[GOAL] Surveying the Sound of One Hand Clapping
*Open Access ≠ Open Access Journals* In AAAS's ScienceInsiderhttp://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2013/11/scientists-ambivalent-about-open-access, Jocelyn Kaiser reports the results of yet another surveyhttp://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/ showing that researchers want Open Access but do not provide it. But if you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers. Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles. OA provides for researchers the advantage of maximizing the access, uptake, usage, applications, progress and impact of their research findings by making them accessible to all potential users, not just subscribers. Most researchers already know this. There are two ways for researchers to provide OA: --- (1) either researchers publish in an OA journal, which makes its article free for all online (Gold OA); --- (2) or researchers publish in their journal of choice but also self-archive their final peer-reviewed draft in their institutional OA repository, which makes it free for all online (Green OA). Gold OA has all the disadvantages mentioned and not mentioned by Kaiser: (i) not the author's established journal of choice; (iii) may have low or no peer-review standards (iii) may cost the author money to publish, out of scarce research funds. That explains why most authors want OA but few provide Gold OA (as this latest Science survey yet again found). About twice as many authors provide Green OA as Gold OA, but that's still very few: So what are the reasons authors don't provide Green OA? Authors don't provide Green OA because they (i) fear it might be illegal; (ii) fear it might jeopardize publishing in their journal of choice; (iii) fear it might jeopardize peer-reviewed publishing itself. The difference between the reasons why authors don't provide Gold OA and the reasons they don't provide Green OA is that the former are valid reasons and the latter are not. But the solution is already being implemented worldwide, although Kaiser does not mention it: Research funders and research institutions worldwide are mandating (requiring) Green OA. Over 60% of journals already formally endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA. For the remaining 40% of articles, published in journals that embargo Green OA for 6, 12, 24 months or longer, they can be deposited as Closed Access (CA) instead of OA duriing the embargo: institutional repositories have a request-a-copy Button that allows users to request and authors to provide an email copy of any CA deposit with one click each (Almost-OA). So Green OA mandates can provide at least 60% immediate OA plus 40% Almost-OA. (This unused potential for immediate Green-OA and Almost-OA has long been known and noted -- most recently by Laakso (2014)http://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/files/2323707/Lakso_2014_Green_OA_Policies_Accepted_Version_.pdf ). And if Green OA mandates eventually make subscriptions unsustainable -- because Green OA from OA institutional repositories makes it possible for institutions to cancel their subscriptions -- then journals will cut costs (leaving all access-provision and archiving to the Green OA repositories), downsize and convert to Gold OA, providing peer review at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the institutions' subscription cancellation savings (not authors' research funds). So mandatory Green OA is (i) legal, (ii) does not jeopardize authors' publishing in their journal of choice and (iii) does not jeopardize publishing or peer review: Mandating Green OA merely provides Green OA (and Almost-OA) until journals convert to affordable Gold OA so that (i) authors can continue to publish in their established journal of choice; (iii) need not risk low or no peer-review standards (iii) need not pay to publish out of scarce research funds. It would have been more complicated for the Science survey to explain the Green/Gold contingencies before asking the questions, but it would have been more informative than asking, as this survey did, What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? The outcome would have been that the vast majority of researchers will willingly comply with a Green OA mandate, exactly as had already been found by Swan Brownhttp://sitecore.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Open%20Access%20Self%20Archiving-an%20author%20study.pdf's classic international JISC survey in 2005. ___ 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.
On Saturday, November 30, 2013, 12:30:54 AM, you wrote: The technology to do all of this already exists. Most of the STEM metadata you describe is actually directly available in Medline, and the core parts can be used as per the open biblio principles. Crawling the websites is already possible using pubcrawler and other tools, and finding out what their stated licence status is can be done with howopenisit (although more often than not the answer is not properly defined). Precisely!! However the hard part is not building or running these things or collecting all the data, but sustaining it in and imbuing it with credibility. Totally agreed! For example I can run a server with all this on it at not too much personal expense, but who would treat it as a serious source? Scaling up to handle a large amount of users and providing a good service does cost money, which I (we) could probably find a way to fund - but even then, we still have to solve that credibility problem. It has to be known by those in or entering the field that this is where you go to find this stuff - as opposed to the current go to the library and follow all the rules approach. What we should be able to do right now (and for some of that we're applying for grants as I type this), is to start building the infrastructure for software and data. This will provide the opportunity to develop standards for how to make the databases for text (repositories), data and software interoperable. Simultaneously, these standards need t be communicated and adopted by a critical mass of institutions. But perhaps most importantly, the institutions participating in crawling and harvesting all our literature need to develop a way of searching, filtering and sorting not only the existing literature, but especially the incoming, new literature in a way that is superior to what we have now. Given that there isn't really a single place where you can exhaustively search the literature, the first part should be easy (existing literature). For the second part, (incoming, newly published literature), we're currently in the process of developing an RSS reader which is tailor-made for scientists. Thus, if there is a superior way to handle the literature, that outcompetes everything we have right now (again, not too difficult), people will go there, simple because they save time and effort that way. The next step will be an authoring tool that allows collaborative writing with scientific referencing and peer-review. there are currently several initiatives developing that environment. Once this is running, submission will be as simple as hitting 'submit'. Everybody who has ever submitted to a journal knows how people will flock to a service that allows submission with a single click. Thus, I agree, this will be the important part, but offering a superior way should do most of the work - just look at how quickly GScholar was accepted. Cheers, Bjoern -- Björn Brembs - http://brembs.net Neurogenetics Universität Regensburg Germany ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Of Course Immediate OA Generates More Citations Than Delayed Access
Laakso Björk (2013)http://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/files/1311951/laakso_bj_rk_delay_preprint.pdf compare the citation impact of immediate Gold OA with delayed Gold and toll-access. They find that delayed-Gold journals average twice as many citations per article as toll-access journals and three times as many as immediate-Gold journals. This is based on comparisons between different journals. But journals differ in both subject matter and quality -- and one of the ways to try to equate them to make them comparable for quality is to equate them for impact. So if journals are not equated for subject matter and quality, one is comparing apples and oranges. But if immediate Gold OA, delayed-Gold and toll-access journals are equated for impact, one can't compare impact for delayed vs. immediate Gold -- in fact one can't compare the journals for citation impact at al!! A feasible way to compare immediate-OA with delayed-access and toll-access is via Green OA based on within-journal instead of between-journal comparisons, by comparing articles published within the same journal and year. To do this one needs both the date of publication and the date the article was made Green OA. It is impossible to get the OA date for webwide deposits in general, but for repository deposits it is possible. We do have some very preliminary and partial datahttp://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/ from the University of Minho repository, but the sample is still too small to do within-journal comparisons. Immediate Green OA articles do have more citations on average than Delayed Access articles (see Figures 2c and 3c) despite the availability of the automated Almost-OA Button during the delay period, but these citation counts are just absolute ones, rather than relative to within-journal matched toll-access controls. Hence these are likewise still comparisons between apples and oranges. (Note also that the large number of undeposited articles is likewise unmatched, and not based on their respective within-journal matched toll-access controls.) The sample will grow as the number of Green OA mandates and repository deposits worldwide grows. The vast unused potential for immediate Green-OA and Almost-OA has long been known and noted -- most recently by Laakso (2014)http://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/files/2323707/Lakso_2014_Green_OA_Policies_Accepted_Version_.pdf . Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent Harnad, Stevan (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandatehttp://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/ (in E Rodrigues, Ed. *title to come)* Laakso, M., Björk, B. C. (2013). Delayed open access: An overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literaturehttp://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/files/1311951/laakso_bj_rk_delay_preprint.pdf . *Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology*. Laakso, M (2014) Green open access policies of scholarly journal publishers: a study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowedhttp://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/files/2323707/Lakso_2014_Green_OA_Policies_Accepted_Version_.pdf. Scientometrics (in press) ___ 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.
I agree with what Bjoern and Mark have said. We have the imperative to develop a new set of tools and most is in place. For my part I am launching the Content Mine over these current days. The goal is simple - to extract 100,000,000 million facts from the scholarly scientific literature. See https://vimeo.com/78353557 (5 minutes video). http://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/the-content-mine-presented-at-uksg and innumerable current blogs on http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/ I would very much welcome help. I have been offered some from outside academia - it would be nice to have some academics who also believed in liberation. This is not vapourware. I demo'ed this at OKFN/Open Science in Oxford last Wednesday. I am starting with Open Access papers, such as PLoSONE and when tested there will move to other outlets. These papers can be queried for a wide range of scientific facts such as species (where we start), chemicals, sequences, geolocations, identifiers, phylogenetic trees, etc. We have means of publishing this and means of capturing it. Everything - code, protocols, extractions, stores, etc. are fully Open (OKD compliant). This has the potential to act as a semantic current-awareness system and also as a scientific search engine. At present there is no Open search engine for science, except Wikipedia. As Bjoern and Mark have made clear we must create one - and rapidly. Else we shall remain completely reliant on the charity of mega-corporations - do we trust them? I have applied for a personal grant to work on this. I will be delighted to work with any others outside or inside academia - all my software is Open for anyone to re-use without my permission. Only by making science immediately Open (OKD-compliant) at the time it is published do we have Open Access in the true (BOAI) sense of the word. On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Bjoern Brembs b.bre...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, November 30, 2013, 12:30:54 AM, you wrote: The technology to do all of this already exists. Most of the STEM metadata you describe is actually directly available in Medline, and the core parts can be used as per the open biblio principles. Crawling the websites is already possible using pubcrawler and other tools, and finding out what their stated licence status is can be done with howopenisit (although more often than not the answer is not properly defined). Precisely!! However the hard part is not building or running these things or collecting all the data, but sustaining it in and imbuing it with credibility. Totally agreed! For example I can run a server with all this on it at not too much personal expense, but who would treat it as a serious source? Scaling up to handle a large amount of users and providing a good service does cost money, which I (we) could probably find a way to fund - but even then, we still have to solve that credibility problem. It has to be known by those in or entering the field that this is where you go to find this stuff - as opposed to the current go to the library and follow all the rules approach. What we should be able to do right now (and for some of that we're applying for grants as I type this), is to start building the infrastructure for software and data. This will provide the opportunity to develop standards for how to make the databases for text (repositories), data and software interoperable. Simultaneously, these standards need t be communicated and adopted by a critical mass of institutions. But perhaps most importantly, the institutions participating in crawling and harvesting all our literature need to develop a way of searching, filtering and sorting not only the existing literature, but especially the incoming, new literature in a way that is superior to what we have now. Given that there isn't really a single place where you can exhaustively search the literature, the first part should be easy (existing literature). For the second part, (incoming, newly published literature), we're currently in the process of developing an RSS reader which is tailor-made for scientists. Thus, if there is a superior way to handle the literature, that outcompetes everything we have right now (again, not too difficult), people will go there, simple because they save time and effort that way. The next step will be an authoring tool that allows collaborative writing with scientific referencing and peer-review. there are currently several initiatives developing that environment. Once this is running, submission will be as simple as hitting 'submit'. Everybody who has ever submitted to a journal knows how people will flock to a service that allows submission with a single click. Thus, I agree, this will be the important part, but offering a superior way should do most of the work - just look at how quickly GScholar was accepted. Cheers, Bjoern -- Björn Brembs
