree that academic presses will reduce costs to produce books. The ANU Press for example publishes online OA, or on-demand print for a fee. Sensible and makes OA books more viable. But academic presses are subsidized. 8. My point in mentioning other forms of research outputs (and some of them are research outputs in the fine arts, others in engineering, and others in various other disciplines) was to point up the absurdity of interpreting all research outputs literally. I apologise to any pure scientists who are bemused by this exchange. If one only publishes in journals or conferences, then the practices of other disciplines may appear strange. You may note that I did not include furniture prototypes, sculptures, etc to try to be succinct. The concept of making a sculpture open access would be an interesting question for a morning tea discussion. I could have made up a much longer list of objects which are research outputs, including databases and datasets, plant patents, etc. I fully expect that the ARC guidelines will spell out what research outputs they specifically intend. I hope that this explanation has helped. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Statement: Australian Open Access Support Group applauds new ARC open access policy
Danny I believe this AOASG statement contains an error. It states that the ARC policy applies to all research outputs of an ARC project, including books. While this can be inferred from the text, it is an extraordinary claim which will be ineffective and cannot have been intended by the ARC. Books do not have less developed mechanisms for open access copyright clearance than journal articles. They have better developed mechanisms for copyright transfer, and greater justification for closed access. There is no simple parallel between scholarly book publishing and scholarly journal publishing. The industries are very different, and convergence is slow in coming though we may be starting on that path. If the ARC policy extends to books, and according to the AOASG statement also to ibooks and ebooks, and to a lesser extent but still importantly book contributions (chapters), then it is easy to predict: 1. Very few books will be published as the outcomes of a research project. Book publishers incur real costs (editorial, printing, stock and distribution), especially research or review books, and require closed access to recover costs over much longer timeframes than articles. They will simply refuse to publish books that are to be made open access, unless heavily subsidized. 2. Very few ibooks will be published as outcomes of a research project. Although the iTunes policy is that free ibooks (ie open access) are accepted, most people wanting to publish a research output as an ibook (.iba format for iPad) will want to recover some of their development cost. This will be less significant in the less interactive .pub format. One has to doubt whether the ARC intends such undesirable consequences, and if it has thought this through. I just mention newspaper articles, video recordings, music scores, film and play scripts, photographs, architectural designs, computer programs, patents, and silicon chip designs, without going into detail. The statement that The AOASG particularly commends the ARC for requiring publications to be made available through institutional repositories is also incorrect, or rather overstated. The ARC policy makes it clear that deposit in a repository is not necessary, if the research output is already available elsewhere on the Internet in an open access form (for example in a subject repository, on a website, in iTunes, in an open access journal, or as an OA article in a hybrid journal). The policy does not mandate open access journals and similar routes (good), but it does not inhibit their natural growth either (also good). It sets institutional repositories as the OA mechanism of ultimate resort, and as a compulsory location for a metadata record and a pointer to an OA full-text. One could improve on the ARC policy, of course, in order to improve global discoverability and shorten the excessive embargo delay. The guidelines that will back up the policy will be especially valuable, as these will be more influential on grant recipients than reading between the lines. Just imagine the effect if the policy had stated: the ARC requires that any article publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be open access and globally discoverable within a six (6) month period from the date of publication. Discoverability of the full-text of the publication through Google Scholar is regarded as proof of meeting this requirement. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Danny Kingsley Sent: Monday, 14 January 2013 7:38 AM To: goal@eprints.org; cai...@googlegroups.com; ao...@mailman.anu.edu.au Subject: [GOAL] Statement: Australian Open Access Support Group applauds new ARC open access policy STATEMENT Australian Open Access Support Group applauds new ARC open access policy The Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) applauds the Australian Research Council (ARC) in their implementation of a new open access policy. The ARC posted their open access policy on their website on Monday 7 January. The ARC Open Access Policy http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/open_access.htm http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/open_access.htm states: the ARC requires that any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve (12) month period from the date of publication. The AOASG particularly commends the ARC for requiring publications to be made available through institutional repositories. This method of making work open access uses the substantial institutional repository network in place across Australian institutions. It also avoids the potentially costly result of a mandate that requires publication in open access journals through the payment of article processing charges. This policy differs from the NHMRC revised policy on the dissemination of research findings http
[GOAL] Re: Searching for OA vs. Providing OA
Sally The situation is much more complex than this. Yep, oversimplifying, but it's natural. Publishers' sites are crawled by Googlebot because (a) robots are allowed in to the public areas of publisher sites, and (b) there are relatively few publishers, well indexed. Google Scholar is a selective service based on Googlebot's results: it chooses what to include (little) and what to leave out (the vast majority). Google Scholar has algorithms that select what from the publisher's site is an article or the metadata thereof, and what is plain publisher guff (like subscription info, guidelines for authors, etc). BTW, Google Scholar does not crawl separately, it uses selectivity on the Googlebot results. Repositories are very unlikely to bar robot entry (through robots.txt), though I would not say categorically that it has never happened. You actually have to extra work to bar robots from a website, and I can't understand why a manager would do so. (Of course password protected data or behind a search barrier is inaccessible to a robot anyway.) However, it is not so clear what is a repository, how many there area or where they are. The number keeps changing. This is problem No 1. The second problem is that Google Scholar seems to apply different rules to repositories than publisher sites. Repositories contain all sorts of things that are not 'articles', such as archival material, unpublished works, conference presentations, etc. One theory is that Google Scholar is happiest if it finds an open-access pdf hanging off a metadata entry in a repository. In other words, if the file is in XML, XHTML, Word, iBook, etc formats, it is not regarded as an article. And what to do if the metadata has several pdfs attached to it (or other formats), which is common with theses? When in doubt, leave it out... Google Scholar is about being ultra-selective on the Internet. The third problem is that Googlebot does not always crawl the entire site. It optimizes its time to best use. One trick it uses is to limit the depth of the link tree to search. Another is not to go too far at any one level. In the case of a publisher site the depth is relatively shallow and each list is short. One finds the list of issues, then each leads to a list of articles, and bingo! Or possibly years - issues - articles. Repositories are not so well organized, necessarily. Unless they are optimized for Googlebot (EPrints is) the robot might well find a year index, leading to 1000s of 'articles' per year. Googlebot gives up well before the end. Next time it may well do the same. Optimal is to have a link to 'most recent deposits' high on the home page (so the robot finds it early), and to provide Googlebot with an easy way to eventually search all of the site. The Google database may build up over time. And finally Problem No 4. How does Google Scholar regard the metadata? It prefers publisher formats. This is referred to in the paper cited. BTW Note that Wouter Gerritsma's comments indicate that Problem No 2 or Problem No 4 dominate over No 3 for his repository. Google knows about the article (Googlebot indexed it) but Google Scholar doesn't. I agree with Stevan Harnad that we need fuller repositories, but disagree that there is any inconsistency in also pressing for improved performance by Google Scholar. The people who deposit papers in repositories, and the programmers in Google are almost completely disjoint groups (Google workers don't publish much - they keep the processes a commercial secret). We can do both at once, and they will have a synergistic effect on each other. Lack of synergy holds back open access. But enough of that. I just wanted to explain what was happening with Google Scholar. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: Saturday, 5 January 2013 11:14 PM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Searching for OA vs. Providing OA It's my understanding that Google (and Google Scholar) find published articles because the publishers enable crawling - whether the content is freely available or not (if I'm oversimplifying, someone will no doubt set me right). Are repository managers unintentionally blocking this? 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 _ On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Gerritsma, Wouter wouter.gerrit...@wur.nl wrote: Google Scholar is a very good fulltext scholarly search engine, no doubt about it. But it doesn't find all the ftxt available on the web, albeit it does a good job. Take e.g. one of my articles http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17014920805021872143 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17014920805021872143hl=enas_sdt =0,5 hl=enas_sdt=0,5 GS found two PDF version's but not the one
[GOAL] The Australian Research Council's New Leader Opens Up
Readers of this list will be interested in the views of the Australian Research Council's CEO. He deserves the full support of this list to rationalize the policies of the two Australian research councils The twelve-month embargo is a bit long, but we can live with that. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia BEGINS The Chronicle of Higher Education The Australian Research Councils New Leader Opens Up October 3, 2012, 2:44 pm By http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/author/jhowardJennifer Howard http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/files/2012/10/Aidan_Byrne.jpg [] Australia has two main agencies that hand out government research money: the http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/National Health and Medical Research Council, or NHMRC, and the http://www.arc.gov.au/default.htmAustralian Research Council, or ARC. Aidan Byrne, a nuclear physicist, became the ARCs chief executive in July. Although hes still finding his feet in the job, he says, Mr. Byrne has made it an early priority to broaden access to government-supported research in Australia. The Chronicle spoke with him by phone about how that effort is shaping up. Q. In July you told the http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/arc-chief-open-to-access/story-e6frgcjx-1226434192258Australian newspaper that you have a particular interest in open access. Why is that? A. Ive been working in academic life for nearly 30 years, and Im a firm believer in disseminating information in the most effective way. I think open access has shown that it can do that very, very effectively. Earlier this year, the National Heath and Medical Research Council changed their policy. They mandated open access so that 12 months after publication, material should go into a repository. That was before I took over the job here at the Australian Research Council. Given my previous life, my preference for disseminating information generated by public money as broadly as possible, it was my view that we should also follow suit there. Q. What steps have you taken toward that goal since you took over the job? A. Ive written now to all [Australian] universities and a number of other stakeholders asking them for advice as to why my policy should not be the same as the National Health and Medical Research Councils. Ive also been going around to institutions in the country and talking to them, and I have not heard a dissenting comment why my policy at this organization should be different. So I think we are heading to a regime where both of the major funding institutions in Australia will have an open-access policy. What that will mean is that from now on, I think, whenever we generate funding rules for part of our program, we will be building in open access as part of that. Were a very small country, and we have an intimate research environment here. For us to have a different policy from the NHMRC doesnt make a lot of sense. Movement has accelerated over the last 12 months. Activity in the United Kingdom and in Europe particularly has meant that things are changing very rapidly. In some ways I see Australia almost as a late adopter here. Q. You mentioned that youve heard no dissent so far. A. No, look, I havent. I have visited nearly 10 institutions already, and not one of them has actually raised any objections to going down this route. Most of them are actually also recipients of funds from the National Health and Medical Research Council, so in some ways theyve been forewarned. In some ways its not a surprise to them. Thats been one of the reasons why we havent seen any major issues arising. Q. Aside from universities, what stakeholders are you asking for input on open access? A. Ive talked to our librarian groups and the national libraries as well. Ive had a couple of conversations with publishers. While they have their views on it, I dont think they see a particular issue with having the two agencies policies be the same. And arguably, for them, its a more difficult regime for them to work in if they have two different regimes working in the country. To some degree theres some overlap between what we fund and what the NHMRC funds. And having a simpler regime, whether you like it or not, is probably easier for the publishers to deal with as well. Q. On the American scene and in the U.K., theres been some very vocal publisher opposition to the idea of government-mandated access. Are you hearing any of that in Australia? A. Certainly we do have a number of academic publishers in this country, but theyre really quite small. Ill probably cause offense to some of them, saying that. But its not on the scale of the U.K. or U.S. So from that point of view, we dont have the same degrees of anxiety, or indeed are likely to go down a similar road to the U.K. We have not mandated a gold open-access policy, for instance. [Gold open access focuses
[GOAL] Of some interest perhaps
You might be interested to have a look at the University of Tasmania's ePrints repository http://eprints.utas.edu.au/. If you browse by year you will find the oldest entry dated at 1150 CE http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/year/1150.html (uploaded in the last few years of course - computers were not exactly common then). Is this a record? Under UNSPECIFIED you can find a picture of the designer of the fairest electoral system in the world (Andrew Inglis Clarke) http://eprints.utas.edu.au/11709/. There is much more, including the entire record of the Royal Society of Tasmania and the history of the Quakers in Tasmania. All historical as mentioned, but part of the open access world. Let's not lose sight of digitizing our heritage while we pursue open access for current research and data. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Publisher statement
You really should read this statement by a publisher. They charge $3000 for hybrid OA (what do they spend it on?) plus possible costs for unwanted colour printing (can you request monochrome in the print version and avoid the charge? I cannot conceive why online colour costs any more), reprints (what possible use are they in this era?) and then finish by writing: CSIRO PUBLISHING journals contain a mixture of Open Access and subscription access content. In our annual review of subscription prices we consider the amount of subscription access content we expect to publish in the following year. Open Access content does not influence subscription price calculations. Really? The Open Access content does not affect the subscription? So if they thought that no researcher expected a free ride, what would they do? Is this a promise of zero subscriptions? The statement is at http://www.publish.csiro.au/nid/247.htm. Arthur Sale ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Publications managed by scholarly communities/institutions
Sally May I suggest we drop the 'fairy godmother' terminology. It seems to be suggesting an impossible dream, as in Cinderella, or alternately is meant to be pejorative. I prefer to simply talk about the sponsored payment model, to be added to the reader-side fee model and the author-side fee model, and combinations of any of these. Sponsorship covers government subvention, professional society support, loss leaders, and even the public donation route. 'Fairy godmother' is a bad description of all of these, as they all expect to get something back, even if it is not monetary. Arthur Sale From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: Thursday, 9 August 2012 8:50 PM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Publications managed byscholarly communities/institutions These are all examples of the 'fairy godmother' payment model 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 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Planning for the Open Access Era
Oh dear Stevan. When I try to help you I get rubbished. You really have to stop using knee-jerk reactions. I fully agree Pay-per-view (PPV) is not ideal, and you know that I know it better than most. I was responding to your very off-target message about 'anarchic' practices (green) vs 'systemic' (gold). Neither is an accurate epithet. We both want open access to articles, not toll access, and we know it will be cheaper. I think that totally deals succinctly with your points (1), (2), 3), (4), (5), (6), and (8). That leaves points (7), (9) and (10). While I agree that Green OA is the potentially faster and cheaper route, it simply ain't going to happen soon. Maybe it might if the OA movement got behind the Titanium route. There simply isn't the wish amongst researchers, funders, universities or the governments to push Green OA. So much for point (7). The Green route leads to another couple of lost decades. As to (9) and (10) I was taking the point of view of a systemic bureaucrat (aka devil's advocate). Green mandates are a lost cause. They have failed to have an impact after too many years. Looking at the global research publication system, it is anti-competitive as an industry, calling out for strong competition. What better than to provide some? Arthur From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 7 August 2012 1:57 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Planning for the Open Access Era Dear Arthur, (1) For years and years I did not refer to toll-access as subscription access but as subscription/license/pay-per-view (S/L/PPV). (Google the AmSci Forum archives in the late 90's and early 2000's and I'll find countless instances.) PPV is neither satisfactory for most users nor is it affordable, scalable or sustainable for most institutions. (If it were, subscriptions would already be cancelled unsustainably. PPV is a parasitic niche market.) (2) S/L/PPV are all forms of toll access, and I don't believe for a second that any of them provides sufficient access. (3) That's why I (and many others) have been struggling for open access (OA). (4) It is true that where we are now [is]paying to read articles (5) But for me it is certainly not true that where we want to be [is] paying to publish articles (6) Where I want to be (and have wanted to be for two decades) is OA: toll-free online access to articles. (7) I also think the fastest, surest, most direct and cheapest way to 100% OA is to mandate Green Gratis OA. (8) I also happen to expect that 100% Green OA will lead to Gold Libre OA (pay-to-publish) and the total cost will be far lower than is was with S/L/PPV. (9) If Finch had done a better analysis, then instead of squandering scarce research money to pay extra for pre-emptive Gold OA, they would have extended and strengthened UK's cost-free Green OA mandates. (10) I'm hoping RCUK may still have the sense and integrity to fix its policy and do just that. Stevan On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au wrote: I completely follow your argument Stevan, and agree with it, as far as it goes. There is however an aspect that you have not covered, and you should include it in your analysis. You write as though reader-side subscriptions were the only alternative to author-side publishing fees as a way of funding publishers. (As ways of funding access one must add green access too, to save you telling me so.) In fact many universities have another option: pay-per-view. The University of Tasmania (mine) has had a system of this sort in place since at least 1998, whereby any researcher can request (online in the intranet) an article from any journal to which the University does not subscribe, and the Document Delivery service will provide an e-copy (usually a pdf) usually within two days. Yes this is not instant, but serious researchers are prepared to wait that long, despite the nay-sayers. The University picks up the cost up to a reasonable limit; if the cost is over the Department has to agree to fund the difference. This seldom happens, and when it does it is for expensive journals in Mining, etc. The interesting thing is that this is an system that you describe as anarchically growing, article-by-article, rather than the journal-by-journal or publisher bundle system. It has enabled the University of Tasmania to cancel many of the subscriptions that it previously held, and still come out in front. Better still, it has enabled the practical closure of the print journal accessioning system (where online versions are available), saving substantial salaries. We know for example that researchers seldom [physically] visit our [physical] libraries these days, they access articles online. If we ever reached the state where we relied on this system totally, then a per-article viewing fee would be easy to compare
[GOAL] Re: Planning for the Open Access Era
I completely follow your argument Stevan, and agree with it, as far as it goes. There is however an aspect that you have not covered, and you should include it in your analysis. You write as though reader-side subscriptions were the only alternative to author-side publishing fees as a way of funding publishers. (As ways of funding access one must add green access too, to save you telling me so.) In fact many universities have another option: pay-per-view. The University of Tasmania (mine) has had a system of this sort in place since at least 1998, whereby any researcher can request (online in the intranet) an article from any journal to which the University does not subscribe, and the Document Delivery service will provide an e-copy (usually a pdf) usually within two days. Yes this is not instant, but serious researchers are prepared to wait that long, despite the nay-sayers. The University picks up the cost up to a reasonable limit; if the cost is over the Department has to agree to fund the difference. This seldom happens, and when it does it is for expensive journals in Mining, etc. The interesting thing is that this is an system that you describe as anarchically growing, article-by-article, rather than the journal-by-journal or publisher bundle system. It has enabled the University of Tasmania to cancel many of the subscriptions that it previously held, and still come out in front. Better still, it has enabled the practical closure of the print journal accessioning system (where online versions are available), saving substantial salaries. We know for example that researchers seldom [physically] visit our [physical] libraries these days, they access articles online. If we ever reached the state where we relied on this system totally, then a per-article viewing fee would be easy to compare with that of a per-article publication fee. Of course we are never likely to go so far. But what it does show up is the key difference in where we are now: paying to read articles, as against where we want to be: paying to publish articles. The real difference is not between bundling and aggregations vs articles, but in this. I could speculate that if Finch et al had done a better analysis, they could have suggested applying the money they want to take away from researchers to University journal presses for start-up costs, on a competitive basis, and conditional on the funded journal being open access. Now that would have created a good argument. It would have created sustainable open access journals, in areas of UK strength, and the funds would have a sunset clause in them, after which the journals should be self-sustaining. One could rely on the universities being economical, because it would not be core business, though prestigious. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] The Australian scene re Finch and OA
, the likely impact of their work on users of research and the further dissemination and production of knowledge. Taking heed of these considerations, NHMRC wants to ensure the widest possible dissemination of the research supported by NHMRC funding, in the most effective manner and at the earliest opportunity. NHMRC therefore requires that any publications arising from an NHMRC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve month period from the date of publication.' NHMRC understands that some researchers may not be able to meet the new requirements initially because of current legal or contractual obligations. The support material being developed by NHMRC will provide further guidance on this and other scenarios. The key sentences are the last three which I have shown in red. Although it is not explicitly stated, the NHMRC clearly expects that deposited applications will not be restricted, but must be open access. The Request-a-Copy button and the Accepted Manuscript (ID/OA) are not mentioned. The rules will however invalidate the ability of authors and publishers to make legal blanket copyright transfers. Analysis The above is all fact, but what follows is my opinion and analysis. 1 Both the ARC and the NHMRC support Green deposit, but they also allow grant funds to be used for author-side Gold fees. 2 The NHMRC strongly mandates the Green Road (irrespective of whether the publication appears in a Gold OA journal or not). All Australian universities have OA repositories. The NHMRC mandate is a major step forward. 3 No-one should have angst about the twelve month deposit period of either research council (as compared to six months), because even if there was some publisher influence, it is geared to the annual HERDC reporting cycle, which requires that every publication produced in the previous calendar year be reported to the Government in Feb/March. In practice at least half the researchers and probably more put their citations into the database as soon as they are published, resulting in a steady stream of uploads, and only a minor flurry of activity at the EOY. I expect this to generalize to VoR upload easily. Uploading of citations is usually done by administrative staff (initiated by data provided by academics), and is subject to Government audit for accuracy of claims. The admin staff harry the academics. 4 There are grounds for concern that the deposit (for both councils) appears to require the Version of Record, and not the Accepted Manuscript (the ID/OA path). 5 Universities will probably feel somewhat aggrieved that they have to respond to the NHMRC mandate and that it only applies to a subset of staff. However, this may be ameliorated since only the Faculty of Health Sciences (or equivalent) is affected (and possibly Psychology), so their work to enforce the NHMRC mandate is limited. The easy solution is of course for the University to interpose a stronger institution-wide mandate, as for example at Macquarie University and the Queensland University of Technology. There is an opportunity here for Australian activists. 6 Gold outlets are supported, but Green is seen as the prime route. In the case of NHMRC, one cannot argue with their policy as there is a Green mandate backing up the possible Gold expenditure. The ARC is the backslider, the outgoing CEO believing that the general public (including industry) are not interested in the research it funds. Not a supportable position. 7 I cannot see Australia as supporting a bizarre notion such as the Finch report appears to be. There is no stomach to use our research funds to support the publishing industry through a transition. We will follow whatever happens... Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: OA and scholarly publishers
Peter  To what extent does âfair-useâ over-ride the publisher wishes? It seems to me that the Australian copyright act is quite clear about using copyright material for criticism, legal purposes, extracting data, etc, but I am not an expert in UK law.  Lawyers could have a good argument too about whether copyright acts say anything about eyeballing whatsoever. Is automatic text speaking (for blind persons) not permitted, or reading aloud by others? Can the speech program not index the material so one can find something one heard earlier?  This whole mess depends on totally obsolete copyright legislation.  Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia  From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Saturday, 12 May 2012 8:47 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: OA and scholarly publishers   On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Richard Poynder ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk wrote: Many thanks to Alicia Wise for starting a new conversation thread.  Letâs recall that Aliciaâs question was, âwhat positive things are established scholarly publishers doing to facilitate the various visions for open access and future scholarly communications that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized?â Alicia Wise already knows my reply - she has had enough email from me. The publishers show withdraw contractual restrictions on content-mining. That's all they need to do. My university has paid Elsevier for subscription to the content in Elsevier journals. I believe I have the right to mine the content. Elsevier has written a contract which forbids me to use this in any way other than reading with human eyeballs - I cannot crawl it, index it, extract content for whatever purpose. I have spent THREE years trying to deal with Elsevier and get a straight answer. Seehttp://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/27/textmining-my-years-negotiating-with-e lsevier/ The most recent discussions ended with Alicia Wise suggesting that she and Cambridge librarians discuss my proposed research and see if they could agree to my carrying it out. I let the list decide whether this is a constructive offer or a delaying tactic. It certainly does not scale if all researchers have to get the permission of their librarians and every publisher before they can mine the content in the literature. And why should a publisher decide what research I may or may not do? All of this is blogged on http://blogs.cam.ac.uk/pmr Yes - I asked 6 toll-access publishers for permission to mine their content before I submitted my opinion to the Hargreaves enquiry. Of the 6 publishers (which we in the process of summarising - this is hard because of the wooliness of the language) the approximate answers were: 1 possibly 4 mumble (e.g. let's discuss it with your librarians) 1 no (good old ACS pulls no punches - I'd rather have a straight no than mumble)  In no other market would vendors be allowed to get away with such awful customer service. A straight question deserves a straight answer, but not in scholarly publishing. Just in case anyone doesn't understand content mining, the technology is straightforward. The only reason it's not done is because Universities are afraid of publishers. I estimate that tens of billions of dollars worth of value is lost through being forbidden to mine the scholarly literature. If Alicia Wise can say yes to me unreservedly, I'll be happy. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Stevan You may think that pressure for biomedical mandates is a special case, but I do not, as I thought I had made clear. Not only are there much bigger public interest groups in other areas, but biomedical research is often much more tentative and confusing than hard science. Sometimes it is plain wrong, or damaging (remember thalidomide? homeopathy?). Really, just repeating the mantra that OA is for researchers first and alone provides a rationale for OA does not change anything. I am happy to agree that all research outputs (even those that are wrong or falsified) are of interest to the researchers in that field. However, I am glad that you are now recognizing that OA for exploiters (or 'appliers' to use your word) is also relevant and not covered by the researcher mantra. This is a step forward. I am happy to concede that there are some fields in which applicability cannot be discerned at the time of writing (or never) such as the search for exoplanets, cosmology, or the Higgs boson. The only exploiters I can think of for these are the popular science journalists, the journal publishers, and science fiction writers and film-makers. [Though on reflection, the techniques may be applicable as second-order benefits.] The reason that I suggest that your points 8 and 9 need rewording is that they are both plain wrong. Let me analyse them: 8. But most peer-reviewed research reports themselves are neither understandable nor of direct interest to the general public as reading matter. This statement is so offensive that it must be replaced. I assert that most if not all peer-reviewed research reports are understandable in some sense to at least some members of the general public. We cannot prove otherwise. Where do we find the research to back up either statement? It may be that you are implicitly making the insertion 'to all the general public', but you cannot sustain this as a statement worth making nor a similar insertion in the researcher equivalent. The other charitable interpretation is that if you can understand the paper in some sense, you are a 'researcher'; if not then you are a 'member of the general public'. I cannot accept that either. I remember some interesting research about a decade ago that the average paper is skimmed for interest by perhaps 100 researchers, read carefully and understood by about 10, and acted on by about two (for which citations are a lower bound). In other words, not all researchers can be bothered to understand all papers (or may not be competent to), even in the same narrow field. 9. Hence, for most research, public access to publicly funded research, is not reason enough for providing OA, nor for mandating that OA be provided. If clause 8 fails, the 'hence' fails. One could instead argue that it is difficult to determine which research outputs are of direct interest to the general public, but if most of them are it is a waste of resources to try to predetermine this, and hence OA should be mandated to provide public access to publicly funded research, of which researchers and exploiters are a special case. There is also the transparency argument: expenditure of public funds entails a responsibility to acquit those funds by showing they are spent wisely, and hence OA should be mandated to provide public access and acquittal of publicly funded research. Peer-reviewing does not alone provide sufficient transparency - for example, it may not expose plagiarism or fraud. Best wishes Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Monday, 30 April 2012 2:51 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access On 2012-04-28, at 9:25 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: 1the Australian NHMRC funder mandate that is proposed was strongly influenced by general public pressure to access biomedical research. It was not as strongly influenced by researcher pressure for access. I suspect the same is true of the NIH mandate I've always agreed that pressure for biomedical OA mandates is a indeed a special case, strengthened by pressure for public access. But that it is not representative of all or most of research, whereas researcher need for researcher access (peer access) is. Researcher pressure does not induce mandates: mandates induce researchers to provide OA. Researchers' (and research's) need for peer access is universal: it's a rationale for mandating OA to *all* research. 2Industrial and commercial developers and exploiters are not researchers. Industrial and commercial developers and exploiters are not the general public but appliers of research. Evidence of their uptake and usage can be as useful a contributor to the research impact of research and researchers as citations can be. But industrial applicability is not representative of all or most of research, whereas
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
No Dana, it wouldn't. How far do you have to travel to a 'public library'? 400 km? Do you have to take a ferry or a plane? Does this make it accessible? Of course the public library might provide an Internet service, but what's the point of that? It would be perfectly possible to set up an Internet service so that all researchers had access to all peer-reviewed research articles, but no-one else. Imagine (as a hypothesis) that Springer owned all journals, and charged all universities a flat fee to access its database. This would satisfy the argument that research articles should be available 'free' and 'instantly' to researchers. However, this is a waste of money, besides being monopolistic. It is easier and cheaper to provide Open Access to all, and almost the whole OA movement is relying on these simple facts. The public access argument means exactly what it says: research should be available to all who want to see it. Researchers and exploiters are just special subsets of the public. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Dana Roth Sent: Monday, 30 April 2012 8:33 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access Would not the widespread provision of 'open access to the published version' at public libraries ... as is currently allowed by the American Physical Society ... solve the problem of 'public access'? Dana L. Roth Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzrlib at library.caltech.edu http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Stevan You may think that pressure for biomedical mandates is a special case, but I do not, as I thought I had made clear. Not only are there much bigger public interest groups in other areas, but biomedical research is often much more tentative and confusing than hard science. Sometimes it is plain wrong, or damaging (remember thalidomide? homeopathy?). Really, just repeating the mantra that OA is for researchers first and alone provides a rationale for OA does not change anything. I am happy to agree that all research outputs (even those that are wrong or falsified) are of interest to the researchers in that field. However, I am glad that you are now recognizing that OA for exploiters (or 'appliers' to use your word) is also relevant and not covered by the researcher mantra. This is a step forward. I am happy to concede that there are some fields in which applicability cannot be discerned at the time of writing (or never) such as the search for exoplanets, cosmology, or the Higgs boson. The only exploiters I can think of for these are the popular science journalists, the journal publishers, and science fiction writers and film-makers. [Though on reflection, the techniques may be applicable as second-order benefits.] The reason that I suggest that your points 8 and 9 need rewording is that they are both plain wrong. Let me analyse them: 8. But most peer-reviewed research reports themselves are neither understandable nor of direct interest to the general public as reading matter. This statement is so offensive that it must be replaced. I assert that most if not all peer-reviewed research reports are understandable in some sense to at least some members of the general public. We cannot prove otherwise. Where do we find the research to back up either statement? It may be that you are implicitly making the insertion 'to all the general public', but you cannot sustain this as a statement worth making nor a similar insertion in the researcher equivalent. The other charitable interpretation is that if you can understand the paper in some sense, you are a 'researcher'; if not then you are a 'member of the general public'. I cannot accept that either. I remember some interesting research about a decade ago that the average paper is skimmed for interest by perhaps 100 researchers, read carefully and understood by about 10, and acted on by about two (for which citations are a lower bound). In other words, not all researchers can be bothered to understand all papers (or may not be competent to), even in the same narrow field. 9. Hence, for most research, public access to publicly funded research, is not reason enough for providing OA, nor for mandating that OA be provided. If clause 8 fails, the 'hence' fails. One could instead argue that it is difficult to determine which research outputs are of direct interest to the general public, but if most of them are it is a waste of resources to try to predetermine this, and hence OA should be mandated to provide public access to publicly funded research, of which researchers and exploiters are a special case. There is also the transparency argument: expenditure of public funds entails a responsibility to acquit those funds by showing they are spent wisely, and hence OA should be mandated to provide public access and acquittal of publicly funded research. Peer-reviewing does not alone provide sufficient transparency - for example, it may not expose plagiarism or fraud. Best wishes Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Monday, 30 April 2012 2:51 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access On 2012-04-28, at 9:25 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: 1the Australian NHMRC funder mandate that is proposed was strongly influenced by general public pressure to access biomedical research. It was not as strongly influenced by researcher pressure for access. I suspect the same is true of the NIH mandate I've always agreed that pressure for biomedical OA mandates is a indeed a special case, strengthened by pressure for public access. But that it is not representative of all or most of research, whereas researcher need for researcher access (peer access) is. Researcher pressure does not induce mandates: mandates induce researchers to provide OA. Researchers' (and research's) need for peer access is universal: it's a rationale for mandating OA to *all* research. 2Industrial and commercial developers and exploiters are not researchers. Industrial and commercial developers and exploiters are not the general public but appliers of research. Evidence of their uptake and usage can be as useful a contributor to the research impact of research and researchers as citations can be. But industrial applicability is not representative of all or most of research, whereas researchers
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
No Dana, it wouldn't. How far do you have to travel to a 'public library'? 400 km? Do you have to take a ferry or a plane? Does this make it accessible? Of course the public library might provide an Internet service, but what's the point of that? It would be perfectly possible to set up an Internet service so that all researchers had access to all peer-reviewed research articles, but no-one else. Imagine (as a hypothesis) that Springer owned all journals, and charged all universities a flat fee to access its database. This would satisfy the argument that research articles should be available 'free' and 'instantly' to researchers. However, this is a waste of money, besides being monopolistic. It is easier and cheaper to provide Open Access to all, and almost the whole OA movement is relying on these simple facts. The public access argument means exactly what it says: research should be available to all who want to see it. Researchers and exploiters are just special subsets of the public. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Dana Roth Sent: Monday, 30 April 2012 8:33 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access Would not the widespread provision of 'open access to the published version' at public libraries ... as is currently allowed by the American Physical Society ... solve the problem of 'public access'? Dana L. Roth Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzr...@library.caltech.edu http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
I did not think that my comments would be as controversial as this. They are plain common sense. Please let me make three points: Â 1Â Â Â It is almost beyond doubt that the Australian NHMRC funder mandate that is proposed was strongly influenced by general public pressure to access biomedical research. It was not as strongly influenced by researcher pressure for access. I suspect the same is true of the NIH mandate and certainly when it was being mandated there were many calls for researchers (regardless of discipline) to support the NIH mandate. A researcher outside his or her area of expertise is acting as a member of the general public, not a relevant researcher. (I will accept OA researchers as relevant, of course.) Â 2Â Â Â Industrial and commercial developers and exploiters are not researchers. They seek to exploit research and yet they often find difficulty in accessing it, especially in small business. This is common in, for example, ICT, general practice of medicine, and agriculture). That's why I lump them in with the general public. Â 3Â Â Â I challenge the group to nominate an area of science or social science in which there is not public interest. I assert that there are none. Even the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs boson (to take the very small and apparently irrelevant) and cosmology (to take the very large and apparently irrelevant) are interesting to some. Maybe the best place to search might be esoteric inorganic chemistry, but even then there are people who want access. I don't think advanced maths cuts the mustard either. Â BROAD SUPPORT Â I cite public interest in climate change, the environment, earth-crossing asteroids, whether Pluto is called a planet or not, the genetics of plants, solar photovoltaic cells, energy, and any of the myriad fields and cross-disciplinary areas that exist. As well as the simple existence of science journalism (often unhealthily focused on Nature and similar peak journals), magazines like New Scientist, and science fiction. I suspect that there is more public interest in economics research and environmental research (including climate) than there is in biomedical research, though the last are often more vocal if they think their lives are at stake. Â But I should really let Darwin have the last say. He knew that his and Wallace's research (arguably the most important ever) was going to be of huge public interest. The public did not contribute much to the follow-up proofs and development (scientists did), but there is surely no doubt that Darwin's thesis benefitted hugely from the public interest? Â REPLACEMENT Having re-read what I had written, I thought I should try to be positive. Letâs ditch Stevanâs Points 8 and 9 and replace them by: Â â8. All peer-reviewed research outputs are of direct interest to differing subsets of the general public. Some have small subsets; others large. Â 9. Hence, for all research, public access to publicly funded research is good reason for providing OA, or for mandating that OA be provided, while noting that this argument is more persuasive to managers and politicians than to researchers who rely on peer assessment for financial rewards.â Â For reference, the original was: Â â8. But most peer-reviewed research reports themselves are neither understandable nor of direct interest to the general public as reading matter. Â 9. Hence, for most research, public access to publicly funded research, is not reason enough for providing OA, nor for mandating that OA be provided.â Â Â Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
Stevan I disagree with you in one regard. I agree that researchers are a main target but the general public cannot and should not be omitted. The place you go wrong is in your clauses 8 and 9. They are false, though perhaps a misguided intent is a better description. Almost all research papers are of interest to a subset of the general public (different for each paper, as for researchers). Not all researchers are capable of understanding all research. I am not. Not all of the general public are capable of understanding all research. But some (too many to ignore) are perfectly capable of understanding research articles and well capable of taking action on the content. As one of my hobbies I engage in Plant Tissue Culture. Hardly a week will go by than I get a plaintive post on a listserv: can someone please give me a copy of 'xxx'. Substitute any title you like in the field. They are nearly always satisfied, by an illegal copy (I often see a Thanks). Most senders are too aware of the law to tell the list who they are. In this field (all plant science) at least, the general public has a strong interest, even if not all of the public do. Neither do all researchers want the same articles either. I am quite sure that this is true of other fields. I cite one of my most downloaded papers, which on the topic of computing the Pythagorean triads (eg [3,4.5 | 5,12,13 | 20,21,29 | 9,40,41 | ...). BTW there are an infinite number so the computation has to be bounded. Is that esoteric enough for you? Yet it is still my most downloaded article! I surmise that it is school-teachers and students who download it, but I do not sniff at them. Great! The work was worth writing up if I influence the kids. A subset of the public are interested in environment, astronomy, geology, you name it. I therefore state that in my opinion your reasons 8 and 9 are spurious and ought to never see the light of day again. I will fully agree that researchers, especially in third-world countries are an important target, but I suspect they are outnumbered by members of the general public in first- and second-world countries, who want open access and have internet access. I add that your conclusion is hampering OA in Australia. The head of ARC simply states that members of the general public can't understand research other than medical (as if that was easy either) and that closes the OA door. We should not allow unaware people such simple outs. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Saturday, 28 April 2012 8:48 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum Subject: [GOAL] Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access The claim is often made that researchers (peers) have as much access to peer-reviewed research publications as they need -- that if there is any need for further access at all, it is not the peers who need it, but the general public. 1. Functionally, it doesn't matter whether open access (OA) is provided for peers or for public, because OA means that everyone gets access. 2. Strategically, however, it does matter, because currently OA is *not* being provided in anywhere near sufficient numbers spontaneously by researchers (peers). 3. This means that policies (mandates) from peers' institutions and funders are needed to induce peers to provide OA to their publications. 4. This means that credible and valid reasons must be found for peers' institutions and funders to mandate providing.OA. 5. For some fields of research -- especially health-relevant research -- public access is a strong reason for public funders to mandate providing public access. 6. But that still leaves all the rest of research, in all disciplines, funded and unfunded. 7. Most research is technical, intended to be used and applied by peer researchers in building further research and applications -- to the benefit of the general public. 8. But most peer-reviewed research reports themselves are neither understandable nor of direct interest to the general public as reading matter. 9. Hence, for most research, public access to publicly funded research, is not reason enough for providing OA, nor for mandating that OA be provided. 10. The evidence that the primary intended users of peer-reviewed research -- researchers -- do not have anywhere near enough access is two-fold: 11. For many years, the ARL published statistics on the journal subscription/license access of US research universities: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats 12. The fraction of journals that any university can afford to access via subscriptions.licenses has since become smaller, despite the Big Deals: 13. The latest evidence comes from the university that can afford the largest fraction of journals: Harvard University http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982tabgroupid
[GOAL] Re: Libre open access, copyright, patent law, and other intellectual property matters
Yes Sally, that is the rationale that I would use were I in that situation. It is analogous to a newspaper cutting service, or to writing a commissioned report which cites freely available articles as well as ones behind a toll barrier. The user is paying for my work in compilation. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: Monday, 26 March 2012 7:17 AM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: Libre open access, copyright, patent law, and other intellectual property matters Playing devil's advocate: aren't people (arguably) paying for the service provided in gathering together the articles in which they might be interested in an easily accessible/searchable form? Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk _ From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Couture Marc Sent: 25 March 2012 17:29 To: goal at eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Libre open access, copyright, patent law, and other intellectual property matters [Apologies for cross-posting] On March 23, 2012, Klaus Graf wrote: It's illegal to hide CC-BY contributions behind a pawywall. quoting the following excerpt of the legal code: You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License Well, without delving too much into legal intricacies, let's just say that even if it may seem so at first glance, this doesn't mean that giving access to the Work (or to a derivative work based upon the work) through a paywall is forbidden. If it were, then what would be the purpose of the licenses CC-BY-NC-ND (for the Work) and CC-BY-NC (for derivative works)? Instead, the excerpt above may be interpreted, without disrupting the whole CC logic, as meaning: If You give access to a copy of the Work (behind a paywall or not), You can't apply to it any DRM technology that would forbid the recipient to reproduce, etc. (all the rights included in the license, see part 3 of legal code) the Work. I agree that putting a CC-BY Work behind a paywall is almost certainly dishonest, if not fraudulent, because it makes sense only if you somehow hide the fact that the work is freely available elsewhere. Things are different for a derivative work, which may offer enough added value to justify a fee. And such a work is not bound by the Work's license conditions (unless SA is added). It's here that the NC option plays its intended role: an author decides if others can make money (by adding a paywall, say) or not from derivative works based upon his or her work. Marc Couture -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120326/a6420143/attachment.html
[GOAL] Strategies for OA
then. Yet today we cannot conceive of operating without our cell phone or smart phone, nor doing without texting. Pure volunteerism simply overwhelmed the big computing view. In the case of Mendeley, which I use as an example though not a perfect one, when I looked it up today, it had 161 million papers from 1.7 million researchers from 35,000 institutions. Of course some of the papers were duplicates, I add. Some of the institutions are probably different forms of the name. Nevertheless, making allowances, this is indicative of what volunteerism can achieve. SUMMARY I therefore assert that the OA movement as a whole should not put all its eggs in one basket. It is almost certain to choose wrongly, especially if it chooses a decade-old option. We should pursue all the options, as we do not know, nor have the faintest idea, which strategy is going to be most important, or if all together will create the climate of change that is characteristic of a scholarly revolution at its tipping point. That is not to say that one person may not choose to devote themselves to one path or to the promotion of one path. That is their free right. What is not acceptable is to try to constrain other people choosing other paths, or promoting all of them. Personally, I have given up on promoting mandatory policies, because (1)All Australian universities now have repositories (2012). (2)Only one has an effective mandatory policy, and it has had it for a long time. (3)Despite continued and determined efforts, no others have shown any sign of changing. (4)The Australian research funders have only a policy of watchful waiting. Yet my own university's volunteerism repository http://eprints.utas.edu.au/ is one of only three Australian university repositories in the top 100 of the 2012 Webometrics global survey (85th in http://repositories.webometrics.info/toprep_inst.asp). I continue to deposit stuff in it; if you want to read the essays that lead me to this position, they are available at http://eprints.utas.edu.au/11441/. I add that mandatory policies have worked in Australia for PhD theses. Nearly all these are OA or subject to short embargoes for commercial or graduate reasons. I support OA journals by choosing to publish in them, and I am trying to see what might be done to estimate and maximize the impact of social networking on OA. Am I irresponsible? I don't think so. I continue to say: OA is a scholarly revolution, and just like Galileo, the atomic theory, genetics and plate tectonics, we ignore the facts of scientific/scholarly revolutions at our own risk. Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120218/b6b10a99/attachment-0001.html
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
Andrew Sorry for the mistake about your name and thank you for the tolerance. I think that you have a rosy idea of what private enterprise researchers actually do. In many cases their attention span is under a second (well say five seconds). They have real work to do. But please DO NOT suggest that I think the AM is not any good. It is. But to suggest that any of this is OK is ideal is exaggeration, and that is what I was responding to in Stevan's post. You should also realize that private enterprise researchers (such as a fish farmer) does not have the easy un-approved access to funds that a university person has, so they don't go further. (I add that I am an honorary 'university person' so I admit to bias.) Though I have industry tacts and experience). Ion point 2, I agree, mostly. In practice the mandate 'policy' is almost meaningless. In some cases it means something but is ignored. I do know you are in complete agreement with Stevan, but he uses shorthand because of the email flood, which most do not understand. Where we disagree is that mandates are THE answer. After years of toiling along this path I have to disagree. Mandates are never going to work, just by themselves. That is why publishers are so complacent. The answer is more complex, and proponents of OA should be more perspicuous. What I most fear is that this mandate policy will cost OA another one or perhaps two decades. Arthur -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Friday, 17 February 2012 12:16 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record Anthony Andrew, actually. But, absolutely no offense taken :-). Point 1 - absolutely true. Only a small minority of downloads lead to citations. Have a look at the download data of eprints.utas.edu.au. However I cannot resist writing that citations are not the same as impact. Only in academic circles are citations highly regarded and that is useful but not totally relevant. In most places what one is looking for is impact. For example if I write an article on improving fish farming, I want the fish farmers to take it up. If they only get the AM, well yes that is much better than nothing (as Stevan says) and they might contact me. However, their directors will want to know (for legal reasons) that their recommendations are firmly-based, and that means access to the VoR, which fish farmers may not have. Hence researcher attitudes to the VoR. While I couched my point in terms of academic work and referencing, I think we're actually talking about the same thing in different contexts. In your example of the fish farm, I think their usage of results in practice shows the same patterns as I gave for academics. They would still, I suspect look at many more articles at some level, gradually drilling down into the ones of most interest/relevance. Only at the very final stage where they wished to make a proposal for adoption of a novel element in their practices drawn from the peer reviewed literature would they need access to the VoR, just as a working scientist or scholar only needs access to the VoR at the point of citation, or other usage (such as replicating the experiment). The benefits of the AM are still enormous in that potential recipients of the research only need, if they feel it necessary, to pay the toll access for the VoR on the small percentage of the articles that get through their filters for relevance Point 2 - sorry no. The observation is anecdotal. Largely based on my university and Australian universities, but supported by website, blog and Mendeley evidence. I believe it is why some mandates are not worth their disk space (or the paper they may be written on) - they are ignored by real live researchers. The OA movement needs to engage with researchers and convince them that the mandate is worth complying with, because they do not believe it. You may be interested to know that ALL Australian universities have repositories, but only those of the University of Queensland, the Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Tasmania (mine) are in the top 100 of the Webometrics survey? Why? Probably because most of the 'mandates' are ineffective, except in gathering citations and restricted documents. The first two universities have strong mandates. The OA world is bigger than 'mandates at all costs'. It needs to recognise the reality of revolutions. They disrupt normal practice (in this case of science and scholarly dissemination). Here I think you, I, Stevan and many others (Bernard, Alma etc.) are in agreement in practice but are interpreting words slightly differently is all. When I talk of mandates (and I know I'm in complete agreement with Stevan on this) I do not mean just a published policy document, however well worded. The
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
Anthony Point 1 - absolutely true. Only a small minority of downloads lead to citations. Have a look at the download data of eprints.utas.edu.au. However I cannot resist writing that citations are not the same as impact. Only in academic circles are citations highly regarded and that is useful but not totally relevant. In most places what one is looking for is impact. For example if I write an article on improving fish farming, I want the fish farmers to take it up. If they only get the AM, well yes that is much better than nothing (as Stevan says) and they might contact me. However, their directors will want to know (for legal reasons) that their recommendations are firmly-based, and that means access to the VoR, which fish farmers may not have. Hence researcher attitudes to the VoR. Point 2 - sorry no. The observation is anecdotal. Largely based on my university and Australian universities, but supported by website, blog and Mendeley evidence. I believe it is why some mandates are not worth their disk space (or the paper they may be written on) - they are ignored by real live researchers. The OA movement needs to engage with researchers and convince them that the mandate is worth complying with, because they do not believe it. You may be interested to know that ALL Australian universities have repositories, but only those of the University of Queensland, the Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Tasmania (mine) are in the top 100 of the Webometrics survey? Why? Probably because most of the 'mandates' are ineffective, except in gathering citations and restricted documents. The first two universities have strong mandates. The OA world is bigger than 'mandates at all costs'. It needs to recognise the reality of revolutions. They disrupt normal practice (in this case of science and scholarly dissemination). Best wishes Arthur -Original Message- From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Wednesday, 15 February 2012 6:47 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record In response to Stevan Harnad, Arthur Sale wrote: When we turn to the researcher, the situation changes significantly, if slightly. Researchers regard the VoR as the canonic version of their article, almost exclusively (I exempt you and me and a small set of similar-minded people). As far as they are concerned, all earlier versions are suspect and not to be displayed once they have served their purpose. They also believe they wnthe VoR. This is not an cademic ideal but a practical reality. The VoR is THE CANONIC VERSION. It is one reason why many researchers fail to post anything on an OA repository, because they do not understand what their rights are and they are reluctant to post something they conceive of as flawed. There's an assumption in many of the posts on this topic that all articles accessed will be cited. My experience is that I identify many articles from their abstract (usually available for free), a forward and backwards reference search (an article is cited by another I've read or cites another one I've read), from the list of publications of an author whose other works I've read and from a number of other sources. If that article is available to me in the VoR or as an AM then I can first skim the introduction/conclusions and if it seems of further interest read the full article, or selected elements of it. After this proper reading of all or some of either the VoR or the AM then at some point I MAY wish to reference the article or quote from it. Then and only then is the VoR actually needed at all, ad actually I (as you note below) rely on the open access AM version if I don't have access already to the VoR (of course any article I don't have access to doesn't get read and therefore not cited - in particular I almost never pay the ridiculous per-article costs requested by publishers - one article costing the same as 50-100% of full books? That just demonstrates exactly how ridiculous are the subscription rates on which the per-article charges are sert pro-rata). If I really felt I needed the VoR for the articles I want to cite then I could pay the per article charge (I don't, but others may be more hesitant). In my experience, and this is just personal anecdote, I identify perhaps 50-100 times as many articles as of potential interest as I actually cite. For someone in a less interdisciplinary field perhaps their numbers might be lower, but then again they may also already have subscription access to the journals they feel they need - the narrower one's research focus, and the large one's group of researchers with the same interest, the more likely one is to have access to the necessary literature. However, I would suspect that most researchers do not cite every article they ever read
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
Anthony Point 1 - absolutely true. Only a small minority of downloads lead to citations. Have a look at the download data of eprints.utas.edu.au. However I cannot resist writing that citations are not the same as impact. Only in academic circles are citations highly regarded and that is useful but not totally relevant. In most places what one is looking for is impact. For example if I write an article on improving fish farming, I want the fish farmers to take it up. If they only get the AM, well yes that is much better than nothing (as Stevan says) and they might contact me. However, their directors will want to know (for legal reasons) that their recommendations are firmly-based, and that means access to the VoR, which fish farmers may not have. Hence researcher attitudes to the VoR. Point 2 - sorry no. The observation is anecdotal. Largely based on my university and Australian universities, but supported by website, blog and Mendeley evidence. I believe it is why some mandates are not worth their disk space (or the paper they may be written on) - they are ignored by real live researchers. The OA movement needs to engage with researchers and convince them that the mandate is worth complying with, because they do not believe it. You may be interested to know that ALL Australian universities have repositories, but only those of the University of Queensland, the Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Tasmania (mine) are in the top 100 of the Webometrics survey? Why? Probably because most of the 'mandates' are ineffective, except in gathering citations and restricted documents. The first two universities have strong mandates. The OA world is bigger than 'mandates at all costs'. It needs to recognise the reality of revolutions. They disrupt normal practice (in this case of science and scholarly dissemination). Best wishes Arthur -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Wednesday, 15 February 2012 6:47 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record In response to Stevan Harnad, Arthur Sale wrote: When we turn to the researcher, the situation changes significantly, if slightly. Researchers regard the VoR as the canonic version of their article, almost exclusively (I exempt you and me and a small set of similar-minded people). As far as they are concerned, all earlier versions are suspect and not to be displayed once they have served their purpose. They also believe they wnthe VoR. This is not an cademic ideal but a practical reality. The VoR is THE CANONIC VERSION. It is one reason why many researchers fail to post anything on an OA repository, because they do not understand what their rights are and they are reluctant to post something they conceive of as flawed. There's an assumption in many of the posts on this topic that all articles accessed will be cited. My experience is that I identify many articles from their abstract (usually available for free), a forward and backwards reference search (an article is cited by another I've read or cites another one I've read), from the list of publications of an author whose other works I've read and from a number of other sources. If that article is available to me in the VoR or as an AM then I can first skim the introduction/conclusions and if it seems of further interest read the full article, or selected elements of it. After this proper reading of all or some of either the VoR or the AM then at some point I MAY wish to reference the article or quote from it. Then and only then is the VoR actually needed at all, ad actually I (as you note below) rely on the open access AM version if I don't have access already to the VoR (of course any article I don't have access to doesn't get read and therefore not cited - in particular I almost never pay the ridiculous per-article costs requested by publishers - one article costing the same as 50-100% of full books? That just demonstrates exactly how ridiculous are the subscription rates on which the per-article charges are sert pro-rata). If I really felt I needed the VoR for the articles I want to cite then I could pay the per article charge (I don't, but others may be more hesitant). In my experience, and this is just personal anecdote, I identify perhaps 50-100 times as many articles as of potential interest as I actually cite. For someone in a less interdisciplinary field perhaps their numbers might be lower, but then again they may also already have subscription access to the journals they feel they need - the narrower one's research focus, and the large one's group of researchers with the same interest, the more likely one is to have access to the necessary literature. However, I would suspect that most researchers do not cite every article they ever read. For any
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
Stevan There is no need to exaggerate. Clearly from the point of view of a reader, the Accepted Manuscript (NISO terminology) is better than no article at all. Equally clearly, the Version of Record (again NISO terminology) is better still. From the point of view of providing access then, then the preferences for mandatory deposits are (1) the AM as soon as sent off to publisher, (2) followed by the VoR at publication time if the author did not an agreement giving up rights in it. It is worth noting that in most jurisdictions, publishers have no automatic rights in a VoR any different from the AM. They depend on the copyright transfer agreement to control the VoR. When we turn to the researcher, the situation changes significantly, if slightly. Researchers regard the VoR as the canonic version of their article, almost exclusively (I exempt you and me and a small set of similar-minded people). As far as they are concerned, all earlier versions are suspect and not to be displayed once they have served their purpose. They also believe they 'own' the VoR. This is not an 'academic ideal', but a practical reality. The VoR is THE CANONIC VERSION. It is one reason why many researchers fail to post anything on an OA repository, because they do not understand what their rights are and they are reluctant to post something they conceive of as flawed. Interestingly though, I believe there are a growing number of researchers who totally ignore any agreement they sign with publishers, and post their VoR regardless, because it is 'theirs'. It is this practice (in the form of providing electronic reprints) that publishers find difficult to ignore, and possibly why the copyright transfer agreements are strengthened. It is possibly why authors are so complacent about six-month embargos, waiting six months to be able to have their VoR OA is better (they think) than immediate OA for the AM. It may also be why researchers who do no OA on their own are happy to sign petitions asking for the VoR to be freed of imagined constraints. Again, I am not talking academic ideals, but real practical behaviour. This suggests a new form of hybrid practice, where instead of providing OA on the publisher website for a fee, the publisher grants the author the right to make the (publisher-supplied) VoR OA. The costs to the publisher of doing this are almost negligible. The VoR has to be produced anyway; the author has to be given a copy; there may be a small legal and administrative fee. Publishers may argue that such a right involves foregone income, but given the delays in researchers posting their VoR, this is rather spurious. There would seem to be no reason why publishers should not sell such a right for more than say US$100. I write this because I believe that OA is not going to be achieved just by sole emphasis on mandates, but on recognising the realities and complexities of real people behaviour. OA is a scholarly revolution in process, and like all revolution, it is the people involved that matter. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 14 February 2012 5:36 PM To: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum Cc: Global Open Access List Subject: [GOAL] Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record Straightforward question: Since the reason we are discussing authors' refereed, accepted final drafts versus publisher's copy-edited versions of record here is not to compare their relative merits but to determine what Open Access mandates should mandate, do those who point out (correctly) the (possible) shortcomings of the author's draft mean to imply that it is better that would-be users who are denied access to the publisher's version because their institutions cannot afford a subscription should be denied access to the author's version as well, because of the (possible) shortcomings of the author's draft? Because it is as simple as that; all the rest has nothing to do with the practical reality of Open Access (OA) but with scholarly ideals. If we are to reach 100% OA in this decade instead of losing another decade dithering, bickering and digressions, then research funders and research institutions need to mandate author self-archiving. The version with the least publisher restrictions on it is the author's final draft. Over 60% of journals, including most of the top journals, endorse immediate OA self-archiviong of the author's final draft, but not the publisher's version of record. (The rest don't endorse any form of immediate OA.) Are we, in turn, going to endorse this mandate (which -- so far adopted by only 200 institutions -- needs all the help it can get) or are we going to continue debating the relative merits of that versus which? Stevan Harnad -- next part -- An HTML attachment
[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record
Stevan  There is no need to exaggerate.  Clearly from the point of view of a reader, the Accepted Manuscript (NISO terminology) is better than no article at all. Equally clearly, the Version of Record (again NISO terminology) is better still. From the point of view of providing access then, then the preferences for mandatory deposits are (1) the AM as soon as sent off to publisher, (2) followed by the VoR at publication time if the author did not an agreement giving up rights in it. It is worth noting that in most jurisdictions, publishers have no automatic rights in a VoR any different from the AM. They depend on the copyright transfer agreement to control the VoR.  When we turn to the researcher, the situation changes significantly, if slightly. Researchers regard the VoR as the canonic version of their article, almost exclusively (I exempt you and me and a small set of similar-minded people). As far as they are concerned, all earlier versions are suspect and not to be displayed once they have served their purpose. They also believe they âownâ the VoR. This is not an âacademic idealâ, but a practical reality. The VoR is THE CANONIC VERSION. It is one reason why many researchers fail to post anything on an OA repository, because they do not understand what their rights are and they are reluctant to post something they conceive of as flawed.  Interestingly though, I believe there are a growing number of researchers who totally ignore any agreement they sign with publishers, and post their VoR regardless, because it is âtheirsâ. It is this practice (in the form of providing electronic reprints) that publishers find difficult to ignore, and possibly why the copyright transfer agreements are strengthened. It is possibly why authors are so complacent about six-month embargos, waiting six months to be able to have their VoR OA is better (they think) than immediate OA for the AM. It may also be why researchers who do no OA on their own are happy to sign petitions asking for the VoR to be freed of imagined constraints. Again, I am not talking academic ideals, but real practical behaviour.  This suggests a new form of hybrid practice, where instead of providing OA on the publisher website for a fee, the publisher grants the author the right to make the (publisher-supplied) VoR OA. The costs to the publisher of doing this are almost negligible. The VoR has to be produced anyway; the author has to be given a copy; there may be a small legal and administrative fee. Publishers may argue that such a right involves foregone income, but given the delays in researchers posting their VoR, this is rather spurious. There would seem to be no reason why publishers should not sell such a right for more than say US$100.  I write this because I believe that OA is not going to be achieved just by sole emphasis on mandates, but on recognising the realities and complexities of real people behaviour. OA is a scholarly revolution in process, and like all revolution, it is the people involved that matter.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania  -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 14 February 2012 5:36 PM To: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum Cc: Global Open Access List Subject: [GOAL] Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record  Straightforward question:  Since the reason we are discussing authors' refereed, accepted final drafts versus publisher's copy-edited versions of record here is not to compare their relative merits but to determine what Open Access mandates should mandate, do those who point out (correctly) the (possible) shortcomings of the author's draft mean to imply that it is better that would-be users who are denied access to the publisher's version because their institutions cannot afford a subscription should be denied access to the author's version as well, because of the (possible) shortcomings of the author's draft?  Because it is as simple as that; all the rest has nothing to do with the practical reality of Open Access (OA) but with scholarly ideals.  If we are to reach 100% OA in this decade instead of losing another decade dithering, bickering and digressions, then research funders and research institutions need to mandate author self-archiving. The version with the least publisher restrictions on it is the author's final draft. Over 60% of journals, including most of the top journals, endorse immediate OA self-archiviong of the author's final draft, but not the publisher's version of record. (The rest don't endorse any form of immediate OA.)  Are we, in turn, going to endorse this mandate (which -- so far adopted by only 200 institutions -- needs all the help it can get) or are we going to continue debating the relative merits of that versus which?  Stevan Harnad [ Part 2: Attached Text
[GOAL] Re: Research Works Act AAP Members
Stevan This approach does not work. Please see interspersed. I think we need more sophisticated and nuanced comments. Best wishes Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 2:50 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Research Works Act AAP Members Sandy Thatcher wrote onLibLicense-L Discussion Forum: a better approach... would be to require any government agency that funds research to require... a final report... to be posted immediately upon acceptance... openly accessible to all The primary intended users of refereed research articles are researchers; A final report is not what they need, and it's not what OA is about: the refereed final draft is. [Arthur] Who knows what you are going on about unless they saw the onLibLicense-L post? Not me. Your quoted pieces from Sandy Thatcher seem totally reasonable. The agency should require in the final report acquitting the grant an accounting of when and where the author(s) made their research OA. Why not? It is a sensible idea. The agency can see whether their requirements actually worked and take action (like reducing grants to that institution) if it didn't. This is just plain ordinary mandatory sense. Taking follow-up action is necessary, otherwise we are in a situation like mandating that everyone should wash their hands after having been to the toilet. What is the compliance rate? I trust it is good in hospitals, but elsewhere? How was this achieved? Not by logic! this approach is preferable because, unlike the current NIH policy, (1) it would make the research results immediately available (not after a 12-month delay... What's needed immediately is the refereed research. What would be preferable would be no 12-month delay... [Arthur] I could say exactly the same as above. If you are going to comment on someone else's post, please be clear instead of obfuscatory. The quote suggests that Sandy Thatcher made a point, but we aren't told what it was. (2) it would make the results available in the exact form in which they were written up and not in the Green OA version A final report is not the exact form in which results were written up: the author's final, refereed draft (Green OA) is. [Arthur] Sorry, you simply ignore reality while being logically and irrelevantly correct. Authors do not treat their final draft as the expression of the research - they reserve this status for the Version of Record (published form). The Accepted Manuscript is a second-best. And the AM is not Green OA if I understood you right - Green OA is defined as author-OA as opposed to publisher-OA (Gold or hybrid) citation of a final report is a preferable form of scholarship than citation of a preliminary version of an article, which may differ in significant respects from the archival version. What researchers use and cite is the refereed article. [Arthur] Confusing, but you are confusing three things here or obfuscating with terminology. What a researcher/author cites is the Version of Record. What an researcher/author tends to disseminate and use in teaching and in discussion with colleagues is the Version of Record. What a viewer/reader/researcher (particularly in the third world) wants is anything. The VoR is best, but the AM is nearly as good. An earlier draft is useful too. I quite agree with your reaction to the assertion that the archival version (VoR) of an article might be significantly different from the AM. This is so rare as to merit controversy when it occurs and a disagreement with the author(s) (apart from rewriting of non-English speakers' drafts). Publishers add little value between the AM to get to the VoR. I am not sure why people are claiming that publishers like Elsevier, by supporting the Research Works Act, are opposed to the dissemination of knowledge. Many AAP-member publishers, including Elsevier (and Penn State Press), permit authors of articles in the journals they publish to post Green OA versions on their institutional or personal web sites. And RWA would prevent their funders from requiring them to do it. [Arthur] Totally agree. And that would cripple Green OA MANDATES. This Act is targeted at MANDATES. Stevan Harnad [Arthur] Arthur Sale Tasmania. Australia ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Research Works Act AAP Members
Stevan This approach does not work. Please see interspersed. I think we need more sophisticated and nuanced comments. Best wishes Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 2:50 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Research Works Act AAP Members Sandy Thatcher wrote onLibLicense-L Discussion Forum: a better approach... would be to require any government agency that funds research to require... a final report... to be posted immediately upon acceptance... openly accessible to all The primary intended users of refereed research articles are researchers; A final report is not what they need, and it's not what OA is about: the refereed final draft is. [Arthur] Who knows what you are going on about unless they saw the onLibLicense-L post? Not me. Your quoted pieces from Sandy Thatcher seem totally reasonable. The agency should require in the final report acquitting the grant an accounting of when and where the author(s) made their research OA. Why not? It is a sensible idea. The agency can see whether their requirements actually worked and take action (like reducing grants to that institution) if it didn't. This is just plain ordinary mandatory sense. Taking follow-up action is necessary, otherwise we are in a situation like mandating that everyone should wash their hands after having been to the toilet. What is the compliance rate? I trust it is good in hospitals, but elsewhere? How was this achieved? Not by logic! this approach is preferable because, unlike the current NIH policy, (1) it would make the research results immediately available (not after a 12-month delay... What's needed immediately is the refereed research. What would be preferable would be no 12-month delay... [Arthur] I could say exactly the same as above. If you are going to comment on someone else's post, please be clear instead of obfuscatory. The quote suggests that Sandy Thatcher made a point, but we aren't told what it was. (2) it would make the results available in the exact form in which they were written up and not in the Green OA version A final report is not the exact form in which results were written up: the author's final, refereed draft (Green OA) is. [Arthur] Sorry, you simply ignore reality while being logically and irrelevantly correct. Authors do not treat their final draft as the expression of the research - they reserve this status for the Version of Record (published form). The Accepted Manuscript is a second-best. And the AM is not Green OA if I understood you right - Green OA is defined as author-OA as opposed to publisher-OA (Gold or hybrid) citation of a final report is a preferable form of scholarship than citation of a preliminary version of an article, which may differ in significant respects from the archival version. What researchers use and cite is the refereed article. [Arthur] Confusing, but you are confusing three things here or obfuscating with terminology. What a researcher/author cites is the Version of Record. What an researcher/author tends to disseminate and use in teaching and in discussion with colleagues is the Version of Record. What a viewer/reader/researcher (particularly in the third world) wants is anything. The VoR is best, but the AM is nearly as good. An earlier draft is useful too. I quite agree with your reaction to the assertion that the archival version (VoR) of an article might be significantly different from the AM. This is so rare as to merit controversy when it occurs and a disagreement with the author(s) (apart from rewriting of non-English speakers' drafts). Publishers add little value between the AM to get to the VoR. I am not sure why people are claiming that publishers like Elsevier, by supporting the Research Works Act, are opposed to the dissemination of knowledge. Many AAP-member publishers, including Elsevier (and Penn State Press), permit authors of articles in the journals they publish to post Green OA versions on their institutional or personal web sites. And RWA would prevent their funders from requiring them to do it. [Arthur] Totally agree. And that would cripple Green OA MANDATES. This Act is targeted at MANDATES. Stevan Harnad [Arthur] Arthur Sale Tasmania. Australia ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Research Works Act, HR3699
ary_work in a non-dramatic form a version of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work (whether in its original language or in a different language) in a dramatic form; (b) in relation to a literary work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#liter ary_work in a dramatic form a version of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work (whether in its original language or in a different language) in a non - dramatic form; (ba) in relation to a literary work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#liter ary_work being a computer program http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s47ab.html#comp uter_program --a version of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work (whether or not in the language, code or notation in which the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work was originally expressed) not being a reproduction of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work ; (c) in relation to a literary work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#liter ary_work (whether in a non - dramatic form or in a dramatic form): (i) a translation of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work ; or (ii)a version of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work in which a story or action http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s135al.html#act ion is conveyed solely or principally by means of pictures; and (d) in relation to a musical work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#music al_work --an arrangement or transcription of the work http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s189.html#work . None of this describes copy-editing! Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120113/26dcc470/attachment-0001.html
[GOAL] Research Works Act, HR3699
in relation to a literary work in a non-dramatic form a version of the work (whether in its original language or in a different language) in a dramatic form; (b)  in relation to a literary work in a dramatic form a version of the work (whether in its original language or in a different language) in a non - dramatic form; (ba) in relation to a literary work being a computer program--a version of the work (whether or not in the language, code or notation in which the work was originally expressed) not being a reproduction of the work; (c)  in relation to a literary work (whether in a non - dramatic form or in a dramatic form): (i)             a translation of the work; or (ii)           a version of the work in which a story or action is conveyed solely or principally by means of pictures; and (d)  in relation to a musical work--an arrangement or transcription of the work.  None of this describes copy-editing!   Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia  [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Counting researchers - some results
I recently posed to this list the question âHow many researchers are there in the world?â and gave some rough estimates that bounded the result N by 1M N 10M. I have received several very useful pieces of data (and some non-useful responses). The question is clearly relevant to the production rate of articles.  My best estimate of N is now 3.60M researchers in 2012. This is based on the UNESCO Science Report 2010 which details researchers by country, and this is an extrapolation from 2 354 851 in 2002 and 2 979 913 in 2007. Note: This figure is to be treated with caution, because of the following factors: 1.     I use the FTE counts which are higher than the headcounts. On inspection, many countries (such as Canada, USA and Australia) did not supply UNESCO with headcounts. I could have fudged the two categories together but the precision of the data did not seem to warrant that. 2.     The raw data is itself subject to various errors. The footnote to the Table states âText Box: â Text Box: â Text Box: â Text Box: â Text Box: â ân/+n = data refer to n years before or after reference year; a = university graduates instead of researchers; b = break in series with previous year for which data are shown; e = estimation; g = underestimated or partial data; h = overestimated or based on overestimated data.â 3.     Not all of these researchers are what I call âproducing researchersâ: researchers who (co)author articles which could be made open access. It is difficult to determine this factor though use of article-based author-lists or author IDs may be useful. This is probably the biggest uncertainty in the data, and means that 3.60M is probably an over-estimate.  One of the reasons I wanted to know this value is to see how large the Mendeley count of users is â they report 1.43M at time of writing. Some of these are not âproducing researchersâ, but are people searching literature for work, hobby or medical purposes, but private communication suggests this is a relatively small fraction of the total. In any case, just to do the raw numbers: 1.4M / 3.60M = 40%. If point 3 above dominates, this is an under-estimate of Mendeleyâs penetration as a researcher tool.  What this implies is that 40% (or whatever) of researchers in the world are using Mendeley, and have the potential to make their work open access by simple actions. Les Carr has blogged that the level of people doing this is about the same as the level achieved in his University of Southampton departmental mandated repository. Thatâs good news in itself. However, it now poses a new set of questions: are the researchers in Mendeley different from those represented in institutional repositories, the same ones, or what is the overlap? Surely this will vary by discipline?  If the user sets their own works to be OA, and the users are disjoint from repository users, then that implies that the Titanium Road (social networking OA) is making significant progress in the OA campaign in its own right, and growing at about 37% from June 2011 to January 2012. The complementary approach to institutional repositories may be valuable.  [IMAGE]  The same question may be asked of articles, but it is more difficult to draw conclusions. An article may be put into a repository and made OA by one co-author, and into Mendeley and made OA by another. I argue this is a net benefit - the more copies of an article on the Internet the better (within reason) though not as useful as a new article made OA. Some however may simply be focussed solely on different article counts and think of this as a waste of effort. No matter â it seems that social networking tools are proving useful in achieving OA.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia  [ Part 1.2, Image/PNG (Name: image001.png) 189 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 1.3, Image/PNG (Name: image002.png) 186 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 1.4, Image/PNG (Name: image003.png) 186 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 1.5, Image/PNG (Name: image006.png) 21 KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?
Thank you Andrew. Exactly true, but that simply says that the task is harder; it does not make it undesirable. I simply am not interested in counting articles except as this helps in establishing the question I asked. Counting articles has been done many times by people with more money than I have and the estimates are still quite wide-spread, though satisfactory as engineering estimates. Similar problems arise win publications with the fake journals and the quality spectrum (exactly the same problem you referred to in relation to counting researchers). To tease out another category you did not mention I have coined the terms (1)'producing researcher' to be a person who adds to the scholarly literature as an author or co-author at least once every three years, and (2)'non-productive researcher' as a person who researches the scholarly literature but has no intention of adding to the corpus, such as a teacher (school to university-level), a science journalist, most undergraduate students, or a member of the general public. The words 'active' vs 'non-active' simply will not do. I have been pointed to a UNESCO Report which is proving very useful. I'll post something when I have more to write and a better estimate than 1M N 10M. Best wishes Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Odlyzko Sent: Wednesday, 4 January 2012 12:02 AM To: goal at eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there? Arthur, There is far more difficulty in counting researchers than in counting articles. The problem is the inherent ambiguity in the term researcher. Who qualifies? How do you tell the difference between research and development? What do you do about all the support staff (such as the technicians who run the often ultra-sophisticated equipment)? How do you count students (graduate and undergraduate) who get involved in researchy projects? One can certainly do something, but one needs to define the terms one uses with some precision. Andrew Arthur Sale ahjs at ozemail.com.au wrote: Thank you Arif. I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will download and look through your thesis asap. However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to know: how many active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011. Of course, it will be useful to have article counts by discipline, however rough, because publication practices differ widely between disciplines. A publication in some disciplines is worth far less than in others, the number of authors/article differs widely, and journal prestige varies at least as much. There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article production rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least of which is the frequency of publication of equally highly respected researchers. Some publish rarely (say once every three years), others produce multiple articles per year. There are distributions in all these things which we should understand. If I mention just one, the huge disparity between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI journals listed in your article (111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cause to reflect! That's over 4:1, too big to gloss over. I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many articles were written or published. As an engineer in a previous career, absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient confidence that we are in the right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Arif Jinha Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there? Arthur, You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in the world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct relationships between the number of researchers, the number of articles published annually and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good sources for methodology are my thesis http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf - http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf (defended and submitted this fall) - Article 50 million - http://www.mendeley.com/research/article
[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?
Thank you Andrew. Exactly true, but that simply says that the task is harder; it does not make it undesirable. I simply am not interested in counting articles except as this helps in establishing the question I asked. Counting articles has been done many times by people with more money than I have and the estimates are still quite wide-spread, though satisfactory as engineering estimates. Similar problems arise win publications with the fake journals and the quality spectrum (exactly the same problem you referred to in relation to counting researchers).  To tease out another category you did not mention I have coined the terms (1)   'producing researcher' to be a person who adds to the scholarly literature as an author or co-author at least once every three years, and (2)   'non-productive researcher' as a person who researches the scholarly literature but has no intention of adding to the corpus, such as a teacher (school to university-level), a science journalist, most undergraduate students, or a member of the general public. The words 'active' vs 'non-active' simply will not do.  I have been pointed to a UNESCO Report which is proving very useful. Iâll post something when I have more to write and a better estimate than 1M N 10M.  Best wishes  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia  -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Odlyzko Sent: Wednesday, 4 January 2012 12:02 AM To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?  Arthur,  There is far more difficulty in counting researchers than in counting articles. The problem is the inherent ambiguity in the term researcher. Who qualifies? How do you tell the difference between research and development? What do you do about all the support staff (such as the technicians who run the often ultra-sophisticated equipment)? How do you count students (graduate and undergraduate) who get involved in researchy projects?  One can certainly do something, but one needs to define the terms one uses with some precision.  Andrew     Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au wrote:  Thank you Arif. I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will download and look through your thesis asap.    However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to know: how many active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011. Of course, it will be useful to have article counts by discipline, however rough, because publication practices differ widely between disciplines. A publication in some disciplines is worth far less than in others, the number of authors/article differs widely, and journal prestige varies at least as much.    There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article production rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least of which is the frequency of publication of equally highly respected researchers. Some publish rarely (say once every three years), others produce multiple articles per year. There are distributions in all these things which we should understand. If I mention just one, the huge disparity between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI journals listed in your article (111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cause to reflect! That's over 4:1, too big to gloss over.    I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many articles were written or published. As an engineer in a previous career, absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient confidence that we are in the right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate.    Arthur Sale  University of Tasmania      From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Arif Jinha Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?    Arthur,    You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in the world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct relationships between the number of researchers, the number of articles published annually and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good sources for methodology are my thesis http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf - http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf (defended and submitted this fall)  - Article 50 million - http
[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?
Thank you Arif. I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will download and look through your thesis asap.  However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to know: how many active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011. Of course, it will be useful to have article counts by discipline, however rough, because publication practices differ widely between disciplines. A publication in some disciplines is worth far less than in others, the number of authors/article differs widely, and journal prestige varies at least as much.  There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article production rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least of which is the frequency of publication of equally highly respected researchers. Some publish rarely (say once every three years), others produce multiple articles per year. There are distributions in all these things which we should understand. If I mention just one, the huge disparity between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI journals listed in your article (111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cause to reflect! Thatâs over 4:1, too big to gloss over.  I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many articles were written or published. As an engineer in a previous career, absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient confidence that we are in the right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania   From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Arif Jinha Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?  Arthur,  You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in the world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct relationships between the number of researchers, the number of articles published annually and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good sources for methodology are my thesis -http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf (defend ed and submitted this fall) - Article 50 million -http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-estimate-number-scholarly-a rticles-existence-6/ Methods and data are based chiefly on: Bjork et al's studies on OA share growth 2006 to current Mabe and Amin, Tenopir and King - works 1990s to early 2000s Derek De Sallo Price - 1960s - the 'father of scientometrics. - you can get the number of article from Bjork's methods and data and mine. - you can get the number of researchers from UN data but there is ratio of researchers to publishing researchers, and publishing researchers publish an average of 1 article per year, so if you can determine good estimate for that ratio you are on your way. You have good data on growth rates of researchers, articles and journals, but growth rates have increased dramatically since 2000 as demonstrated in my thesis. It got a bit complex and I tried to sort it best I could in my thesis.  all the best,  Arif    - Original Message - From: Arthur Sale To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 6:25 PM Subject: [GOAL] How many researchers are there?  I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy. I seek your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as the average publication has more than one author and we need only one to make it OA.  To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35 universities and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835, and this spans big universities down to small ones. Australia produces according to the OECD 2.5% of the worldâs research, so letâs estimate the number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as âtypicalâ of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted non-university research organizations (theyâll make a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed in the author list of any publication they produce).  Letâs take another tack. I have read
[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?
Thanks Stevan. Unfortunately that does not answer the question I posed, but a different question which is not relevant in the research being undertaken to see the adoption of OA practices amongst researchers, as opposed to the application of OA to articles which you have ably handled.  As you have recognized, it only needs one author of a multi-author article to make the whole paper OA; however as we approach 100%, single-author articles will require that sole author to make his or her paper OA. (The question is irrelevant to Gold OA because all authors jointly agree to make the article OA, once.) It would be an interesting study to see amongst Green OA, whether the rate of making articles OA improves as the number of authors does. Hypothesis A: it will, but not linearly. Secondly one could look at the number of times an article is OA (ie the number of OA copies there are on the Internet). Hypothesis B: this measure should increase with the number of authors, though probably not linearly. Zipfâs law is more likely in these cases as earlier-listed authors are probably the more likely to take OA action. Is your crawled data capable of being re-interpreted this way?  I propose to do the following:  (1)  Estimate the total number of papers P published per year y, Py (2)  Estimate the average number of authors per paper for this corpus, m. (3)  Compute m x Py = N, an estimate of the number of active researchers.  The expected errors in N are: ·      The value of Py is not certain â neither ISI nor Scopus are complete. This leads to an under-estimate. ·      Not all researchers publish every year. This means that the number of researchers is again under-estimated. ·      Some researchers publish more than once per year. This is double-counting and results in an over-estimate. ISI or Scopus may be able to provide disambiguated estimates from their databases. ·      Unfortunately aggregating the number of years causes both the above errors to change â the first reducing, the second increasing. I have seen statements to the effect that an active researcher publishes at least once every three years, so the effective limit is 3 successive years.  Still, the information will be interesting and perhaps useful. It may be useful to do a pilot study in a single institution. Australian universities have complete citation databases of their publications, so it may be possible to check this type of data for a single institution. If it is a big one, the data may extrapolate.  Best wishes  Arthur  From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Sunday, 1 January 2012 8:52 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?  Some suggestions:  (1) Estimate the total number of papers P published per year y, Py, rather than the number of researchers.  (2) Start with the Thompson-Reuters-ISI-indexed (or SCOPUS-indexed) subset.  (3) For Py, sample the web (Google Scholar) to see what percentage of it is freely available (OA).  Our latest rough estimate with this method, using a robot, is about 20%.  (Using estimates of the number of researchers, if the margin of error for the total is 1M - 10M then the margin of error for the percentage OA would be 10% - 100%, which is too big. Using known, published papers as the estimator also eliminates the multi-author problem.)  Cheers, Stevan  On 2011-12-31, at 6:25 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy. I seek your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as the average publication has more than one author and we need only one to make it OA.  To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35 universities and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835, and this spans big universities down to small ones. Australia produces according to the OECD 2.5% of the worldâs research, so letâs estimate the number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as âtypicalâ of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted non-university research organizations (theyâll make a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed in the author list of any publication they produce).  Letâs take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research universities in the world bandied about. Letâs regard â
[GOAL] Re: Scope of the GOAL list and discussions on open access
Heather, my comments are interspersed on two paragraphs of your recent post. Happy New Year. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ... [Heather] Libraries. Currently, library subscriptions account for about 80-90% of the financial support for the scholarly publishing system, with 68-73% coming from academic libraries alone. (Ware and Mabe, 2009). I argue that transitioning this economic support from subscriptions to open access is key to a successful transition to open access. Library budgets need not be the only source of support, however they should be one of the main sources of support. Librarians have a lot of experience negotiating terms including pricing for subscriptions which can easily translate into open access negotiations. [Disclosure: this is my day job]. The SCOAP3 project is doing just this, transitioning one sub-discipline from subscriptions to open access. [Arthur] I assume you mean the project SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing) discussed in http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/223_elpub2008.content.pdf and http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/scoap3_09april.shtml. There are a lot of things with the SCOAP acronym. Unfortunately high energy physics does not offer a transferable model for most disciplines, for several reasons. Do you have any experience in your day job of transitioning a discipline or initiating the process? I ask because there is a quite solid move in my university at transitioning from some subscriptions to on-demand acquisition of toll-access articles. Especially in specialized journals. Adding OA publishing fees to such a scheme might be feasible. ... [Heather] One model that might be optimal for reasons of fiscal prudence, which is the approach of N.I.H. and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, I understand, is to allow researchers to use grant funds or some portion thereof for dissemination purposes, without specifying that these be OA article processing fees or if so, how much. This gives the researcher an incentive to look for cost-effective alternatives, to use the remaining funds for other purposes, for example sending grad students to conferences to present on the research. [Disclosure: I'm a grad student, and have many friends who are grad students]. This approach also avoids the possibility of the research funder setting an overly generous trend. [Arthur] Giving researchers one-line freedom over their grants is no solution, because (a) there are very strong competitive needs for these funds, and (b) researchers see journal publication as traditionally free to them. Only people with an institutional perspective see the costs. Separate funding (eg Library, Government, funder) seems to be necessary to persuade researchers to see a level playing field between reader-side and author-side fees. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: The Titanium Road response
I totally agree with Stevan. Just one point of clarification. While I think the Titanium Road is a very useful addition to the OA arsenal, I continue to promote ID/OA institutional repositories, and even the growth of open access journals as appropriate. My approach is eclectic. Dear Father Christmas, what I would like for 2012 is 100% OA to be adopted as policy by all researchers. Best wishes to the list for the holiday season. Arthur Sale From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Saturday, 24 December 2011 1:04 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: The Titanium Road response For the perplexed reader who wonders what on earth two OA advocates -- long on the same team, and still on the same team -- are disagreeing about: it's just about where the time and effort of OA advocates is best invested. I am for redoubling efforts to persuade institutions and funders to adopt Green OA Mandates (now with the help of EOS), and Arthur is for encouraging researchers to adopt the Titanium Technology (e.g. Mendeley) which could provide OA as a side-effect (if adopted). That's all. Both of us would like to see OA prevail before we become nitrogen nourishing future generations. I wish Arthur the best of luck in promoting Titanium. I'm sure he does not wish me any less in promoting Green OA mandates. Peace. Stevan Harnad -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20111224/0dfb915f/attachment.html
[GOAL] Re: Titanium Killer Apps and OA
My apologies to you, Stevan, for appearing to ignore you, and the list, since Monday. The trouble was that when my old email address was edited to the one I use mostly now, the new address was mangled, and as a result I got no posts from GOAL. It was only when I tried to post a second time that the problem came to light. Richard has fixed the error, I think (thanks Richard). So this message is to address part of your very long email, and to serve as a test that GOAL has me right at last. Then I can get to answering the rest of your post.  IS THE TITANIUM ROAD A TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERCHARGED GREEN ROAD? Well, if you want to play on words, you can think of it that way. I wonât. But you had better start thinking of the Gold Road as an ultimate commercial version of the Green Road too, because it is the author that decides to self-archive his or her article as Open Access by the choice of journal, selecting a hybrid option, offering an article, and paying author-side fees as needed.  I could also argue that no journal can make an article open access without the authorâs permission, so all roads are the same, since they are all author-roads.  And for good measure to help your argument,  a Titanium appâs storage in the cloud, an institutional repository, a subject repository, a gold journal, and a hybrid journal are all repositories of scholarly articles. They differ only by their scopes and policies.  I donât find this sort of word play useful to me nor to OA. It is simply denigrating what is clearly a different way of achieving open access. One might as well argue that SMS and Twitter are simply technologically supercharged email, and Facebook is simply a website. They are all quite different phenomena, while having some common technological features and human needs underlying them.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia  PS, since I did not see Stevanâs reply to me except by looking at the archive, please see the original of this thread if you want to read it. It is rather long.  [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] The Titanium Road response
[ARTHUR] It seems that I am back on-list again, so here is a response to another chunk of Stevanâs response. I find it interesting to argue with Stevan, because we are both on the same side of wanting OA as soon as possible and believing it is well overdue. If I can characterise the debate, Stevan wants to keep it focused obsessively on ID/OA institutional repositories (which I believe from his recent comments he would now characterize as just a subclass of the Green Road), whereas I have become convinced that this approach will not suffice in my lifetime and think we should pursue a multi-factorial approach (which includes my Titanium Road). Â Here are my responses interspersed after selected bits of Stevanâs last post. I have tried to condense this because otherwise no-one will read it. My apologies to him if I quote him out of context. Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconstruct a reply email from the archive. I have done my best. Â On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Arthur Sale ahjs at ozemail.com.au wrote: Â *** Â ** The more important issue is that I have failed to get across to him that the Titanium Road has nothing to do with researcher voluntarism. Â Â Volunteerism means that *in order to make their papers OA, researchers have to do something that they are not currently doing*, of their own accord, not because of an institutional or funder requirement. Â Using new tools, voluntarily, is volunteerism. Â [ARTHUR] This is more word-play and inventing a definition. A volunteer has clear options: to volunteer to do something, or do nothing at all. âVolunteerâ is not the same as âchoose between optionsâ. It may be useful to look at the origin of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary: the primary meaning is that of someone who volunteers for military service, as opposed to those who have no choice. Or do not have to choose. Researchers who self-archive in an institutional repository are either volunteers or conscripts. Users of Titanium Road apps are neither. Â Â The Green Road also does, because the researcher has to volunteer to undertake unnatural extra work to deposit works in the institutional repository through a clunky interface. Â Â The volunteer step in Green OA self-archiving is: Choosing to self-archive. Â [ARTHUR] We both agree on that: volunteering to do the extra work in self-archiving. Â The clunkiness of the interface is a technological matter. Not everyone would agree that filling out a few obvious form-interface fields (login, password, author, title, journal, date, etc.) is so clunky or unnatural in a day when we are filling out online forms all the time. It's just a few minutes' worth of keystrokes. Â But my friend Arthur is profoundly mistaken if he thinks that the reason why over 80% of researchers are *not* voluntarily self-archiving today is because they find it too clunky to do the keystrokes. Â [ARTHUR] But is it the reason they overwhelmingly give up after having been persuaded to try it? Â I wish it were that simple. But in fact there are at least 38 reasons researchers why do not voluntarily self-archive -- http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#38-worries -- and their worry that doing so might be clunky is just one of them (and usually based on never even having tried it out). Â [ARTHUR] See above. Frankly I resent being characterized at complaining about keystrokes, when the Titanium Road has little to do with keystrokes. It is about âdoing what comes naturally.â Â [omitted, more keystroke rhetoric.] Â [ARTHUR] I have to waste time answering this. Simplifying things to keystrokes is inappropriate. It *is* just extra work. I know it takes me 5 minutes extra, but that is 5 minutes I could spend on other work things. That is volunteering. And for what? More citations in the cloud, which a researcher may not really be interested in? I do it willingly, but then I am pursuing a cause. Â They even hate to deposit a version of the article that they have no confidence in (the Accepted Manuscript). Â Â Arthur: Over 80% of researchers hate to deposit *any version at all*, and don't! Worries about versions are just one of the at-least 38 reasons researchers don't deposit, year upon year upon year. Â And the point is that all 38+ reasons are groundless. But it is now evident that it is hopeless to try to persuade researchers of this, one by one, researcher by researcher, reason by reason, year upon year upon year. Â That's why deposit has to be mandated. (That way, only researchers' funders and institutions need to be persuaded!) Â [ARTHUR] Stevan, do you really think I need to be told this after my work all these years? The facts are, if you observe them, researchers DO care about versions. Where mandates are applied, they often ignore the Accepted Manuscript requirement in favour of the Version of Record. The VoR becomes restricted because
[GOAL] Re: Bold predictions for 2012
I am proud to be able to count Stevan as one of my friends, but we donât always agree, as is normal for most people.  I really donât understand how Stevan manages to call the Titanium Road âa technologically supercharged version of the Green Roadâ, but Stevan can explain that statement if he wishes.  The more important issue is that I have failed to get across to him that the Titanium Road has nothing to do with researcher voluntarism. The Gold Road does, because unless the researcher is funded by the Wellcome Trust or its like, he or she is likely to have to volunteer to divert money from his or her research grant to pay the author-side fees. The Green Road also does, because the researcher has to volunteer to undertake unnatural extra work to deposit works in the institutional repository through a clunky interface. They even hate to deposit a version of the article that they have no confidence in (the Accepted Manuscript). So few of them do it, and they backslide so easily, that the only solution is to force them to do it (a mandate). Since mandates rely on persuasion of key executives who are themselves usually ex-researchers and are transitory, voluntarism is an intrinsic thread running through the Green Road.  I liken the Titanium Road with the situation with Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Where universities mandate the deposit of an electronic copy of the thesis, the deposit rate easily reaches completeness (and I mean 100%, not the 80% or so ID/OA mandated articles sometimes achieve). It never retreats from that. Why? Because the action required of the graduating student is completely natural and theyâve always expected to do it. The university simply says âinstead of depositing two bound copies of your thesis with the university before graduating, give us one and an electronic copyâ. Or in even more enlightened universities âjust give us an electronic copyâ. The student does what is asked, and is even happy that copying the files to a CD or DVD is much, much easier than waiting for 100s of pages to print, finding a binder who can do black card covers and gold lettering, and paying for all of it. The success of ETD schemes is that they are natural, and simply electronicize a function that is already part of a PhD studentâs activity.  So to the Titanium Road, which is directly aimed at existing researcher practice and psychology. Every researcher worth a cent keeps a record of all their publications (and sometimes their unpublished works too). Being a person who grew up with computers but still in the Gutenberg era, I still have an archive box under the house with paper copies of all my early publications, going back to my 1969 PhD thesis and several earlier publications. A list of all the publications also exists in my curriculum vitae (cv), and I keep both up to date. Did any serious researcher do differently then? But the times are changing. While I may have produced one of the worldâs early word-processed PhD theses (I wrote the word processing software myself too, and took over the universityâs mainframe to run it off on the console IBM typewriter in night-time hours), I did not keep a âmachine-readable copyâ (it was in several boxes of 80-column punched cards). Nowadays that is exactly what I do. I rely on electronic apps to keep my recent records.  The Titanium Road is predicated on researchers doing just this: keeping the records of their publications (full text and citations) online and in the cloud. The only tiny missing step is access to this huge resource, probably rapidly heading for 100% data coverage. Emails to the author asking for access are an âalmost OAâ option, just like the ID/OA Green Road, but increasingly I predict we will see a researcherâs personal corpus of work opened to the Internet. Thatâs OA! Of course computer scientists have long done this on their own websites, but computer scientists are able to write html code and use web tools, whereas most researchers canât or wonât waste the time to learn. The new generation of apps such as Mendeley that collect data make this as easy as creating a Facebook page, and as I said, it is simply electronicizing what they already do, better, simpler, and cheaper. There is no âvolunteeringâ, Stevan. The researchers just keep on doing what theyâve always done, but optimize it a bit by using better tools that become available. I remain optimistic. Unfortunately I cannot point to big major gains to match where the Gold Road and the Green Road have reached, but then you know me also as a person with sensitive antennae for small signals of scholarly revolutions... It is early days yet.  Best wishes to the list for the silly season. Keep yourselves safe.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=oNF2d24Jhl=en     From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf
[GOAL] Bold predictions for 2012
Richard, you asked what weâd like to see in 2012.  Iâd like to see more open access journals, and higher prestige attached to those that already exist. Who wouldnât? Iâd also like to see more ID/OA mandated institutional repositories. Again who wouldnât? But I donât see either strategy as taking Open Access to the tipping point where a scholarly revolution becomes unstoppable. Why? Because both strategies are too cerebral, too argumentative, too technological, and they require at present unnatural actions on the part of researchers.  What I want to predict is a growing number of researchers doing completely natural things that have always been in their repertoire of work, for example like keeping a lifetime record of their publications and ephemera. It used to be a collection of paper, but the social media tools like Mendeley now allow this to be electronic, and like the silent transition from typewriters to the admittedly superior word processing software, I predict we will see a silent transition to online in-the-cloud corpus collections. Making this open access is technologically trivial, and I have named this the Titanium Road to open access: light-weight, strong, robust and recognises what people actually do.  If I can make another prediction, I think that 2012 might just be the year that we begin to question the copyright position of articles. Despite legal transfer of copyright (sometimes) most publishers pay only lip-service to their âownershipâ and carry out minimal due diligence in their âpurchaseâ in return for services, and researchers respond with total indifference by dispensing copies of the Version-of-Record as they see fit. Never a week goes by when I do not see someone post to a list âCan anyone send me a copy of Xxx by Yyy in journal Zzz?â and it appears they almost always are satisfied by their later posts of effusive thanks. The law in respect of scholarly articles has to change, and this might be the year that we begin to see cracks open up.  Finally, let me make my last prediction â that 2012 might see us begin to address the issue of China, and the language barriers that look like being a major part of the OA spectrum in this decade (2011-2020). The English-speaking world and the European language speaking world have been happy to live with English as the lingua franca (what a strange misnomer!), but the Asian-speaking world is not likely to be so accommodating. We shall have to begin to treat open access as a matter involving automatic translation, at first maybe just for metadata, but later for the whole article.  Richard, you said youâd like to see short posts dominate this list, so Iâve been brief to the point of encryption. I am happy to expand on any of the previous four paragraphs, recognising that some of them are separable issues. I hope I have been controversial enough to get some responses.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia  [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: Automating metadata extraction
Thank you William.  I had previously come to the conclusion that institutional repositories were simply failing to reach enough acceptance to reach the OA revolution tipping point, and open access journals are struggling. My analysis a year or so ago was that the social media model (such as Mendeley) offered a model which would result in rapid takeup, particularly by younger, active, researchers. I wrote four essays (and I called this route the Titanium Road) which alas I have forgotten to upload to the University Repository and make OA. I will do so asap and let the list know when they are available.  Thank you for the reply. The time for the change has not only come - it is long overdue. I'll follow your blogs with interest.  However, there is another key issue that nobody has yet responded to. Besides synchronizing Mendeley (excellent), can we get rid of the horribly clunky repository deposit interfaces? Being an Emeritus Professor I no longer command the programming resources to make it happen. Librarians are no longer so wedded to manual intervention in metadata so they wonât resist.  Best wishes for Christmas and New Year. I look forward to Mendeleyâs subversive activities in the future!  Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania, Australia  -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of William Gunn Sent: Friday, 16 December 2011 10:18 AM To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Automating metadata extraction  Arthur, it's interesting that you mention the fluid deposit interface of Mendeley as an example for institutional repositories, because I made exactly that argument during my talk at Open Repositories in Austin this summer [1], and I'm not the only one who's been thinking about it. Les Carr [2] and Adam Brownfield [3] have also had the same idea.  So it sounds like an idea whose time has come! Next year we hope to have a pilot going with Cambridge to sync Mendeley with institutional repositories, and you can kepe up to date on the progress of the work here: http://jisc-dura.blogspot.com/  [1]https://conferences.tdl.org/or/OR2011/index/search/presenters/view?firstName=Wi lliammiddleName=lastName=Gunnaffiliation=Mendeley%20Research%20Networkscoun try=US [2]http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2010/08/more-on-mendeley-and-repositories.htm l [3] http://prezi.com/fbgyiabmtq1w/mendeley-and-institutional-repositories/ [4] My slides from OR are here: http://db.tt/Ydwbgv1I They're a bit impressionistic, but I think you can get the idea.  Best, -- William Gunn | Head of Academic Outreach | +1 646 755 9862 http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/william-gunn  Mendeley Limited | London, UK Registered in England and Wales | Company number 6419015
Re: Organisation of Repository Managers?
Australia + New Zealand has an email group IRC/ANZ, see institutionalrepositoriescommunity-...@googlegroups.com. Membership open to anyone.  Contact info at bottom of posts You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups InstitutionalRepositoriesCommunity-ANZ group. To post to this group, send email to institutionalrepositoriescommunity-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz?hl=en.  Arthur Sale  -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Tuesday, 30 November 2010 11:42 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Organisation of Repository Managers?  I gave a talk last week at a Digital Repository Foundation meeting in Japan. This is a group of (primarily) librarians involved in running repositories for their institutions here in Japan. They asked if there was an equivalent organisation in the UK or elsewhere. I don't know of one, but that doesn't mean there isn't, since I'm not actively involved in running a repository, merely evangelising about IRs and mandates. Does anyone know of similar organisations elsewhere that I can point the Japanese DRF people at?  -- Professor Andrew A Adams                     a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan      http://www.a-cubed.info/
Australian Lists of Journals and Conferences
I have been waiting for the Australian Government to post to these lists, but they havenât.  So let me advise you that the Australian Research Council (ARC) has published its definitive lists of ranked journals used by Australians, and ranked conferences in selected disciplines. I emphasize that (a) these are lists relevant to Australians, and (b) the verb âusedâ conveys the proper relationship between author and publisher. The Journal of the American Beaver or the International Journal of Up-Helly-Aa are unlikely to appear (if they exist). Though they might be in the list if we have an Australian researcher working in these fields. Australians are rather eclectic in where they publish (3% of the worldâs research). There is in fact very little local!  Please point your browser to the ARCâs page on ranked outlets http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_journal_list.htm. Warning: if you download the files on this page they are fairly big. But invaluable.  The rankings were developed after a two-year consultation with Australiaâs professional societies (and their members) and the Academies (important Australians in several groupings eg Science, Humanities).  Note that the journals are ranked A+, A, B. C and only the first two categories are regarded as important. They are likely to be internationally relevant. Bs and Cs will contain most of the local stuff. Publishers will dispute rankings of course and the C category is no doubt missing many which are irrelevant to us.  Conferences are ranked A, B, C with A regarded as important. Only selected disciplines have ranked conferences (eg computer science) where these are regarded as important research outlets as journals.  Arthur  Â
Unethical harvesters
. Further ARO require that the first dc:identifier element be the metadata identifier, despite clear indications that order does not matter. Don't get me wrong. I am not on a crusade to change the way repositories currently present their OAI-PMH elements, unlike ARO. I really don't care much how they interpret the standards. But I do care about the NLA assuming such a bullying stance in relation to Australian repositories. Already at least two Australian repositories have confessed to changing their OAI-PMH interface to suit ARO! If this happens elsewhere, the consequences for open access are significant as incompatibilities are bound to arise. Conclusions 1. Readers of the list should be alert for similar unethical behaviour in their territories. 2. ARO and the NLA should start harvesting from the Australian OAI-PMH interfaces correctly, as soon as possible, just as the rest of the world does. 3. In the meantime, mis-harvested repositories should be withdrawn from the ARO gateway database. 4. If ARO does not comply, Australian repositories will need to consider boycotting the service. Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania
Re: Authors Re-using Their Own Work
in Australian law. unfortunately in UK, and most of EU law, it isn't. In these countries, there is a clear distinction between the right of reproduction and the communication right and the law treats them differently. Thus, in the UK, it is legal for anyone to copy a work for themselves under fair dealing, but fair dealing does not apply to the communication right (i.e., providing things electronically to third parties). Thus, unfortunately, whilst Arthur may well be able to do what he suggests within Australia (and no doubt some other countries as well), what he cannot do is send such materials to the EU as the recipient would be breaking the law by importing an infringing copy. Arthur and others may well of course argue that this is such a trivial illegality that the risk can gbe taken, and I'd agree. But there's a world of difference between saying it's illegal, but the risk is trivial and saying it's absolutely legal. I am sure readers of the forum are by now totally bored by this topic so I don't intend to say anything more on it, other to remind them that there are numerous solutions to the problem anyway: to send a requestor an earlier version of the work before copyright was assigned; to assign copyright but make sure the publisher gives permission for you to send stuff electronically to requestors; or not to assign copyright at all to the publisher. Charles On Sun, 2 Aug 2009 11:15:16 +1000 Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au wrote: Charles The Australian Act makes no mention of who does the reproduction. Whether I make a reproduction/copy (say electronic by email, or photocopy my manuscript or the journal, or some other form of copy) of my article to give to my PhD student, or he/she does it personally from a CD I lend or a journal issue they borrow, makes no difference. I can even ask an administrative assistant to make the copy for me and deliver it. What matters is that the copy is for the purpose of research or study. Exactly the same applies to a remote researcher who asks me for a copy of my article. I left out sections 1A and 1B of Section 40 but they (amongst other things) even make provision for reproductions of journal articles to be provided to [multiple] off-campus students engaged in a course of study. The Australian Act simply recognises that research thrives on dissemination. I might add that it is equally sensible in other areas, such as photography of copyright works located permanently or temporarily in public places. But Stevan is right. The law is not the issue. I merely pointed out that the Australian Act is more sensible than most in that it legitimises what is common practice, so common indeed as to be hardly worth remarking on except when people query it. The facts are that researchers have practised copying of research articles and sending copies to fellow researchers for a long time, and they continue to do so. My memory of this goes back to when I started work as an academic in 1961, 48 years ago. My publishers then even asked me how many reprints I wanted - not necessary these days. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of C.Oppenheim Sent: Saturday, 1 August 2009 10:31 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Authors Re-using Their Own Work The Austrlain Act does indeed permit fair dealing for one's own research or private study; but it doesn't permit copying for distribution to third parties. I am slightly alarmed that there is this misunderstanding about copyright law. Fair dealing for research or private study is when you make a copy for one's own research or private study. Thus, in law, if Dr Jones asks Dr Smith for an electronic copy of Dr Smith's article, and Dr Smith gave away the copyright to Megacorp Publishers, then Dr Smith should strictly not supply that copy (unless the publisher has granted permission for do such things) b3ecause the copy isn't then for Dr Smith's own research or private study, but should advise Dr Jones to make his own fair dealing copy.
Re: Authors Re-using Their Own Work
May I confirm and endorse Marc Couture's very valid comments. The Australian Copyright Act as amended up to date says as follows. Note in particular clause (1) and clause (3). It really could not be much more clearly stated! [My comments are in red and in square brackets.] Indeed the Australian Act does not allow the copyright owner to object to fair dealing of a journal article on the grounds that it might affect the potential market. The Request-a-copy button rests on firm legal ground in the Antipodes. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania COPYRIGHT ACT 1968 - SECT 40 Fair dealing for purpose of research or study (1) A fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or with an adaptation of a literary, dramatic or musical work, for the purpose of research or study does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the work. [ahjs: 1A and 1B omitted, not relevant, deal with lecture notes.] (2) For the purposes of this Act, the matters to which regard shall be had, in determining whether a dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or with an adaptation of a literary, dramatic or musical work, being a dealing by way of reproducing the whole or a part of the work or adaptation, constitutes a fair dealing with the work or adaptation for the purpose of research or study include: (a) the purpose and character of the dealing; (b) the nature of the work or adaptation; (c) the possibility of obtaining the work or adaptation within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price; (d) the effect of the dealing upon the potential market for, or value of, the work or adaptation; and (e) in a case where part only of the work or adaptation is reproduced--the amount and substantiality of the part copied taken in relation to the whole work or adaptation. (3) Despite subsection (2), a reproduction, for the purpose of research or study, of all or part of a literary, dramatic or musical work, or of an adaptation of such a work, contained in an article in a periodical publication is taken to be a fair dealing with the work or adaptation for the purpose of research or study. (4) Subsection (3) does not apply if another article in the publication is also reproduced for the purpose of different research or a different course of study. (5) Despite subsection (2), a reproduction, for the purpose of research or study, of not more than a reasonable portion of a work or adaptation that is described in an item of the table and is not contained in an article in a periodical publication is taken to be a fair dealing with the work or adaptation for the purpose of research or study. For this purpose, reasonable portion means the amount described in the item. [ahjs: this applies to non-article works, for example books. The section goes on to describe reasonable portion.] [Sections 41-44F go on to describe other acts not constituting copyright infringement, such as reproduction for reporting, satire, etc.] From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Couture Marc Sent: Saturday, 1 August 2009 5:22 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Authors Re-using Their Own Work On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 7:19 AM, c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.ukc.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: CO: The query referred to cases where the author has ASSIGNED copyright to Sage. Sage then owns the copyright and is perfectly entitled to say what can be done with the article. Crucially, if something is not mentioned as permitted, it is forbidden. So if you have assigned copyright to Sage, you cannot do anything other than those things listed as permitted by Sage. One should stress that no copyright owner can prevent a user doing something that is allowed under one of the so-called exceptions which are part of copyright laws, like fair use (in US) and fair dealing (in Canada, UK and Australia). For instance, US Copyright law (§107) states : [...] the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In the all the jurisdictions I mentioned, the exceptions allow for distribution of copies (and note that copy is in no way restricted to print copy) on an individual basis for research purposes, as embodied in the traditional practice referred to by Harnad or, more recently, in the request button, It is true that some criteria must be met for such a use to be considered fair, most
Re: The Accelerating Worldwide Adoption Rate for Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates
Richard This data is now somewhat old, but the message is still as valid and fresh as ever. I have two papers which show the difference between voluntary deposit with or without persuasion, and a mandate; and a second paper of what actually happened as the mandate university transitioned to its mandate. Sale, AHJ (2006) Comparison of IR content policies in Australia. First Monday, 11 (4). http://eprints.utas.edu.au/264/ Sale, AHJ (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11 (10). http://eprints.utas.edu.au/388/ The key problem in doing this sort of research is not in seeing how full the repositories actually are, but having an independent measure of what the actual body of work produced was and so what is missing. Fortunately in Australia, we have this latter data in a public summary form. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Richard Poynder Sent: Tuesday, 26 May 2009 7:35 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] The Accelerating Worldwide Adoption Rate for Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates Stevan's comments raise more questions I think: 1. Stevan says, Full compliance is of course 100% compliance, and the longer-standing mandates are climbing toward that. On my blog Bill Hooker asks, Where could I find data to show this?(http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/05/open-access-mandates-judging-success.ht ml#comments). I too would be interested to know if and where these data can be found. 2. Responding to my question about mandate opt-outs Stevan cites the results of Alma Swan's international surveys in which, most authors report they would comply willingly with a self-archiving mandate. Can we be confident that voluntary departmental commitments to self-archive will attract the same compliance rates as a mandate requiring researchers, as a condition of their employment, to self-archive? (And thus can we be confident that Alma Swan's surveys answer my question?) Stevan says, Researchers need to be reassured that their departments or institutions or funders are indeed fully behind self-archiving, and indeed expect it of them. Is that what's happening with some of the new voluntary mandates? For instance, the Gustavus Adolphus College Library Faculty recently published an OA pledge (http://gustavus.edu/academics/library/Pubs/OApledge.html). Amongst other things, the Library Faculty promise, to make our own research freely available whenever possible by seeking publishers that have either adopted open access policies, publish contents online without restriction, and/or allow authors to self-archive their publications on the web. It adds, Librarians may submit their work to a publication that does not follow open access principles and will not allow self archiving only if it is clearly the best or only option for publication; however, librarians will actively seek out publishers that allow them to make their research available freely online and, when necessary, will negotiate with publishers to improve publication agreements. On ACRLog, the Chair of the Gustavus Adolphus Library Department Barbara Fister says, we haven't had the time or money to start up an institutional repository. We also, quite frankly, don't have a terribly sophisticated grasp of all the OA arguments, the copyright issues, and the color choices. (Green? Gold? What about mauve?) We've also very, very busy trying to wrap up a big project, working with departments to make enough cuts that we can balance our budget next year - without scuttling our commitment to undergraduate research. (http://acrlog.org/2009/05/17/how-were-walking-the-oa-walk/). How relevant are Alma Swan's findings when predicting the likely outcome of such a pledge, or indeed many of the other recent departmental commitments to OA, many of which include opt-outs? Nine years ago the founders of Public Library of Science organised an open letter to publishers. As a result 34,000 researchers from 180 countries made a pledge not to submit papers to any journal that refused to make the articles it published available through online public libraries of science such as PubMed Central 6 months after publication. Only a handful of publishers complied, but researchers ignored their own pledge and carried on publishing in those journals. Richard Poynder From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 23 May 2009 20:25 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: The Accelerating Worldwide Adoption Rate for Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates In response to Alma Swan's graphic demonstration (posted yesterday and partly reproduced
Re: The Accelerating Worldwide Adoption Rate for Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates
/faculty/school mandates, rather than full university-wide mandates. These are the patchwork mandates that Arthur Sale already began recommending presciently back in 2007, in preference to waiting passively for university-wide consensus to be reached. (The option of opting out is only useful if it applies, not to the the deposit itself [of the refereed final draft, which should be deposited, without opt-out, immediately upon acceptance for publication], but to whether access to the deposit is immediately set as Open Access.) (2) Another recent progress report for Institutional Repositories, following Stirling's, is Aberystwyth's, which reached 2000 deposits in May. (3) Richard asks: Will the fact that many of the new mandates include opt-outs affect compliance rates? (Will that make them appear more voluntary than mandatory?) [comply1.jpg] According to Alma Swan's international surveys, most authors report they would comply willingly with a self-archiving mandate. The problem is less with achieving compliance on adopted mandates than with achieving consensus on the adoption of the mandate in the first place. (Hence, again, Arthur Sale's sage advice to adopt patchwork department/faculty/school mandates, rather than waiting passively for consensus on the adoption of full university-wide mandates, is the right advice.) And the principal purpose of mandates themselves is to reinforceresearchers' already-existing inclination to maximise access and usage for their give-away articles, not to force researchers to do something they don't already want to do. (Researchers need to be reassured that their departments or institutions or funders are indeed fully behind self-archiving, and indeed expect it of them; otherwise researchers remain in a state of Zeno's Paralysis about self-archiving year upon year, because of countless groundless worries, such as copyright, journal choice, and even how much time self-archiving takes.) (4) Richard also asks: What is full compliance so far as a self-archiving mandate is concerned? Full compliance is of course 100% compliance, and the longer-standing mandates are climbing toward that, but their biggest boost will come not only from time, nor even from the increasingly palpable local benefits of OA self-archiving (in terms of enhanced research impact), but from the global growth of Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates that Alma has just graphically demonstrated. (5) What other questions should we be asking? We should be asking what university students and staff can do to accelerate and facilitate the adoption of mandates at their institution. (See Waking OA's Slumbering Giant: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access.) And the right way to judge the success of a mandate is not just by reporting the growth in an institution's yearly deposit rates, but by plotting the growth in deposit rate as a percentage of the institution's yearly output of research articles, for the articles actually published in that same year. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum [ Part 2, Image/PNG 81KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]
AuseSearch
Some of you will know of AuseSearch but most won't. AuseSearch is a custom search engine operated by Google under my management since 2006 that returns search results in the familiar Google format, based on searching all the institutional repositories (digital archives) in Australia, and nothing else. The price is that Google advertising appears on the results page. I have just updated AuseSearch, using the data in Kennan Kingsley http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2282 /2092, while including Australasian Digital Theses as well. May I encourage you to add the link to AuseSearch to any relevant library or repository search pages? My university did so long ago. AuseSearch does a similar thing to the Australian ARROW Discovery Service, but faster, without the glitz, with Google's ranking of results, and it is free. You can check this out by going to http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012189697858739272261:yyyqychcumo (AuseSearch's home page). You can add an AuseSearch box to a personal iGoogle home page there too. Better you can add the search box to your library website or repository homepage by using this code. Results will appear on a new Google page. form action=http://www.google.com/cse; id=cse-search-box div input type=hidden name=cx value=012189697858739272261:yyyqychcumo / input type=hidden name=ie value=UTF-8 / input type=text name=q size=31 / input type=submit name=sa value=Search / /div /form script type=text/javascriptsrc=http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-boxlang=en;/scr ipt The same technique can be used for any country. Once the data is in an institutional repository, it is findable and capable of being aggregated. This is why institutional repositories and mandates to deposit in them are so important. How about similar facilities for the USA, Canada, Germany, or whatever? I'm happy to help or even set them up. We could have a directory of country-based search engines for those that want to drill down into a country issue! Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania
ERA Timeframe, submissions commence June (PCE) and August (HCA)
Update on the Australian ERA (research evaluation) Below is the Minister's recent release on ERA. To help members of this list to interpret it, · Consultation on the submission drafts sent out has meant that the time window for the submission for the PCE and HCA clusters has been pushed out from 20 April - 8 May 2009 to June (PCE) and August 2009 (HCA). · The PCE and HCA cluster evaluations have morphed into a trial. · Esteem indicators will not be included in this trial, and the ARC will do more work on what esteem metrics it can create/find in the full ERA. Personal analysis My guess is that universities (mainly) complained about preparing submissions in the original timeframe, resulting in the push-out. It was certainly tight. Conveniently for the Government in these financial times it is now in the next financial year. Nevertheless universities will still be in full preparation mode as 4 or 5 months still does not give them much time. The omission of esteem also effectively causes the morphing into a trial, probably better called a dummy run. The real ERA has thus been delayed a year, and it is unclear whether the PCE and HCA clusters will still be the first to be done properly in 2010. That would seem sensible to capitalize on the work already done by both universities and the ARC's committees. We await the finalized Submission and Technical guidelines due in March. Note that we also still await the selected supplier of the citation data for the HCA cluster. The PCE cluster data will be supplied by Scopus as I previously posted. It is not known if the PCE evaluation will use Scopus' SJR metrics (the PageRank algorithm applied to cites instead of hyperlinks). It would be nice if it did, to make the metric mix richer and because the SJR seems to be a better measure of the scientific value of a paper than raw cite counts. Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania PS Roughly PCE = Physical, Chemical Earth Sciences Cluster; HCA = Humanities and Creative Arts Cluster (including Fine Art, Music, Drama and Architecture), but they are both defined by ANZSRC codes. http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/ERATIMEFRAME.aspx ERA TIMEFRAME The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, today announced the timeframe for the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) trial, which will evaluate the Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences (PCE) and Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA) clusters. The Australian Government is committed to the development of a world- class research quality and evaluation system that has the confidence of the sector, Senator Carr said. Recent feedback on the ERA Submission Guidelines and ERA-SEER Technical Specifications raised concerns about the proposed timing of the ERA trial. To ensure universities are adequately prepared for the trial, submissions for the PCE cluster will now commence in June 2009, and submissions for the HCA cluster will commence in August 2009. The outcomes of these trials will inform the full ERA process in 2010. This timeframe will ensure that universities are able to collect and submit quality and accurate data for ERA. Recent feedback also raised concerns about the scope of some of the data to be collected. Following this feedback, esteem indicators will not be included in the ERA trial. I have asked the ARC to further investigate the collection of esteem indicators, which will be included in future evaluations. The expert review and feedback that the ARC has received so far has been crucial in shaping ERA. I trust universities will be pleased with the timeframe I have announced today and I ask that they continue to provide constructive feedback on ERA to the ARC. The ARC will release the final ERA Submission Guidelines and ERA-SEER Technical Specifications for the trial, in early March. You can find out more about ERA at www.arc.gov.au Media contacts: Patrick Pantano, Minister's office, 0417 181 936 Sheena Ireland, ARC, 0412 623 056
FW: [IRCommunity-ANZ] FW: ARC media release - Scopus to provide citation information for ERA
For the information of list readers. The Australian Cluster One is Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences, which will be evaluated by metrics and expert advice (no peer review of research outputs). Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: institutionalrepositoriescommunity-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:institutionalrepositoriescommunity-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Diane Costello Sent: Friday, 20 February 2009 11:12 AM To: caul-l...@caul.edu.au Cc: institutionalrepositoriescommunity-...@googlegroups.com Subject: [IRCommunity-ANZ] FW: ARC media release - Scopus to provide citation information for ERA To CAUL Members, for information, Diane Diane Costello Executive Officer, CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians), LPO Box 8169, ANU, Canberra ACT 2601 Australia Tel: +61 2 6125 2990 Fax: +61 2 6248 8571 diane.coste...@caul.edu.au http://www.caul.edu.au/ From: ARC - Communications [mailto:arc-communicati...@arc.gov.au] Sent: Friday, 20 February 2009 11:10 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: ARC media release - Scopus to provide citation information for ERA Good morning Australian Research Council (ARC) CEO, Margaret Sheil, today announced that Scopus will provide citation information for the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative Cluster One evaluation. Please see the attached media release for more information. Media contact: Sheena Ireland Stakeholder Relations 0412 623 056 Further information about the ARC is at www.arc.gov.au Kind regards [ Part 2, Application/OCTET-STREAM (Name: Scopus to provide ] [ citation information for ERA_20 February 2009.pdf) 108KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]
Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...
[ The following text is in the utf-8 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Thanks Charles We are agreed then on the following points: · The ÿÿSelling the houseÿÿ analogy is a poor one. The object (a research article) is in fact never sold or transferred, even by assignment of copyright. A manuscript can of course be sold under common law, but that does not impact on copy rights. · Deposition of a research article in a repository while keeping it Restricted, just like all other types of preservation, is open to any author. · Copyright law can and does change as a consequence of social pressure and non-conformance. In respect of whether copyright consists of copy rights, or prevention of infringing copying, I leave that to the consortium of angels on the head of the OA pin, with confidence that this is an irresolvable issue. I just insert as evidence for the prosecution side the section of the Australian Copyright Act that deals with literary works. For completeness I show sections 31(3)-31(7) though these are solely in relation to computer programs and performances. I point also to the sections relating to right to copy without infringement (such as fair use) and indeed the right to photograph copyright works installed in public places such as free-standing sculptures in a park or plaza (lots of them in the UK though probably many are out of copyright), or pictures in a gallery as evidence of ÿÿrightsÿÿ granted under copyright. I concede to the defence that there are also sections in the Act relating to infringements and remedies. The section I quote also illustrates that copyright varies by the type of work, though as the Act extends to 249 major sections I do not propose to go into detail. Best wishes Arthur Sale COPYRIGHT ACT 1968 - SECT 31 Nature of copyright in original works (1) For the purposes of this Act, unless the contrary intention appears, copyright, in relation to a work, is the exclusive right: (a) in the case of a literary, dramatic or musical work, to do all or any of the following acts: (i) to reproduce the work in a material form; (ii) to publish the work; (iii) to perform the work in public; (iv) to communicate the work to the public; (vi) to make an adaptation of the work; (vii) to do, in relation to a work that is an adaptation of the firstÿÿmentioned work, any of the acts specified in relation to the firstÿÿmentioned work in subparagraphs (i) to (iv), inclusive; and (b) in the case of an artistic work, to do all or any of the following acts: (i) to reproduce the work in a material form; (ii) to publish the work; (iii) to communicate the work to the public; and (c) in the case of a literary work (other than a computer program) or a musical or dramatic work, to enter into a commercial rental arrangement in respect of the work reproduced in a sound recording; and (d) in the case of a computer program, to enter into a commercial rental arrangement in respect of the program. (2) The generality of subparagraph (1)(a)(i) is not affected by subparagraph (1)(a)(vi). (3) Paragraph (1)(d) does not extend to entry into a commercial rental arrangement in respect of a machine or device in which a computer program is embodied if the program is not able to be copied in the course of the ordinary use of the machine or device. (4) The reference in subsection (3) to a device does not include a device of a kind ordinarily used to store computer programs (for example, a floppy disc, a device of the kind commonly known as a CD ROM, or an integrated circuit). (5) Paragraph (1)(d) does not extend to entry into a commercial rental arrangement if the computer program is not the essential object of the rental. (6) Paragraph (1)(c) does not extend to entry into a commercial rental arrangement if: (a) the copy of the sound recording concerned was purchased by a person ( the record owner ) before the commencement of Part 2 of the Copyright (World Trade Organization Amendments) Act 1994 ; and (b) the commercial rental arrangement is entered into in the ordinary course of a business conducted by the record owner; and (c) the record owner was conducting the same business, or another business that consisted of, or included, the making of commercial rental arrangements of the same kind, when the copy was purchased. (7) Paragraph (1)(d
Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...
[ The following text is in the utf-8 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Charles I am glad to see you acknowledging now that assigning copyright is not the same as selling your house or car (physical objects). What an author is giving away is a set of restricted rights to copy and exploit. In the case of copyright assignment they are even giving away to movie and TV exploitation! Publishersÿÿ insistence on copyright assignment, which as Sally has pointed out is changing, is based on authorsÿÿ complaisance. The author, as with everyone one else on the planet, retains rights to fair use access and copying. Indeed the author cannot sell some author rights, such as moral rights. In house/car terms, I donÿÿt know how this would translate ÿÿ maybe in to a right to inspect the house at any time to allow copying for teaching or research purposes? Even stretching the metaphor, assigning copyright is more like an 99-year lease of your house. Depositing data in a repository, though not making it OA, is open to anyone. It is simply part of preserving what one has produced. I suspect that a court would even allow putting it on a Learning Repository, provided access was restricted for teaching purposes to enrolled students. I am sorry, but the existence of a complex law does no6t invalidate people behaving in contradiction to the law or bending it, when it is foolish. Witness jaywalkers in cities or people who momentarily minutely exceed the speed limit in their cars. Conscientious objectors as in WWII are another example. The law will adapt. It is so patently obvious that in most cases that copyright law has not kept up with the technology of the Internet, that it would be a very ÿÿcourageousÿÿ court that convicted someone of breaching copyright by having automated backup services, copying an article to a new computer, or deposition (restricted) in a repository. Regarding your penultimate paragraph, the law has changed recently and does change. Australian copyright law is an example. The issue here is that copyright in respect of music, TV, and other sold-for-profit works is not completely compatible with that of given-away-for-free works. The Australian Copyright Act recognises this. I think that the latest version of the Australian Copyright Act has gone a long way to handle these problems. I would be very surprised if it were unique. Arthur Sale From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk Sent: Monday, 16 February 2009 9:24 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Fair-Use/Schmair-Use... Fair use/fair dealing allows an individual to make a copy for his/her own private study/research (and in a few countries, also for teaching); it also gives the author permission to pass a copy of the item on request to a colleague if that colleague requires it for research or private study. I never have argued otherwise. However, it does NOT give the person the right to put something up on a repository, (in many countries) on a Virtual Learning Environment, etc., without explicit permission from the copyright owner - assuming that its copyright has been given away. The law is an ass, but that doesn't give anyone the right to deliberately flout it. The same applies to motor cars, where just because you are able to drive it at 120 miles per hour whilst high on alcohol or drugs, because the technology allows you to, does not mean it is legal. I'd rather this list encouraged respect for the law, argued for changes in the law, argued for sensible negotiations with publishers rather than just ignoring the law. And as for the law catching up? If you mean, allowing users more flexibility, I rather fear that is in your dreams!! The pressure from rights owners (not publishers, but film, music, software, etc. industries) is to make copyright law even more in favour of them and to make the penalties for infringement more severe. In any case, as Stevan repeatedly points out, this list is for those interested in furthering the cause of OA and copyright is not its main focus. For that reason I do not propose to continue adding words to this particular discussion. Charles Professor Charles Oppenheim Head Department of Information Science Loughborough University Loughborough Leics LE11 3TU Tel 01509-223065 Fax 01509 223053 e mail c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Sale Sent: 15 February 2009 01:00 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use
Re: The German problem with OA
Klaus I take it then that we agree at least that the German problem (if it exists) is confined solely to Germany? That seems to be a logical consequence. Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Klaus Graf Sent: Sunday, 15 February 2009 2:13 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] The German problem with OA Unfortunately it isn't enough to read the German constitution. You have also to read the influential legal interpretations and court decisions. I have made a suggestion for a university mandate in 2007 at http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4369539/ But I have to take into account that not only jurists against OA see the constitutional barriers. OA friends like Eric Steinhauer or Gerd Hansen (advocating a copyright law change that publicly funded scholars would have the right to deposit in repositories after a 6 months embargo) are also against mandates. You can read Hansen's influential refutation (2005) of the Pflüger/Ertmann mandate suggestion in German at: http://www.gerd-hansen.net/Hansen_GRUR_Int_2005_378ff.pdf If you all would applaud Sale's interpretation of the German constitution - that wouldn't change nothing. German jurists only read German legal journals or books. And I cannot see any discussion on the OA via mandates problem in the German OA community (discussions are very rare there). Klaus Graf
Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...
[ The following text is in the UTF-8 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] I agree with Stevan. A simple reading of copyright law in some countries does imply that if you sign away copyright you cannot make copies. But there are many exceptions, including fair use. And the law is an ass. In most cases it has not caught up with the reality of IT and in any case it must be read in conjunction with other law. In practice, when I submit a paper to a journal there will be a copy on my laptop, my home computer and my work PC (not to mention a possible copy on a memory stick). The copy in a repository follows soon after, to satisfy the record-keeping requirements. In the ensuing days and weeks, other copies are directly created by the automated back-up process at university (including the repository) and stored somewhere. Multiple copies are made en route to the publisher and back. Only an insane publisher would contest any of this. They would expect me to keep my article safe and backed up, just in case. They would also know that any court would throw a case contesting normal record-keeping and ICT practice out of the window. The Australian Copyright Act is pretty up to date in this respect and covers this, as in the extract below and elsewhere. The red is my annotation. Note that this is Section 200 of the Copyright Act! I write this at the risk of suggesting that more angels can dance on the head of a pin than is commonly thought of. We need to do what is sensible and wait for the law to catch up, as it will eventually. Arthur Sale COPYRIGHT ACT 1968 - SECT 200AB Use of works and other subject-matter for certain purposes (1) The copyright in a work or other subjectÿÿmatter is not infringed by a use of the work or other subjectÿÿmatter if all the following conditions exist: (a) the circumstances of the use (including those described in paragraphs (b), (c) and (d)) amount to a special case; (b) the use is covered by subsection (2), (3) or (4); (c) the use does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work or other subjectÿÿmatter; (d) the use does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the owner of the copyright. Use by body administering library or archives (2) This subsection covers a use that: (a) is made by or on behalf of the body administering a library or archives; and (b) is made for the purpose of maintaining or operating the library or archives (including operating the library or archives to provide services of a kind usually provided by a library or archives); and (c) is not made partly for the purpose of the body obtaining a commercial advantage or profit. Use by body administering educational institution (3) This subsection covers a use that: (a) is made by or on behalf of a body administering an educational institution; and (b) is made for the purpose of giving educational instruction; and (c) is not made partly for the purpose of the body obtaining a commercial advantage or profit. From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Saturday, 14 February 2009 10:31 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Fair-Use/Schmair-Use... On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:48 AM, Charles Oppenheim c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk wrote (in JISC-REPOSITORIES): Arthur [Sale] is wrong on his final point. When an author assigns copyright to a publisher, the author gives away all rights. It is equivalent to selling your house, your car or anything else. Once you've sold it, you've no right to enjoy it's use any more, even though you were the previous owner. So when an author assigns copyright to a publisher, he or she has no rights to keep a back up copy, store it in a repository, etc., UNLESS the publisher graciously gives permission for the author to do so. But what the publisher cannot do is demand deletion, etc., of earlier drafts of the manuscript, because the author has only assigned the final accepted version to the publisher. With all due respect, if this were true, then the author could not keep and store a paper copy of the final draft of his book in his attic either (or, for that matter, his author's copy of the published book). And, as we all know, earlier drafts are a slippery slope. The penult, which is the refereed draft minus the copy-editing is an earlier draft. So is an author's draft incorporating corrections
The German problem with OA
of travelling to and visiting a public library. SUMMARY 1. Klaus, you are right that Germany has a constitutional issue with OA, though it is probably vanishingly small. It is also unique - the constitutional provisions are due to the special historical conditions that they grew out of in 1949 and are unlikely to be replicated anywhere else in the world. The world is thus safe in classing Germany as a unique case. 2. I believe we are also safe in classing the risk as minimal. I don't think any publisher would dare mount a case in the Constitutional Court, though they might threaten. It would cost them far too much in bad publicity (and money) and they would be certain to lose. 3. The Constitution however can also be construed as requiring OA. Why don't you pursue this avenue vigorously? I believe that your consultant jurist is probably ignorant about OA, but why not ask him/her if the Constitution requires that the outputs of German research should also be available at lowest possible cost to any German citizen? I'd be really interested to read the response. Best wishes from Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Klaus Graf Sent: Monday, 9 February 2009 6:27 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? emergent properties and the compulsory open society ... I do not share the opinions of the German legal experts but it is a fact that the legal mainstream in Germany regards a mandate not compatible with the freedom of research (art. 5 Grundgesetz) i.e. against a fundamental right of the German constitution. It wouldn't be enough to change a law according these opinions - the constitution has to be changed (with other words: forget it). I do not think that there is a chance to convince the German jurists. Klaus Graf
RE: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
Let me make a clear distinction between ~U Subject-based repositories, and ~U Multi-disciplinary repositories. The rhetoric about institutional repositories arises because (a) they are multi-disciplinary, and (b) because the owning institutions are empowered to mandate deposit. No subject-based repository can match these conditions. There is no reason in the world why IRs cannot co-exist with consortial arrangements (ie aggregates of research institutions), especially in the case of small countries or university groups with low research output, and they do. These are just a bit larger 'institutions'. IRs can co-exist with subject repositories too, though at some risk of confusion and duplication. For example an NIH mandate and an institutional mandate require two deposits or an automated synchronization process between the two, or three, or... No matter, we can live with that too since the important issue is to get 100% of the world's research online anyhow. If central harvesters have not made much progress it is because the amount to harvest remains too fractional. I totally disagree that researchers should be free to deposit where they will. Their employers or funds-granters have total responsibility for directing them. Researchers are not free agents. (There are exceptions for unemployed free-lance researchers of course, but they are a small fraction of the world's research authors.) Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Chanier Thierry Sent: Friday, 6 February 2009 4:34 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Liège] Dear all, I agree. The question of tools for central repository (CR) is central. - it is preferable to avoid opposing CR and (Institutional repository) IR. In some countries, CRs may be prominent (particularly because local institution have a low status, so IR may not mean much to researchers ... when they exist), because centralized procedures for evaluating research may offer opportunity to researchers to start depositing - see hereafter about France -). - Researchers should be free to choose where they deposit but with requirements to deposit. They may do it in different repositories (I mean one document is only in one place, but depending on the nature of the document / data, one may choose various repositories) - It is a tactical decision for OA supporters, knowing the local habits, to advertise ways of deposit to colleagues - we have to make sure that people in charge of funding research (EU, National) do not oblige researchers to deposit in one specific place (their CR or any other) - But I understand them, because when they ask researchers to give access to their work and advertise the fact that they have been paid by them, there are currently no practical way of doing it (labels put on deposit with the name of the program which gave the money, and harvesters able to compute this information ?) - I also understand them because I feel that they want to add interesting tools (search, computation, meta-engine), tools which could be developped by central harvesters (CH). We are late on this issue and harvesters have not made much progress (see hereafter). See hereafter for details if interested. Thierry Chanier 1) HAL and research evaluation - 3 years ago I tried to convince my former lab to open a sub-archive within HAL (same repository, but URL specific to the lab, with proper interface). I also tried to convince my university to have a general meeting with directors of local labs in order to invite them to do the same and, at another level, to manage the sub-archive in HAL for the university (a solution somewhere in between CR and IR). My colleague of the lab agreed, started the work but gave up because of lack of time. My university never answered to my proposal. Now, thanks to procedures for evaluating research in France, lab will have to choose the way they want to be evaluated(I mean the technical procedure to achieve it). Some software used by the national board will make computation out of HAL. Consequently, my lab decided this week to urgently re-open and manage its sub-archive in HAL. Of course, the first thing they have to do is deposit of metadata. Actual deposit of corresponding papers is not mandatory. But they will take the opportunity to suggest to researchers to deposit as well their full papers. Last thing : I do not mean that in France, only HAL should be used. We should make sure we have the choice to deposit where we please. 2) Harversters : advantages and current limits -- Just a personal experience. Till recently I used to advertise my list of publications by giving the URL
RE: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Fwd: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
Klaus 1. Almost all research intensive universities in the world now have repositories. I am sorry if yours doesn't. The remaining non-research oriented universities will follow suit if it suits them, and there are at most 10,000 of them. 2. I accept there are a few thousand scholars with no university or research lab institutional affiliation. I myself exist on the fringe of UTas as a retired Emeritus Professor. Consortial arrangements will take care of this when we reach near 100% capture (such as the Tasmanian Museum Art Gallery - a primary source of key botanical and zoological data) - well say 80%. Arguing for 10-15% is a defeatist attitude. 3. Your third argument is true but silly. It simply does not make sense. IRs are primary as they link to researcher output, CRs and publishers are secondary. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Klaus Graf Sent: Friday, 6 February 2009 5:00 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Fwd: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Liège] -- Forwarded message -- From: Klaus Graf klausg...@googlemail.com List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: 2009/2/5 Subject: Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Liège] To: fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org (1) Please consider that most universites worldwide doesn't have IRs. (2) Please take into account that thousands of scholars have NO university affiliation. (I cannot see that my idea to open IRs for alumni research has get any feedback.) (3) IR managers can take all eprints from institution-affiliated scholars which are libre OA (under CC-BY or CC-BY-NC/ND) and available on a publisher's website or in a CR/TR. This is one reason why gratis OA isn't enough. Klaus Graf http://archiv.twoday.net
RE: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�
What a load of rubbish. If we follow that line, academics would be free not to publish their research, not to participate in evaluations, not to set and mark examination papers, not to deliver lectures, etc. This is a total misconstruction of academic freedom. What 'academic freedom' means is that academics can say (and write) things that are unpalatable to their employers and more importantly, their funders including governments, without fear of losing their jobs. I have and do exploit this sort of academic freedom all the time. I strongly support academics being required to contribute to their discipline and access to knowledge (and opinion). Otherwise why are they employed? Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Krichel Sent: Friday, 6 February 2009 11:02 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Liège] Arthur Sale writes I totally disagree that researchers should be free to deposit where they will. This one of the basic tennants of academic fredom. Instititutional mandates reduce that freedom. That's why I, and many other academics, oppose mandates. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates
Sally Had you asked this question of UTas academics and PhD students, you would have answers, but which you would have found irreconcilable. The UTas Library (of course at this instant in time) subscribes to a variety of journals and bundles, most of which include an electronic access provisions. However in addition, the Document Delivery section of the Library provides delayed access to any given article for free (ie university-paid) if it is not held (up to a limit for each department which is seldom reached). So UTas researchers would need to be instructed what `not accessible' meant before they could answer your questionnaire meaningfully. The situation is not unique, I think. It would of course help enormously if the preprint of the actual article was available free online, wouldn't it? Accuracy of comment would improve greatly. At least you are receiving some peer review online, and that's good I think. Arthur From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris (Morris Associates) Sent: Wednesday, 21 January 2009 10:02 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates There were questions about how they accessed copies of articles. However, the question we're discussing related specifically to the situation where they did NOT have access to the published version Sally Sally Morris Partner, Morris Associates - Publishing Consultancy South House, The Street Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Tel: +44(0)1903 871286 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Sale Sent: 20 January 2009 21:29 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates Sally They could have meant that they used a famous search engine which threw up the article's metadata (including journal title) high in the ranked list, and then knowing that their Library held the journal in its subscriptions, proceeded to the Library website to download the published version. What else indeed? I'm even inclined to do this myself, but it does not mean it is ideal. It wastes my time to a small extent. Almost all scientists these days start a search with a search engine if they are not following references or backtracking citations, and they certainly don't walk even 5 minutes to a print library. If it is not online (free or pre-paid), it is not available (except for known ancient materials). Print libraries these days are mostly populated by undergraduate students. This seems to be universal, but is certainly the case at the University of Tasmania. Arthur Sale From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris (Morris Associates) Sent: Tuesday, 20 January 2009 9:53 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates I would assume that those who said they never accessed self-archived versions, even when they had no access to the print version, must have meant that they never even tried to do so (for a variety of interesting reasons, which they listed). What else could they possibly mean? Sally Sally Morris Partner, Morris Associates - Publishing Consultancy South House, The Street Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Tel: +44(0)1903 871286 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 19 January 2009 23:49 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote: Sue Thorn and I will shortly be publishing a report of a research study on the attitudes and behaviour of 1368 members of UK-based learned societies in the life sciences. 72.5% said they never used self-archived articles when they had access to the published version; This makes sense. The self-archived versions are supplements, for those who don't have subscription access. 3% did so whenever possible, 10% sometimes and 14
Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates
Sally They could have meant that they used a famous search engine which threw up the article's metadata (including journal title) high in the ranked list, and then knowing that their Library held the journal in its subscriptions, proceeded to the Library website to download the published version. What else indeed? I'm even inclined to do this myself, but it does not mean it is ideal. It wastes my time to a small extent. Almost all scientists these days start a search with a search engine if they are not following references or backtracking citations, and they certainly don't walk even 5 minutes to a print library. If it is not online (free or pre-paid), it is not available (except for known ancient materials). Print libraries these days are mostly populated by undergraduate students. This seems to be universal, but is certainly the case at the University of Tasmania. Arthur Sale From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris (Morris Associates) Sent: Tuesday, 20 January 2009 9:53 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates I would assume that those who said they never accessed self-archived versions, even when they had no access to the print version, must have meant that they never even tried to do so (for a variety of interesting reasons, which they listed). What else could they possibly mean? Sally Sally Morris Partner, Morris Associates - Publishing Consultancy South House, The Street Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Tel: +44(0)1903 871286 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 19 January 2009 23:49 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote: Sue Thorn and I will shortly be publishing a report of a research study on the attitudes and behaviour of 1368 members of UK-based learned societies in the life sciences. 72.5% said they never used self-archived articles when they had access to the published version; This makes sense. The self-archived versions are supplements, for those who don't have subscription access. 3% did so whenever possible, 10% sometimes and 14% rarely. When they did not have access to the published version, 53% still never accessed the self-archived version; This is an odd category: Wouldn't one have to know what percentage of those articles -- to which these respondents did not have subscription access -- in fact had self-archived versions at all? (The global baseline for spontaneous self-archiving is around 15%; see, for example http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/178_elpub2008.content.pdf) The way it is stated above, it sounds as if the authors knew there was a self-archived version, but chose not to use it. I would strongly doubt that... 16% did so whenever possible, That 16% sounds awfully close to the baseline 15% where it *is* possible, because the self-archived supplement exists. In that case, the right description would be that 100% did so. (But I rather suspect the questions were again posed in such an ambiguous way that it is impossible to sort any of this out.) 16% sometimes and 15% rarely. However, 13% of references were not in fact to self-archiving repositories - they included Athens, Ovid, Science Direct and ISI Web of Science/Web of Knowledge. To get responses on self-archived content, you have to very carefully explain to your respondents what is and is not meant by self-archived content: Free online versions, not those you *or your institution* have to pay subscription tolls to access. Stevan Harnad
Re: Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA
Klaus I find your conclusions regarding the Request Button unproven. · Firstly, it is obvious that the button works in the case of the University of Tasmania. You got two papers, so the software works. · Secondly the sample was ridiculously small. · Thirdly, you have given no indication of what you asked for. For example if you had asked for a thesis, the following could have happened: a. The research might have a totally banned commercial reason for non-disclosure (I have just had a PhD student graduate, and the company that sponsors him insists on a two year total embargo so they can exploit the research. This is not peer reviewed and published research. b. You might be asking during the exam period / summer holidays (you will know your northern summer is 6 months out of sync with ours, ditto academic year). c. The graduate may have left the University and the email address on record might be defunct. · Fourthly, the author may still be ignorant or worried about their rights under Australian copyright law (unfounded, but real). Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Klaus Graf On October 11, I requested 7 titles from the U of Tasmania repository found with the following query: http://tinyurl.com/5dbssm On October 12 and 14 I get summa summarum 2 results, i.e. the PDFs of the requested eprints. For me this is enough empirical evidence to say that there is until now no empirical evidence that the RCB works! Klaus Graf .
Re: Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA
Dear Klaus I don't believe you are an idiot, but if you want to be taken seriously you must give the data to support your arguments. It was really interesting to see, for example, that the two papers you received were from our top 1% of researchers (Professors Large and Canty). Large h-index 12, 67 papers, 680 citations, paper 0 cites published 2007, Geology; Canty h-index 8, 111 papers, 294 citations, paper 0 cites published 2008, Chemistry. Your queries were pitched right in the middle of the examinations period, and I am sure that even in Germany you would expect this to have consequences for responses. You also chose three geology papers, which we know here have some of the most restrictive copyright policies on the planet. The reasons are obvious: there is a lot of money involved in minerals exploitation (billions of dollars) and people pay very high prices for these journals. One paper (your second, from Education) is unpublished, for a reason I don't know, but in any case it is not yet public nor refereed. The remaining three are from political science (2) and chemistry (1). Since this is early days in the use of the button, I thought 2/6 (33%) is actually not a bad response even ignoring the time of the year. It is certainly a better access rate than 0/6, and better than non-mandatory OA deposit (around 10-15%). Obviously we in Tasmania need to do more work to educate our depositors to respond to 'reprint' requests, and we will. So maybe if I concede that the button is not infallible, perhaps you will concede that it is so far better than any non-mandatory deposit scheme known. I would be grateful if you would stop labelling all processes at the University of Tasmania that you don't agree with as Harnadian. I make up my own mind as to what to implement. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Klaus Graf Sent: Saturday, 22 November 2008 2:05 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA 2008/11/22 Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au: Klaus I find your conclusions regarding the Request Button unproven. . Firstly, it is obvious that the button works in the case of the University of Tasmania. You got two papers, so the software works. That was'nt the point. Like Professor Harnad you seems to use a rabulistic discussion style. . Secondly the sample was ridiculously small. This is true. So what? I requested 7 articles and received only 2. In find this a very poor result for a Harnadian patent recipe. . Thirdly, you have given no indication of what you asked for. For example if you had asked for a thesis, the following could have happened: I did'nt ask for a thesis. Do you think I am an idiot not knowing what OA a la Harnad means? I asked for the following papers: Reading, AM and Kennett, BLN and Goleby, B (2007) New constraints on the seismic structure of West Australia: Evidence for terrane stabilization prior to the assembly of an ancient continent? Geology, 35 (4). pp. 379-382. ISSN 0091-7613 Reading_2007_Geology.pdf Smith, KH (2006) Promoting innovation in Australia: business and policy issues. Discussion Paper. Australian Business Foundation, Sydney. InnovationKnowledgeEconomyFull.pdf Kellow, AJ and Haward, M and Welch, K (2005) Salmon and Fruit Salad: Australia's Response to World Trade Organisation Quarantine Disputes*. Australian Journal of Political Science, 40 (1). pp. 17-32. ISSN 1036-1146 K4H24P2700606224.pdf Cooke, DR and McPhail, DC (2001) Epithermal Au-Ag-Te Mineralization, Acupan, Baguio District, Philippines: Numerical Simulations of Mineral Deposition. Economic Geology, 96 (1). pp. 109-131. ISSN 0361-0128 Cooke_McPhail_ECON_GEOL_2001.pdf Haward, M and Rothwell, DR and Jabour, J and Hall, R and Kellow, AJ and Kriwoken, L and Lugten, GL and Hemmings, AD (2006) Australia's Antarctic agenda. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 60 (3). pp. 439-456. ISSN 1035-7718 CAJI_A_186498_O.pdf Large, RR and Maslennikov, V and Robert, F and Danyushevsky, LV and Chang, Z (2007) Multistage sedimentary and metamorphic origin of pyrite and gold in the giant Sukhoi Log deposit, Lena gold province, Russia. Economic Geology, 102 (7). pp. 1233-1267. ISSN 0361-0128 Multistage_Sedimentary.pdf [received] Canty, AJ and Deverell, JA and Gomann, A and Guijt, RM and Rodemann, T and Smith, JA (2008) Microfluidic Devices for Flow-Through Supported Palladium Catalysis on Porous Organic Monolith. Australian Journal of Chemistry, 61 (8). pp. 630-633. ISSN 0004-9425 AustJChem_2008.pdf [received] Klaus Graf
Withdrawal from Open Access
I have recently come across two cases of an author asking for their paper to be withdrawn from the proceedings (online, OA) of a conference. I am pursing these cases as I can to find out why. I assume that the conferences did not have an appropriate license agreement allowing them to make the paper OA, though few authors would pay much attention to that anyway. There are a variety of possible reasons; perhaps reader of this list can suggest others: 1. The authors want to publish their paper in a journal as well to get double counted value in their cv from their research. 2. Conferences don't count for anything in their field, but journal articles do. 3. As above in 1 and 2, and the authors have been scared by publisher's words about `prior publication' invalidating submission. 4. The work is plagiarized, fraudulent, or is a case of multiple papers spread over one research nugget, and the authors do not want to be found out. 5. The authors do not believe the Internet is suitable for scientific publication and discovery. 6. The authors are in their 60s or 70s and set in their ways (not Internet-savvy). ... It is worthwhile trying to understand these counter-intuitive actions. There may be lessons to be learnt. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania
Re: FW: Liblicense-l: rules of the road
Dear moderator Can we please regard this subject as closed? I don't want to waste my time on any more of this. I note that Sally's posting violates even Rule 3 she quotes. As far as I am concerned it is all noise and no signal. Arthur -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris (Morris Associates) Sent: Thursday, 23 October 2008 10:09 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] FW: Liblicense-l: rules of the road Here's a set of 'rules' for another email discussion forum, one which I personally think is moderated in an exemplary fashion Sally (Forwarding with Ann's permission) Sally Morris Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy) South House, The Street Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Tel: +44(0)1903 871286 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: owner-liblicens...@lists.yale.edu [mailto:owner-liblicens...@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Okerson, Ann Sent: 23 October 2008 00:15 To: liblicens...@lists.yale.edu Subject: Liblicense-l: rules of the road Dear Readers: A couple of individuals have asked if liblicense-l has any rules of the road for moderation. I've tried to set them down, and here they are. Comments? Thank you, Ann ___ liblicense-l: Rules of the Road The hallmark of liblicense-l for many years has been its mix of current information of high value to librarians and publishers and friends, with serious and spirited discussion of issues that engage, perplex, and divide us. The moderator participates but hopes that the moderating hand is mainly invisible. But even if invisible, it is still active, seeking to keep the list valuable as a place for both information and discussion. First rule: If we can possibly post a submitted message, it will be posted, as soon as possible (usually this happens in the evenings), timing adjusted perhaps by professional travel and responsibilities, quirky networks, and the occasional balky laptop. We're not fond of censors and have no ambition to take on that role. Second rule: Tedium is tedious, so if there's a choice, messages are preferred to be shorter rather than longer. Once in a while if a message seems too long to sustain attention or promote conversation, we will ask the poster to shorten or perhaps point to a URL for fuller discussion. Third rule: Embarrassment is embarrassing and unpleasantness is unpleasant. If threads linger to the point where the posters lose perspective and the signal to noise ratio falls near zero, we will stop a conversation discreetly, perhaps by a note, as kindly as possible, to one or two posters. Fourth rule: Insults are unnecessary, so we try to ask posters to restate something if only heat and not light will result. (We do sometimes occasionally miss a potential source of affront, and apologies for that.) This does mean recognizing the personalities and styles of the regular posters, in particular, and not thwarting their evident pleasure in thwacking away at each other a bit with cushiony oversize boxing mitts. A bit of that may liven things up. Fifth rule: Nobody makes money here. Publisher announcements are posted when they seem to be of genuine interest to the readers here - e.g., announcing a very important piece of business, a new kind of partnership, a business model, or an ambitious project. Single announcements of individual new titles or new hires rarely meet that test of interest. Sixth rule: We all agree we dislike monopolies, so when there is risk of a poster monopolizing the conversation, we write to that person to ask for some restraint. Seventh rule: The Web is an even more wondrous place when we check URLs first to be sure they're working. Even then, the URL doesn't always work, though. Eighth rule: Vanilla ASCII RULES. Sometimes evenings are spent reformatting, word by word, messages that, unfortunately, don't arrive as plain text -- provided such messages are readable at the moderator end; often they are not and must be returned to the sender. The Listproc software garbles non-ASCII text, html formatting, or attachments to some extent or totally, which means that it is a kindness to the moderator when posters send ASCII-only. (No smart quotes, no em-dashes or en-dashes, no umlauts or accents.) Why use listproc? Because many of our subscribers are in countries where internet access doesn't permit easy receipt of fancy or complicated messages. Sometimes, character by character cleanup (not fun, believe me) doesn't work and gibberished messages go get to the list, so we go back to the archive to clean up the =20 and =93 signs that have crept in. That's not fun, either, but we do it. Ninth rule: Do all the previous message in the thread need to be included with your response? Often, the answer is
Re: Brisbane declaration on Open Access (fwd)
Totally agree Sally, it is worth pointing out. Actually the primary Version of Record for a print journal is normally the paper article (not electronic at all and on varying paper sizes dependent on country and publisher), and an electronic VoR file is a derived Version of Record usually expressed at a lower but adequate quality of reproduction, though I have come across electronic VoRs that have colour images and charts while the print VoRs are monochrome. The VoR terminology is in fact not sufficiently precise without an electronic qualification. In addition one can readily find Versions of Record in html and associated files (typically in online-only journals) and in XML (the preferred format for many reasons). The Brisbane Declaration did not go into formats, though I used the term publisher's pdf in my summary so as not to be misunderstood since this term is much more widely understood than Version of Record. Sorry. However, I am doing my bit to spread awareness of the NISO terminology. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris (Morris Associates) Sent: Friday, 10 October 2008 12:45 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Brisbane declaration on Open Access (fwd) Perhaps it's worth just pointing out that the Version of Record is not necessarily in PDF format Sally Sally Morris Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy) South House, The Street Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Tel: +44(0)1903 871286 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Sale Sent: 09 October 2008 02:17 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Brisbane declaration on Open Access (fwd) This declaration has got swallowed up amongst the c**P that has polluted this forum in the last days. May I tease out a few strands of the Brisbane Declaration for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference in Brisbane. 1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of the active members of the repository community in Australia. 2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what Australia should do about making its research accessible. It is not a policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are inevitably needed in a formal policy. 3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research. 4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data and knowledge (in the humanities and arts). 5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs (Versions of Record) were not the preferred version of an article to hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft (Accepted Manuscript) which is preferred. The Version of Record remains the citable object. 6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA when possible). While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a cusp.. What are the chances of a matching declaration in other countries? Arthur Sale University of Tasmania == Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants. Brisbane Declaration Preamble
Re: Brisbane declaration on Open Access (fwd)
This declaration has got swallowed up amongst the c**P that has polluted this forum in the last days. May I tease out a few strands of the Brisbane Declaration for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference in Brisbane. 1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of the active members of the repository community in Australia. 2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what Australia should do about making its research accessible. It is not a policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are inevitably needed in a formal policy. 3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research. 4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data and knowledge (in the humanities and arts). 5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs (Versions of Record) were not the preferred version of an article to hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft (Accepted Manuscript) which is preferred. The Version of Record remains the citable object. 6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA when possible). While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a cusp.. What are the chances of a matching declaration in other countries? Arthur Sale University of Tasmania == Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants. Brisbane Declaration Preamble The participants recognise Open Access as a strategic enabling activity, on which research and inquiry will rely at international, national, university, group and individual levels. Strategies Therefore the participants resolve the following as a summary of the basic strategies that Australia must adopt: 1 Every citizen should have free open access to publicly funded research, data and knowledge. 2 Every Australian university should have access to a digital repository to store its research outputs for this purpose. 3 As a minimum, this repository should contain all materials reported in the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC). 4 The deposit of materials should take place as soon as possible, and in the case of published research articles should be of the author's final draft at the time of acceptance so as to maximize open access to the material. Brisbane, September, 2008
Re: Zurich Open Access: Still disappointing
Klaus The 'Request a Copy' button only works if the repository has an email address for an author. An email address for the depositor is not the same, and regrettably many self-archivers don't seem to realize that depositor is not necessarily an author. Remember also that responding to the button is at the discretion of the author. Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Klaus Graf Sent: Sunday, 7 September 2008 12:12 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Zurich Open Access: Still disappointing http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5173851/ (in German) Some results of my test: There are in the Arts faculty 58 eprints with 26 OA full texts. Without Psychology: 25 eprints and 7 full texts. I have also checked the 21 eprints from the last Tuesday: only 2 OA full texts. From the 13 eprints with fulltext only available for registered users only 5 have a Request a copy button. This feature doesn't work in all cases well. If the request is technically accepted one receives a mail confirmation: If you do not receive a reply or need advice at a later time please contact the administrator. For items with copyright implications, you may also be able to contact your local interlibrary loan service. The low percentage of full texts in Zurich seems to give some evidence against the OA mantra that most publishers allow green OA: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5169934/ Klaus Graf
Re: Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy
Let me add something that I have said repeatedly in many forums and without contradiction: Universities are delinquent in their duty of public accountability if they do not make all their research outputs which are not specifically commissioned by private enterprise publicly accessible on the Internet. One simply cannot say the same for any `central' or better `subject' repository, for which deposit is simply desirable. Funders can nominate where they want the research they fund to be deposited, but in reality, to do so other than in the institutional repository simply creates extra work for everyone, and conflicts of interest. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Thursday, 24 July 2008 2:58 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Guédon Jean-Claude jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: How can Harnad simultaneously state that there is no drive on his part against institution-external OA repositories and then proceed to state point 4? To repeat: No drive against institution-external OA repositories, just a drive against MANDATING DIRECT DEPOSIT in institution-external OA repositories. (Deposit mandates should be convergent, on institutional OA repositories, not divergent; then institution-external OA repositories can harvest the deposits from the institutional OA repositories.) Reason: To facilitate instead of retarding the scaling up to universal OA. (It would save readers a lot of time and bandwidth if those rushing to proclaim Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy would first take the trouble to understand what Harnad is saying on OA deposit and APA policy...) Stevan Harnad
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
I think there is some talking at cross purposes going on here. The term `central repository' or CR is a misnomer and has led you astray, because even so-called CRs are distributed repositories in the context of global scholarly work. Better to talk about `subject repository' or SR, to make it clear that the discussion is simply about whether the world is divided up by subject or by institution (or at the moment by both and neither). Second point: a consortium of universities (even a whole country) can establish a repository, which retains its IR characteristic of being multi-disciplinary. It is an IR in style, and subject to exactly the same benefits and disadvantages as a single institution IR. There are many examples worldwide including Australia and the UK, so I hope that this disposes of the small university problem cited in India. Such repositories are collaborative IRs. There is no problem with establishing such collaborative IRs. The key issue in the discussion between SRs and IRs is that (a) Subjects and disciplines do not provide a unique partitioning of world research. Categories overlap and are blurred. The domain is confused. (b) SRs in general have no secure funding source. (c) SRs have no possibility of mandating deposit in that discipline. If it occurs, great. If it doesn't, wring your hands. (d) IRs of all types have mandatory mechanisms available to them. (e) IRs of all types have secure access to the quite low level of funds required to run them. (f) IRs do not in general overlap, because they are defined by discrete entities. If the few thousand research universities in the world had access to an IR, the world's research could be 100% captured. Summary - Any successful CR is to be applauded. However CRs do not provide a scalable model for open access. Only IRs do. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Atanu Garai/Lists Sent: Sunday, 9 March 2008 3:51 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Central versus institutional self-archiving Thanks Stevan. These are key points that are coming to my mind. Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: Dear Colleagues This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions? Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh those of CRs on every count: This forum must have discussed this issue. Also, the objective of posing this question should be made clear, so that you can find it in the right context and spirit. At one point of time and still now, we wanted to have disbursed information platforms and database. But with the emergence of large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the advantages of having a centralised global databases are becoming obvious. A choice between 'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy decision for a university or group of universities and such a decision is driven by number of factors. Again, the question is what are the sequence of events and rationale that led the open access community to select IRs as primary archiving mechanism over CRs. Institutions should be able to make a choice of their own, but if you want to advise the institutions what should be the key criteria to advise them to go for own IRs, over the CRs. (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide network of independent research institutions (mostly universities). (2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.) http://roar.eprints.org/ http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/ Points 1 and 2 are essentially
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
Thomas, what you actually wrote is Show me an archive, and a university, who will vouch that for a certain period, all that is in the IR with free full-text is a equivalent to the university's authors' total research papers in the same period. Does such a university exist? Such a university can never and will never exist if you insist on every term in the statement. Mainly because no university authority can ever know all of the university authors' research output with absolute certainty, unless its staff size is very small (say less than 50). Maybe the head of a small research institute can be that sure, but a senior executive simply can't for even a small size university. Insistence on a free full-text is also impossible given current publisher requirements, though deposit of a full-text is achievable. Exactly the same is true of discipline specific repositories, with the proviso that the repository manager must be even more unsure. I assumed that you meant the question seriously and would accept 'close to all'. To be reasonably sure that you are capturing close to all research output requires some audit capability - for example that there is independently collected data on the university's research output to compare with the repository. As it happens, such a situation existed in Australia in 2007 as you probably know. The HERDC data collection for Government provides such an independent estimate. The HERDC is spot-audited by Government to prevent over-claiming. Queensland University of Technology I assert that QUT achieves an acceptable closeness to collecting all research output in its repository. Indeed Paula Callan is in a good position to cross-check the two collections against each other, and does so. The QUT policy statement is widely known within Australia and outside, and you can read the current version approved by the Academic Senate at http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/F/F_01_03.jsp. The QUT eprints site is certainly up now because I checked. University of Queensland As to UQ, I need not wait until 2009 to know that they will collect all research output for 2008 by March 2009. They are simply implementing the usual Australian Government HERDC report through their repository. In other words the HERDC report will be generated from the repository contents. That guarantees that they will collect the same data that the HERDC requires or suffer financially for it by losing funds from the research block grant. As I wrote, I need no evidence to know this (nor does any other Australian repository manager), though it will be worth confirming in 2009. This policy is weaker than QUT's because it is not necessarily Immediate Deposit (ID), but it is also stronger since it guarantees much closer to 100%. There is a financial penalty for losing publications, often down to the department. Of course there may always be a small number of missing publications in any system. This may be because of laziness on the part of the authors, mislaid documentation, illness, or other reasons. Charles Sturt University and others BTW, Charles Sturt University has exactly the same intention. Probably about ten or more other Australian universities are actively considering the same step as UQ, because it eliminates duplication of work. Disagreement You write But I hope that we can agree that, from today's perspective, filling IRs until we achieve 100% open access will be a very very long process. Sorry, we can't agree. Filling IRs is happening now. The rate varies by country and situation, of course. I have hopes that IRs in all or most ~40 Australian universities will be capturing substantially all their research output by say two years. It may not all be open access, but it will be deposited. And by filling, I don't mean retrospectivity but that current output is captured and continues to be captured into the future. I could agree with you that filling discipline-specific repositories and covering all disciplines and inter-disciplinary fields will be a very long process, if that will help. Arthur Sale Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAX I.ORG] On Behalf Of Thomas Krichel Sent: Sunday, 17 February 2008 3:10 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] How to Compare IRs and CRs Arthur Sale writes In response to Tom's request for one university that will guarantee that they collect all their research output, here are two: Queensland Institute of Technology, Australia, since 2004. University mandate since 2004. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Now in its 5th year! The site can not be reached on Februrary 17 at 09:41:21 NOVT 2008. http://qut.edu.au can be, but I don't find such a statement there. University of Queensland, Australia, since beginning
Re: New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories
Mark Doyle The dominant institutional repository softwares ALL have such simple identifiers. The softwares are not badly designed. But that does not obscure the essential point that inward bound links on the open web are a minor contributor to a repository success. Many links that are used are not exposed on the Web, and are simply kept in an EndNote file, or bookmarked. People use institutional repositories via search engines, not links. Subject repositories are subject to different rules. Arthur -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAX I.ORG] On Behalf Of Mark Doyle Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2008 6:41 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories Hi, On Feb 12, 2008, at 4:38 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: This brings me to the second point: Repositories were not set up to provide linkage, and if they were to be in the deep web apart from being harvestable, their utility would be only slightly weakened. Indeed this is exactly the situation with most of the PhD thesis repositories in Australia. The federated site is open to the Web, and a very few thesis sites like my university's, but most university repositories are simply in the deep web, accessed only by the federated harvester. This is the Australasian Digital Theses Program, also listed in the Webometrics top 200. I haven't heard 30+ universities complaining about the loss of links. I think this is poor design. Depending on bookmarked URLs and 'browse by name' is a rather fragile infrastructure. One of the reasons that a central repository like arXiv.org is so successful is because Ginsparg, in his wisdom, came up with short, somewhat meaningful identifiers (new arXiv ids are now slightly less than ideal, but at least you can tell right away when something was first entered into the repository) AND provided for the ubiquitous linking to arXiv.org via the /abs/ID URL. These URLs have been stable since they were introduced in 1994 when the web interface was introduced (even after the xxx.lanl.gov - arXiv.org transition). This has allowed the arXiv staff to insert clickable links into the PDFs and people to trivially link to the arXiv version of a work. On the publisher side, considerable effort has been put into introducing DOIs which again make it easy to provide interlinking between scholarly articles. Some publishers (like APS) have easy to create DOIs from the usual (journal, volume, page) metadata (or even URLs that don't depend on a DOI), while others are more opaque. CrossRef levels the playing field though and makes DOIs easily discoverable. In any case, one should not underestimate the usefulness of having simple identifiers that map algorithmically to permanent URLs. Best, Mark Mark Doyle Assistant Director, Journal Information Systems The American Physical Society
Re: New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories
Steve and Isidro There are two points about links. The main point about links is that they are hardly used. Over 75% of entries to an average institutional repository comes from an out-of-repository search engine. The small number of uses of the in-repository search are by the local repository community. Entry by following links established by prior search or browse are more scattered, but in our case are easily dominated by accessing links from the University Library website. Next comes accesses by medical students from a med student website to our most popular document - a psychiatry textbook. I assert that none of these are critical to a repository's success. I also note that my evidence points to people bookmarking a useful paper, rather than going to the trouble of writing it in a web-accessible page. The exceptions, as I noted before, are hyperlinks from the university's own bureaucracy, such as corporate staff pages, and the research website. For example all my papers are linked to from the research website. My publications are accessed via link to a browse by name facility. I suspect that only very few follow these links, which seems to be borne out by the evidence from the logs. Please note that I am not against using inward-bound links as one component of a rich set of metrics. It should be in there. But giving it a 50% weighting is absurd! 10% is more reasonable a priori. This brings me to the second point: Repositories were not set up to provide linkage, and if they were to be in the deep web apart from being harvestable, their utility would be only slightly weakened. Indeed this is exactly the situation with most of the PhD thesis repositories in Australia. The federated site is open to the Web, and a very few thesis sites like my university's, but most university repositories are simply in the deep web, accessed only by the federated harvester. This is the Australasian Digital Theses Program, also listed in the Webometrics top 200. I haven't heard 30+ universities complaining about the loss of links. Arthur Sale Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAX I.ORG] On Behalf Of Steve Hitchcock Sent: Tuesday, 12 February 2008 11:44 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories I agree with most of Arthur's points, especially with regard to activity and download measures, but I'm puzzled by his comments about link-based visibility. He may be criticising the method of calculation or its use in the overall factoring, but in principle links seem a relevant measure for repositories and one that should be factored in.
Re: New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories
Isidro As one of those that contributed to that discussion, may I be more specific? The impact of a repository should be measured by things other than some of the measures that you use. PageRank and Size are both very weak indicators. I give examples below. VISIBILITY Visibility in the way you measure is nothing to do with the purpose of repositories, and only a minor factor in their impact. Let me give examples: * Inward links to the repository itself are relatively rare, and probably negligible in the total. Almost no-one really goes to a repository to search its content except locally - its value is in federation. The exceptions are (1) central repositories such as CERN, RepEc, ArXiv, etc, and (2) exemplar repositories such as Southampton and QUT. The component is hugely biased towards these repositories. * The majority of links to institutional repositories on the Web are probably from depositor's home pages, linking to their research records. In UTas we will gain 600-1000 such links once it is in the standard staff member template. Is this visibility? Or does it measure university size? * In a few cases, viewers may link to a paper. However to do this they have to value the paper significantly, then copy the URL, and then post it to a public website or blog. I expect this is a minority in the total of links. Any data otherwise? In any case it is dependent on an author's importance in the field, not the repository value. REAL VISIBILITY Real visibility in the case of a repository consists in (a) whether it provides a compliant OAI-PMH interface, and (b) whether that interface is harvested by federated services, such as ROAR, OAIster, etc. One might also add whether the repository is actively harvested as a flat file or via OAI by Google and Google Scholar, Scopus, or Thomson. Noithing else really matters in respect of visibility. All these are measurable. PageRank is irrelevant, sorry. SIZE Size is a terrible measure. Australia is full of examples where the repository has been populated by uploading zillions of old stub records going back to the 1930s or before. The full text is mostly missing, though sometimes a grant has funded image scanning of the document. This is fullness for the sake of fullness. To give one example in your list, the Australasian Digital Thesis Program has 110,000 records of this type of old PhD theses. The full-text simply says: contact the university for a photocopy. That's OK, but the weighting of size ought to be low - less than 20%. If it is necessary to measure size, and it probably is, then I suggest a measure that counts the number of records with a publication date within the last five years. Choose 10 years if you want, but ancient record-keeping does not translate into impact. ACTIVITY It is quite clear from ROAR that deposit activity is a major measure of impact. There are three easy measures to derive. * The number of acquisitions in the last 12 months. Easily discovered from the OAI interface. The number of acquisitions with a publication date in the last 12 months. Easily discovered from the OAI interface. This measures currency as well as activity. * Some repositories are sporadic, some are continuous, the latter reflecting a deep-seated integration within the university's activity. A simple measure would be to derive a statistic from the traffic (see ROAR), such as + number of days in last 12 months with a deposit event + the Fourier spectrum of the last 12 months deposit events having no component with a period longer than 7 days above 10% (I guess at what is significant and perhaps this can be turned into a score). RICH TEXT This is a reasonable measure, though subject to error. For example we sometimes put a full-text that gives instructions on how to ask for access to the item concerned, or a bio of the creator of an artwork. DOWNLOADS I'd love to promote downloads as a measure of impact, but there is as yet no federated way to access this data. I'm happy to continue this dialogue. Arthur Sale Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAX I.ORG] On Behalf Of Isidro F. Aguillo Sent: Monday, 11 February 2008 6:53 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories Dear all: Thanks for your interest in the Ranking of repositories, part of our larger effort for rnaking webpresence of universities and research centers. A few comments to your messages: - Currently the Ranking of repositories is a beta version. We will thank comments, suggestions and criticisms. Information about missed repositories are warmly welcomed. After feedback recieved
