Re: Growth rate of OA mandates?
- Original Message - From: Heather Morrison hgmor...@sfu.ca To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2010 4:11 AM Subject: Re: Growth rate of OA mandates? Comments (Heather): How libraries can contribute to improving access for all: many libraries are currently very involved in scholarly communication programs, providing education for scholars on author's rights (no one needs to sign away copyright in order to publish), managing institutional repositories, assisting with compliance with funding agency OA policies, and many also provide journal hosting and support services for faculty, and working to transition funding from the subscriptions system to open access, for example by joining the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE): http://www.oacompact.org/compact/ A point is missing after managing institutional repositories. You should add AND explaining all the advantages and the necessity of a mandate. Comments (Heather) There isn't really ONE tipping point for OA, but rather many (Peter Suber wrote about this some time ago). There is no longer a need to advocate for OA as a good thing, for example; the arguments now relate to feasibility, not desirability. The feasibility of a mandate has been proven by all the universities which appear in ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ and the advantages are listed in the article Maximizing and measuring research impact through university and research-funder open access self-archiving mandates http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16616/ Hélène Bosc Euroscience Member http://www.euroscience.org/ Convenor of the workgroup on scientific publishing http://www.euroscience.org/WGROUPS/SC_PUBLISHING/index.htm
Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
- Original Message - From: Couture Marc To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 10:37 PM Subject: Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself Marc Couture wrote : I was speaking on general terms: I see (but it may be highly subjective) more progress on the general front of Gold OA with, for instance, successes like PLoS, two journals appearing every day in DOAJ, etc. Marc, The number of OA journals appearing in DOAJ is not a criteria of good health of Gold OA ! It is exactly the same as Archives. OA periodicals appear, yes, but they can stay empty. It was the case of some BioMed Central Journals when Sally Morris conducted her survey on OA periodicals in 2005. The good criteria is the number of researchers publishing in them. I can give the example of the 65 researchers of the lab of PRC at INRA in France who publish about 100 articles a year. Go to the database PUBLICAT where you can find the metadata of 7226 publications of the lab (thesis, reports, articles, etc) since 1963. http://wcentre.tours.inra.fr/prc/internet/texto/index.php Since 2003 our researchers publish in OA periodicals (essentially BMC periodicals). Ask a research in PUBLICAT with the key-word BMC and you will see that only 10 publications appear in the answer. Perhaps you could add one or two other OA titles as key-words but I don't think that it would really change the result. 1 in 2003 1 in 2004 1 in 2005 1 in 2006 1 in 2007 3 in 2008 2 in 2009 Looking at the references you will find that the researchers publish in the same 4 BMC periodicals . In accordance with a survey conducted in my lab in 1994, our researchers published their results in 98 different periodicals (for the period 1983- 1992). There were also many other periodicals used only once that are not included in the 98. The diversity offered by BioMed Central (our main OA periodicals for publishing in biology) is not enough for our researchers. Yes, we progress in Gold OA, but is not yet the Eldorado! But I must admit that we see also interesting advances on the Green-OA front, with mandates piling up, albeit at a modest pace. By the way, I saw recently that at Université de Liège's, which adopted a mandate, the repository ORBi went from 178 full-text documents in July 2008 to... no less than 15 000 documents (mostly articles) 15 months later (source: http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/stats). Now that's some success... The progress of 15000 OA articles in 15 months (at the level of an university) seem to me more stricking than 10 OA articles offered in 7 years (at the level of a lab) Hélène Bosc
Re: Against Squandering Scarce Library Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA
Thank you Uncle Sam : today you seem to have enough money for paying OA publications. We hope that you will be able to support also in the future, the increase of price due to the impossibility of other universities worldwide of paying Gold OA publications. In Europe, the university of Amsterdam announced on the 25th May that due to a precarious financial situation the UvA has decided that the OA fund will not be extended after 2009. Please see Amsterdam closes its OA journal fundhttp://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/05/amsterdam-closes-its-oa-journal-f und.html It is probably time in Holland to chose the Green Road with the Mandate, in order to acheive successfully their Green Road so well opened some years ago . Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: Stevan Harnad To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 7:31 PM Subject: Against Squandering Scarce Library Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA It is beyond my powers of comprehension to fathom why Cornell University would want to throw $50K of scarce library funds at funding Gold OA publication (for at most 0.1% of Cornell's annual journal article output) without first mandating Green OA (for the remaining 99.9% of Cornell's annual journal article output) at no cost at all. (Yes, $50K is a pittance compared to $18M library budget, but wasn't this supposed to be about providing OA to Cornell's research output?) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA... 15 May 2009 Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again... 23 Apr 2009 On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA 28 Mar 2009 University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without 8 Mar 2009 Conflicts of Interest in Open Access... 1 May 2009 Green OA is no threat to grants: Pre-emptive Gold OA, today, might 24 Jan 2007 More OA Somnambulism: Conflating the Journal Affordability and... 5 Mar 2009 SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive flip model for Gold OA conversion 23 Jun 2008 Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley... 17 Apr 2009 Publisher anti-OA Lobby Triumphs in European Commission... 13 Jul 2007 Physics World: The CERN Gold OA Initiative 8 Mar 2007 On Open Access Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving 3 Mar 2007 Gold and Green Keynotes at IATUL 2007 11 Jun 2007 Cliff Lynch on Open Access 12 Jan 2007 Journal Affordability, Research Accessibility, and Open Access 14 Jun 2008 Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2) 23 Mar 2007 OA Primer for the Perplexed: I 25 May 2008 Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI Evidence-Based Analysis of Data... 8 Oct 2006
Re: Heidelberg Humanities Hocus-Pocus
It is difficult to discuss of taste or colours. In my opinion, ~Snot one full of pro-OA platitudes (like the Berlin Declaration) but of anti-OA canards and nonsequiturs~T are not cheap polemics : just words expressing personal ideas with a strong style. A cat can be a pussy-cat or a durty cat or a beast : it depends on the feeling you have for a cat, for some cats or for cats . Censoring a style seems a difficult exercise in a forum. Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: Hans Falk Hoffmann To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 11:25 AM Subject: Re: Heidelberg Humanities Hocus-Pocus Apart from the factual reply by Prof. Dr. Eberhard R. Hilf, that tells all the necessary facts about what is happening in Germany, you, Stevan Harnard, should have a proper look at your own language ~Snot one full of pro-OA platitudes (like the Berlin Declaration) but of anti-OA canards and nonsequiturs~T. This is cheap polemics and not appropriate to this forum! - Dr. Hans F Hoffmann CERN-PH honorary CH 1211 Genève 23 Tel. +41 22 7675458 Email: hans.falk.hoffm...@cern.ch From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 04 May 2009 18:02 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Heidelberg Humanities Hocus-Pocus ** Apologies for Cross-Posting ** Yet another declaration/petition/statement/manifesto concerning OA has been drafted, this time not one full of pro-OA platitudes (like the Berlin Declaration) but of anti-OA canards and nonsequiturs:The Heidelberg Appeal (Heidelberger Appel), launched by the German text critic, Roland Reuss. (These misunderstandings are intentional when promulgated by publishers lobbying against OA [e.g., the DC Principles, the Prism Coalition and the Brussels Declaration] but not in the case of scholars waxing righteously indignant about their rights without first coming to a clear understanding of what is really at issue, as in the case of Herr Reuss.) An article in the 2 May 2009 Zuercher Zeitung seems to catch and correct a few of the ambiguities and absurdities of Reuss's singularly wrong-headed argument, but far from all of them. Someone still has to state, loud and clear (and in German!), that Herr Reuss (and the signatories he has managed to inspire to follow him in his failure to grasp what is actually at issue) is: (1) conflating consumer piracy of authors' non-give-away texts (largely books) with author give-aways of their own journal articles (which is what Open Access is about); (2) conflating Open Access with Google book scanning; (3) conflating Gratis Open Access (free online access), which is what all the Green Open Access Self-Archiving and self-archiving mandates are, with Libre (free online access PLUS re-use rights), which only some Gold OA journals are providing, and again, in accordance with the wishes and agreement of the author. The Humanities are more book-intensive than other disciplines, but insofar as their journal articles are concerned, they are no different: their authors write them (and give them away) for usage and impact, not royalty income. So insofar as OA is concerned, the Heidelberger Appell is largely misunderstanding, nonsense and mischief, and I still hope this will be clearly exposed and put-paid-to in the German Press, otherwise it will continue to retard the progress of OA in Germany. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
Re: Chronicle of Higher Education: Misunderstanding about the Evans Reimer OA Impact Study
Klaus Graf wrote : Is there any empirical evidence that there are more self-archived articles in the web than articles free after an embargo? There is a lot af free backfile access for TA journals. And even you exclude that you have to proof your assertion. Yes, there is a lot of free backfile access in some periodicals and there is also a lot of articles from the Academie des Sciences published in the 18th century in our Archive HAL . But I doubt that the following article, for example, published in 1700 and describing the human urethra could accelerate the progress in research on sida or cancer, today. http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/index.php?halsid=648bte0jlr7coh80702n258hf6; view_this_doc=ads-00104349version=1 Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: Klaus Graf klausg...@googlemail.com To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:04 PM Subject: Re: Chronicle of Higher Education: Misunderstanding about the Evans Reimer OA Impact Study 2009/2/24 Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com: (Re: Phil Davis) No, E R do not show that the vast majority of freely-accessible scientific articles are not published in OA journals, but are made freely available by non-profit scientific societies using a subscription model. E R did not even look at the vast majority of freely-accessible articles, which are the ones self-archived by their authors. E R looked only at journals that make their entire contents free after an access-embargo of up to a year or more. Is there any empirical evidence that there are more self-archived articles in the web than articles free after an embargo? There is a lot af free backfile access for TA journals. And even you exclude that you have to proof your assertion. Klaus Graf
Academic Online Ressources: Assessment and Usage
Call to communication for an International Symposium: Academic Online Ressources: Assessment and Usage . Lille (France) 26-27 Nov 2009 http://epef.anr.free.fr/index-eng.html Appel à communication du colloque Ressources électroniques académiques : mesures et usages qui aura lieu le 26 et 27 nov 2009 à Lille (France) (http://epef.anr.free.fr/index.html) The evaluation of academic online information resources through usage assessment accompanies their integration into academic libraries. The topic associates librarians, publishers, vendors and scientists into a common discussion on resource management, evaluation, research and theoretical aspects. Between 1998 and 2008, the work on usage assessment advanced in several ways. The COUNTER Codes of Good Practice are to become international standards and facilitate the recording and reporting of online usage statistics in a consistent, credible and compatible way. Regularly revised and updated, they are built upon common definitions of collected usage statistics. Vendors and service providers offer tools and services for the management of usage data, compliant with the COUNTER standards. Libraries develop local software for usage assessment. Especially in the UK, results from a new type of usage research based on the weblog analysis have been published. These studies provide an accurate knowledge about who uses what, when and how. The symposium aims at highlighting the frontline research of library and information scientists and LIS professionals and at getting a large and precise understanding of online information usage assessment and to discuss the challenges. The symposium is also a forum to compare and debate on different theoretical and methodological approaches. The invited communications should cover the whole range of questions related to the evaluation of online information resources in academic and research environments ~V e.g. economical, political, scientific, documentary aspects and so on. Suggested topics : 1. Access statistics : empirical studies 2. Usage behaviours in academic environment : plural methodologies 3. Metrics and assessment 4. Tools, standards, and services : prospective analyses 5. Access statistics and scientific research assessment 6. Usage behaviours and business models for academic online resources 7. Academic libraries in a digital environment : usage profiles and new services 8. New publishing models and access statistics 9. Usage assessment of new information resources : datasets, multimedia~E 10. Usage of online resources, competencies, and information literacy (Google generation) The list is not exhaustive, other proposals can be submitted to enrich and complete the suggested topics. Concerned are foremost researchers in information and communication sciences but scholars from other disciplines and LIS professionals are welcome. The symposium is open to contributions from France and other countries. Expected languages are French and English. Hélène Bosc
Re: Note from Gene Garfield On: English Language, Scientific Journals, and Thompson-Reuters ISI Coverage
Gene Garfield wrote : Now in the era of electronic publication I would encourage those who are able to publish bilingually to do so since there is usually enough space on the web for such bilingual postings I totally agree with this suggestion. Here is my recent story: Two months ago, I archived in a French archive, an article ( 25 pages) published in French in a French periodical. Looking recently at the number of downloads, I was very satisfied of its impact refering to the number of supposed readers. But at the same time, I was very surprised to see that a conference paper written in English (that was in fact, something like an English summary of 5 pages of my French article ) archived in the same archive only 3 weeks ago, had already a very important number of dowloads and will probably over pass the French article. Writing again in English a long article is difficult and takes too much time for the majority of authors in the world (specially in Human and Social Sciences) but a long abstract of several pages in English is feasable and would bring to the author the benefit of reaching more readers . Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: Stevan Harnad To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 1:50 AM Subject: Note from Gene Garfield On: English Language, Scientific Journals, and Thompson-Reuters ISI Coverage Posted with permission. -- SH GENE GARFIELD: Dear Stevan: Do you happen to know Charles Durand? At one point he appears to have been at the Univ of Sherbrooke in Quebec, but I have not been able to locate his email or other address or phone? In a recent posting he attributed a statement to me that was not true. Here is the message I tried to send him but it was returned as undeliverable. Eugene Garfield, PhD. email: garfield -- codex.cis.upenn.edu home page: www.eugenegarfield.org Tel: 215-243-2205 Fax 215-387-1266 Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3302 President, The Scientist LLC. www.the-scientist.com 400 Market Street, Suite 1250, Philadelphia, PA 19106-2501 Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) www.asist.org In a paper (doi: 10.2167/cilp085.0) you posted on the www you claim that I said If It's Not in English, It's Not Worth Reading You refer to a 1998 paper of mine, but there is nothing in that paper about this topic. Furthermore, I never said or believed what you attribute to me. Please inform me exactly where you obtained this misquotation. This is a complete distortion of what I have said about the use of English as the lingua franca of science. I am fully sympathetic with desires of Francophones to promote the use of the French language in daily life. Now in the era of electronic publication I would encourage those who are able to publish bilingually to do so since there is usually enough space on the web for such bilingual postings. I became aware of your views just today from a posting at: http://www.ameriquebec.net/actualites/2009/02/02-pour-le-francais-dans-nos-u niversites.qc STEVAN HARNAD: Hi Gene, The issue of the posting is not so much language of publication (though it does discuss that too) but the language of notices on walls in Francophone universities in Quebec: Sometimes they are in unilingual English -- which is regrettable, but it is sometimes unavoidable, if the source of the notice is an American university that does not produce French versions. This is something that is felt less acutely in France, where the language is strong and safe, than in Quebec, where its survival may be at risk. (There is, however, little excuse for notices produced by the Francophone University itself being in unilingual English. That has a note of laziness and inconsiderateness, if not of contempt. I think you might be able to understand that plaint.) I am sure you never wrote anything like what was quoted above. That's typical hyperbolic distortion on 2nd hand repetition. The issue was probably about how ISI selects journals for coverage. ISI criteria are probably objective ones, based on readership, regularity, maybe citations, and it may simply be a demographic fact that it was mostly English-language journals that met those criteria at that time. Since then, coverage is cheaper and broader because of the online medium, but it's probably still true that most of the core journals in most(scientific) fields are in English. Those statistics, not of ISI's creation, are of course a far cry from the distorted quote above. If you give me permission, I could post our exchange on AmSci, to
Re: Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
In the 80, when we used several different biological, biomedical and chemical databases at the same time, for our bibliographic researches (via Dialog for example) we had a lot of doubles in the results but this problem has been finally solved : no doubt that researches in repositories will be improved on the same way .as soon as repositories are filled up. Hélène Bosc From: Chanier Thierry thierry.chan...@univ-fcomte.fr To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 6:34 PM Subject: Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Liège] [...]Now I give to colleagues the OAISTER URL (with the path to follow) to get all my publications (because some of them are in other archives). The problem is : deposits in Edutice appear twice in the OAISTER list (as deposits of Edutice and of HAL - but there is one only deposit). It is a concrete exemple of progress which should be made to avoid repetitions in harvesters (among many other new features).
Two French publications on OA
Bosc, H, (2008) [in French] L~Rauto-archivage en France : deux exemples de politiques différentes et leurs résultats [Self-Archiving in France: Two Different Policies and Their Results] Liinc em Revista, 4 (2): 196-217 http://revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc http://cogprints.org/6284/ ABSTRACT: In France, the first Institutional Repositories (IRs) were set up in 2002, using the E-Prints software. At the same time, a centralized repository was organized by CNRS, a French multidisciplinary research institute, for the deposit of all French research output. In 2006, most of the French scientific and scholarly research organisations signed a ~SProtocol of Agreement~T to collaborate in the development of this national archive, HAL. Independently, the Ifremer Research Institute launched its own IR (Archimer) in 2005. We have compared the development of HAL and Archimer. Our results show that Ifremer~Rs policy of self-archiving has resulted in 80% of its research output being made Open Access (OA). In the same time interval, HAL, lacking a self-archiving mandate, had only 10% of its target research output deposited. Ifremer~Rs specific implementation of its mandate (a staff dedicated to self-archiving) is probably not affordable for most French research institutions but its self-archiving mandate itself is, and Arthur Sale~Rs comparative studies in Australia have shown that the essential element is the mandate itself. The European Universities Association, mindful of the benefits of mandating OA, has recommended self-archiving mandates for its 791 universities. Self-archiving mandates have already been adopted by 22 universities and research institutions worldwide (including Harvard, Southampton, CERN, and one CNRS research laboratory) as well as 22 research funding agencies (including NIH, ERC, RCUK). OA maximizes research usage and impact. It is time for each of the universities and research institutions of France to adopt their own OA self-archiving mandates. Bosc, H. (2008, preprint; in French) Le droit des chercheurs à mettre leurs résultats de recherche en libre accès : appropriation des archives ouvertes par différentes communautés dans le monde [Researchers' Right to Self-Archive Their Articles In Open Access Repositories: Evolving Policy Worldwide] http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00340784/fr/ ABSTRACT: In 2002, a group of researchers, librarians and publishers, launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), formulating the concept of Open Access (OA) as well as the two strategies for achieving it ~V OA self-archiving (BOAI-1, ~SGreen OA~T) and OA publishing (BOAI-2, ~SGold OA~T). The concept of OA spread rapidly among researchers and research policy-makers, but was at first equated almost completely with Gold OA publishing alone, neglecting Green OA self-archiving, despite the fact that it is Green OA that has the greatest immediate scope for growth. After considerable countervailing effort in the form of strategic analysis, research impact and outcome studies, and the development of technical tools for creating OA archives (or ~SInstitutional Repositories~T IRs) and measuring their impact, the importance and power of Green OA has been demonstrated and recognised, and with it has come a growing number of IRs and the adoption of mandatory OA self-archiving policies by universities, research institutions and research funders. In some countries OA self-archiving policies have even been debated and proposed at the governmental level. This strong engagement in Green OA by policy makers has begun to alarm journal publishers, who are now lobbying vigorously against OA, successfully slowing or halting legislation in some cases. It is for this reason that the research community itself ~V not vulnerable to publisher lobbying as politicians are ~V are now taking the initiative in OA policy-making, mandating self-archiving at the university level. Hélène Bosc
Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum
I totaly agree with Eloy when he says : 1) this discussion should not go on indefinitely here on the list! 2) I agree with him and with a lot of other members that Stevan has done a FANTASTIC work! 3) I agree that it is amazing to see how this discussion has started and where it conducts us! 4) I agree with him that the request of standardization of a forum and of a posting style is a form of censorship. 6) I am not sure that a vote is necessary . In France, we say : Les plus gênés s'en vont . I will try to translate. Sorry if it sounds strangely : The more bothered leave. Since 10 years, a lot of members have left the list for different reasons without a noise but this list during this time has gained 1000 members . Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: Eloy Rodrigues e...@sdum.uminho.pt To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 5:29 PM Subject: Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum I think this discussion should not go on indefinitely here on the list! There are two separate issues, that are being mixed and confused here. 1 - Stevan's position as moderator 2 - Stevan's style as poster Regarding the first, I think one should ask himself if Stevan has done something wrong on his role as moderator (and if he has done it recently for all this fuss now). As he censored, or had any other action limiting the diffusion, of any legitimate message about OA sent to the list? Despite some previous claims, afterwards denied, I think the answer is NO. So, I think Stevan has been doing a great job keeping the list on topic, I'm thankful for all the work and time he invests on moderating the list, and I'm really amazed with all this thread of discussion (started by unfunded claims of censorship). But as it started, I agree with the call for a vote, but of list Regarding the second point, I think no one should censor or impose a style on the postings of other members of the list (provided that they respect basic rules of social behavior). In my opinion that would really constitute censorship. But it's only my opinion! But if there a members thinking that we should have a manual of posting style for the list, please write it, and propose it to the list and we can vote it, again of list (I would be really curious, to see the proposed borders of what would be admissible or not admissible regarding the reply and comment of other postings- could I cite/comment an expression, a phrase, a paragraph?). As long as we don't have a Manual of posting style approved, I don't think no one (not even many voices) can impose a limitation on the freedom of expression of any member of the list! Eloy Rodrigues Universidade do Minho - Serviços de Documentação Campus de Gualtar - 4710 - 057 Braga Telefone: + 351 253604150; Fax: + 351 253604159 Campus de Azurém - 4800 - 058 Guimarães Telefone: + 351 253510168; Fax: + 351 253510117 -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: terça-feira, 7 de Outubro de 2008 14:10 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum We could try having a different moderator, freeing Stevan to post, and to respond to others' postings (preferably, as several respondents have indicated, in a concise self-contained message, rather than interpolated into the original or a summary thereof) without any ambiguity as to his standing vis-à-vis other list members. Then we could see whether list members find it better, worse, or no different I for one would nominate Charles Oppenheim, if he's willing to take on the role 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 -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 07 October 2008 13:37 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 3:37 AM, c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: I totally support Jean-Claude's view. I can only repeat what I said before: (1) I am happy to put an end to my 10-year moderatorship of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and hand it over to someone else who is willing to do it, but only if it is requested by a plurality of the membership, not if it is merely requested by a few dissatisfied members. (2) The moderator's role is to filter postings, approving the relevant ones, and rejecting the off-topic or ad-hominem ones. (3) Apart from that,
Re: How can I convince administrators of the value of an IR?
Mike, Your project to set up your own small repository is a good one. Please, see the story of my lab repository, set up in 2001. It was reported in a previous message on this list . http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07L=american-scientist-open-a ccess-forumD=1O=AF=lP=113107 It was seven years ago and at that time the idea of open archives was very difficult to be understood. Today, it is more and more obvious. Set up a repository for your lab : a concrete example is necessary. Explain what is at stake, using Stevan's http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html , Alma Swan's http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/index.html and Arthur Sales' arguments http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/authors/Sale,_AHJ.html and I am sure that you will succeed to convince your administrators to follow you and launch a campus project. Good luck. Hélène Bosc Euroscience Member http://www.euroscience.org/ Convenor of the workgroup on scientific publishing http://www.euroscience.org/science-publishing-workgroup.html From: Michael Smith To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 6:15 AM Subject: How can I convince administrators of the value of an IR? Now with the state of Arizona in a financial crisis and budgets being cut across the campus, things do not look promising for new initiatives. My immediate plan is to try to set up a small repository for my own unit (with help from the Library) and hope the campus comes on board later. But it would help to have some succinct arguments and evidence, presented in a form that administrators will understand. Any suggestions?
Re: Cost of running an OA repository
- Original Message - From: N. Miradon nmira...@yahoo.fr To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 6:09 PM Subject: Cost of running an OA repository Does anyone have a good estimate of the real financial cost of running an OA repository? This subject has often been discussed on this list and we will probably receive an updated estimate. On this list, Hélène Bosc has recently told some of the organisational obstacles in setting up an E-prints repository [1] - but she didnt mention finance as an issue. You are right : no financial issues. You can easily imagine that I had no funds for starting this kind of underground experiment. But Eprints is open source and we have rescued old computers no one wanted . Our first machine in 2001, was a SUN SS20 under Unix Solaris 7. In 2004, we succeeded to change and reinstall our archive on an old PC Pentium III with Linux (900 Mhz, RAM 256 Mo, hard disk10 Go). I know that 45 Mo are necessary for 54 documents. Therefore we can estimate that the present machine will be able to contain about 1500 documents. It's quite enough for a beginning! In our case, the only cost was (is) computer technician's time (administration, etc.). I am sure that more details on this cost will be given by ECS Southampton. Hélène Bosc
Re: OA in Europe suffers a setback
I'd be interested to hear how other repository projects came about and about the structure by which they are managed, to compare with our experience. I hope this response is a useful synopsis of ours. Talat, Here is the story of my repository : a French side story. I am a French librarian retired (since 2005) from INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research : INRA counts about 4000 researchers working in 160 laboratories. These laboratories are distributed in 21 different centres and organized in 14 different departments. http://www.international.inra.fr/ I worked in a lab of 60 researchers. Since 1995, I have attentively followed the changes in scientific communication provided by Internet, in attending conferences and in reading the limited literature on the subject. I have subscribed to American Scientist Open Access Forum, (September forumat this time) since its inception (1998). All this allowed me to become aware of what was approaching in scientific publication and I tried to convince INRA, by different means (reports, web pages, organizing conferences, etc.) to be a pioneer in freeing scientific communication. They could use the two ways of providing Open access (Gold and Green). For example, they edited (and still edit) periodicals that they could have tried to convert to (Gold) Open Access periodicals. Some of my propositions began to gain some credit only in 2004, one year before I retired. When I decided to set up a E-prints repository, for my lab, in 2001, I considered that it would provide a concrete example of what can be done for Open Access at an institutional level and I hoped once again, to succeed in influencing the Head of INRA to consider this (Green) way of providing OA. Our archive was launched in the beginning of 2002 at the same time as other 4 initial E-Prints repositories in France To start my project I first had to convince our computer technician to set up this repository just for me (that is, out of an official project). At that time OAI was totally unknown. I explained to him what was behind this standard. He quickly perceived the importance of this project and was interested in it but was very busy and could only work on our unofficial project in his spare time. So the setting up took more time than it should have taken. As soon as the repository was set up , I started to fill it with recent peer reviewed articles, seeking all the green copyright agreements for the publications At that time it was even more difficult to fill an archive. See the ROMEO figures published in my conference for the national commission of UNESCO, in Paris in 2003 [1] When I pre-populated my repository with about eight or ten articles, I decided that it was time to launch it officially. For that I had to inform the hierarchy of INRA of the existence of this archive and to declare it OAI . This bureaucratic part of the establishment of my archive took several months because at an upper level of INRA nobody wanted to assume the responsibility of this archive. Too new, therefore too threatening! Fortunately, when I at last asked the head of my lab, he agreed to assume this responsibility. I am sure that at time he had not totally understood what was at stake but he perceived well that scientific communication was changing and he accepted this challenge without fear concerning a risk of copyright breach. I am grateful for his confidence and support. The name of our repository was initially Physiologie Animale but when my head of laboratory became the head of department it took the name of the Department, that is Animal Physiology and Livestock Systems Archive » See at http://phy043.tours.inra.fr:8080 I have been severely criticized for the low number of articles in my Archives .They said : You are not credible with this small number of documents and they were right. But at that time I had my reasons: I could have certainly succeeded to deposit a lot of reports or theses, etc., -- that is, all sort of documents without legal issues - so as to increase the number of documents but I had another goal. I wanted to demonstrate exactly what Open Access really means, and that an archive is provided essentially for depositing a copy of a published article. Nevertheless, I was invited in 2004 to a seminar in la Rochelle, to talk about my experiment.[2] I explained during that conference that if I can archive 15/20 articles a year from the publications of my lab, the 160 laboratories of the whole of INRA could provide between 2000 /3000 annual open access articles, immediately. Total INRA output is about 6000 articles per year. My idea was that it would have been easy to set up 13 other departmental Eprints archives and to centralize them at a national institutional level. This way has the advantage of emulation among the different departments and the appropriation of a project on the part of the staff in the different libraries. After that we could use our database
Re: Priorities: OA Content Provision vs. OA Content Preservation
A 22:37 07/10/04 +0100, Iva Melinscak Zlodi a E9crit : This discussion is going to turn to discussion about true task of an academic librarian! For Steven Harnad it is acquisition, and to Brian Simboli it is acquisition + preservation. Both views are somewhat limited, I believe. Librarians should be responsible for provision (in very broad meaning) of academic content + presentation and preservation of that content + education of users +... Acquisition is not the right term here. Libraries acquire contents (usually by purchasing) from the outside. Open Access articles, in contrast, are not acquired from the outside but provided from the inside, by their own self-archiving institutional authors. The library then, in turn, provides access to those contents, both for its own users and, in the online era, for outside users worldwide. This is a new role for the library, and one we must adapt to. May I draw your attention to the online version of a presentation I made in Stockholm on 26 August 2004 at the EuroScience Open Forum Symposium Spreading the word: who profits from scientific publishing ? http://www.esof2004.org/programme_events/session_papers.asp The title is In a paperless word a new role for academic libraries: providing open access(p.22) (This article was co-authored with S. Harnad.) We discuss provision and presentation and preservation (at all levels) and education of users. And we cite the exemplary case of Lund University providing open access via both the green and gold road! So we all agree: there are many things for librarians to do to-day, but it is absolutely necessary not to forget that in research institutes, librarians' first mission is to provide immediate, large-scale, high-quality information to help researchers progress rapidly in their work. Rapidly creating and filling institutional Open Access Archives is a new, essential part of this mission today. The apparent disagreement about preservation is just a matter of priority: Preservation of the self-archived Open Access versions of articles is of course natural, desirable, welcome, and underway! The problem is only when doubts about permanence are cited as a reason for not providing the Open Access version at this time. The new immediate priority for research institutions today is to provide open access to their own research output. Preservation efforts should enhance this access-provision, not retard it. Helene Bosc Bibliothecaire Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6175 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours-Haras Nationaux 37380 Nouzilly France http://www.tours.inra.fr/ TEL : 02 47 42 78 00 FAX : 02 47 42 77 43 e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr
Re: Priorities: OA Content Provision vs. OA Content Preservation
A 11:46 05/10/04 -0400, Brian Simboli a E9crit : I'm not convinced that green self-archiving holds out any more promise of providing a stable, long term way to fulfill third world needs satisfactorily than does the development of gold open access or low-cost TA solutions. Apparently you think this to be the case. What arguments might you give here, other than an emotional appeal? 1) With emotions you can lead the world. 2) Stevan Harnad has developed, more than once, in this Forum and elsewhere, a number of specific arguments for privileging the green road, and I agree with those arguments. (It is not necessary for me to repeat them here, and less well.) 3) But concretely, I can explain my own involvement in the green road: Our research laboratory's field is Biology and we have been able to commute unproblematically between both the gold and green roads (i.e., publishing in Open Access [OA] journals and OA self-archiving]. I have been encouraging our researchers to publish in Biomed Central (gold) journals. But since 2002, our researchers have only published 3-4 articles a year in those gold periodicals whereas their other 160 articles are still being published in the conventional non-OA journals. What to do about making those articles OA? The obvious solution is not always the best. Immediate solutions are not always in the best long-term interest. 4) My immediate solution is to fill our OA Archive through librarian-assisted proxy self-archiving http://phy043.tours.inra.fr:8080/ This will now be done rapidly (and awaits only my finding time enough to self-archive the backlog on behalf of the researchers in my lab!). I have a lot of articles (including those articles on LH and FSH that were recently requested by the Algerian teacher I mentioned in my prior posting) published in green journals. More than 100 articles are waiting to be archived. (Recall that 92% of journals now officially give their green light: to author self-archiving: http://romeo.eprints.org/ ). I cannot see any problem at all with this obvious solution. Helene Bosc Bibliothecaire Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6175 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours-Haras Nationaux 37380 Nouzilly France http://www.tours.inra.fr/ TEL : 02 47 42 78 00 FAX : 02 47 42 77 43 e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr
