Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
[ 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. ] Interesting text from Stevan harnad. let me comment as follows: Le dimanche 15 novembre 2009 à 20:31 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : 1. First paragraph. Two separate ideas. A need for mandate first, and we all agree on this. A claim that presently the promotion of gold OA is premature, and the further claim that this promotion of Gold OA distracts and confuses. This is speculation at best. 2. Second paragraph. It largely reiterates the distracting and confusing speculative theory above. What we could agree on is that, under certain conditions, and for certain objectives, mandated green OA is the fastest and surest way to OA. But this is not a universal truth. Furthermore, the so-called cross-talk would greatly diminish if criticisms against Gold OA did not accompany the promotion of Green OA. As for the kind of zero-sum game that institutions are presented as playing, once again, I would like concrete evidence for it. My own experience is that mandating self-archiving and supporting gold OA, including some unfortunate moves in this regard (I tend to agree with Stevan Harnad on a number of these cases), tend to be quite separate. 3. Third paragraph. Interesting paragraph in that it shows a confusion between the less-than-optimal and the counter-productive. As we do not know what the ideal form of the optimal really is, does this eman we all are condemned to being counter-productive? As for the fantasy about magical powers, it is quite revealing in itself... But I do not subscribe to the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. :-) 4. Gold OA is conflated once more with the author-pay approach. In my own view, the author-pay approach is flawed for a number of reasons. My own optimal vision of the Gold Road is free for everybody and external sources of support, probably governmental and my main model is SciELO. It would be nice, for once, not to reduce Gold OA to author-pay models, or SCOAP-like models. This said, it is the paragraph I feel closest to of the four presented below. Jean-Claude Guédon [snip] What limits the success of repositories is the failure of (85% of) researchers to deposit unless deposit is mandated by their institutions and/or funders. So Green OA self-archiving mandates are needed, from all institutions and funders. What slows the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates is distraction and confusion from the premature promotion of Gold OA (or copyright reform, or publishing reform, or publisher boycott threats), often as if OA were synonymous with Gold OA. So the disagreement *is* about speed and probability: If we agree that (mandated) Green OA self-archiving is the fastest and surest way to reach 100% OA, then the speed/probability factor comes down to the distraction and confusion from the promotion of Gold OA that are slowing the promotion and adoption of Green OA mandates. It would just be harmless Green/Gold parallelism if there weren't this persistent cross-talk, but there is. Institutions wrongly imagine that they are doing their bit for OA if they sign COPE and pledge some of their scarce resources to pay for Gold OA -- without first mandating Green OA (because they're already doing their bit for OA) (Individuals of course have the right to pursue any course they like. No one is talking about depriving anyone of rights. I am simply giving the reasons it is counterproductive -- if 100% OA, as quickly and surely as possible is the goal -- to promote Gold OA without first mandating Green OA. [My goodness, if I had that sort of magical power that could determine what people had a right to do, I would use it to conjure up universal Green OA mandates on the part of the planet's researchers institutions and funders: I certainly wouldn't waste it on hexing those who insist on chasing after iron pyrite today...] (Pursuing and paying Gold OA today also locks in the current costs of doing journal publishing the way it is being done today. Green OA will eventually lower those costs substantially, but I do not invoke this as a reason against pursuing and promoting Gold OA today -- *if* Green OA has first been mandated. Otherwise, however, it is not only dysfunctional but downright foolish.) Stevan Harnad Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, Hon.PhD Publisher/Editor in Chief Information Research InformationR.net e-mail: t.d.wil...@shef.ac.uk Web site: http://InformationR.net/ ___ Quoting Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk: On Sun, 8 Nov 2009, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote: TW: Self-archiving is one approach, free, subsidised OA journals are another. My position is not against the former, it is simply that one approach alone is not
Criticizing supporters of giold OA
[ 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. ] In a recent post, in response to Tom Wilson, Stevan Harnad wrote: That's what I'm banging on about. I'm not criticizing the pursuit of other options *in addition* to mandating self-archiving, I'm criticizing pursuing them *instead*, i.e. without first doing the doable, and already long overdue. This is a telling admission: 1. So, an individual motivated to launch an OA journal, and only that, and who works exclusively on that project, is going to be criticized even though his contribution is obviously positive for the OA movement. 2. The argument seems to rest on efficiency, probabilities, etc., but what happens if the individual in question reacts by saying: it is an OA journal that interests me, or nothing? In other words, if this banging on about end up repelling a number of people, is it so very efficient? Another statement says the same thing in slightly different words (in response to Marc Couture): The one point on which we may not see quite eye to eye is whether an individual who (unlike Marc) has not self-archived, nor promoted Green OA self-archiving for the sake of OA, should promote Gold OA publishing (or journal boycotting) for the sake of OA. First of all, the hypothetical individual in question will certainly not ask permission to promote OA his (her) way from Stevan Harnad. The symmetrical statement would lead to the strange conclusion that if people have not promoted journals or Gold OA, they should not promote green OA alone... Let us leave boycotting aside; it is not at all at the same level as publishing a journal or self-archiving. How about decoupling the two roads a little? How about letting people support what they feel comfortable with? How about banging on people that oppose OA, rather than on people that support OA in a slightly different way? Jean-Claude Guédon
Re: Wrong advice on OA
[ 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. ] Let me add a slight re-phrasing to the PS of my latest message: Stevan Harnad is right when he says that mandates will not work for OA journals. No one could, nor should, force authors to publish in some journals. However, a parallel to a mandate can be established by governments if they fully subsidize journals (e.g. journals of scientific associations): they can offer the equivalent of a public option where researchers can publish. The term is much in the news in the US these days. Maybe it is time to hijack it and transpose it to the OA debates. Another thing governments can do is ensure that evaluations do not rely on a single figure, and particularly avoid resting only on Thomson-Reuters' JCR. These improved rules of evaluation should be applied for grant allocations. Adequate rules for the evaluation of researchers should also be designed, and these evaluations should avoid using JCR. In short, there is no mandate in the Gold road, but there are ways, including a public option of journals to correct a playing field distorted by very imperfect (to say the least) metrics. Let us work together at promoting both mandates for self-archiving and public options for gold journals. Jean-Claude Guédon
Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
[ 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. ] That gold dust cannot accelerate through mandates is right, but it does not get in the way of green acres. And in the case of countries like Brazil, self-archiving the articles published in journals the OECD ignore, neglect or simply fail to place within their indexing tools will not make them look more appealing to the rest of the world. Self-archiving is important. Mandates are crucial. And working on producing ever more visible OA journals is also, I repeat *also*, crucial. Once again, I invite everyone to meditate the lessons of SciELO. And I defy anyone to demonstrate that the presence of SciELO has slowed down the move toward self-archiving in Brazil or in other countries in latin America, or in South Africa. Jean-Claude Guédon PS Mandates are the result of political pressure, be it institutional or national. Producing OA journals can also be the result of political pressure and will (as again SciELO demonstrates). Accelerating the production of quality OA journals that are free to readers and to authors (i.e. fully subsidized by governments, as scientific research is subsidized by governments) would greatly increase the number of articles accessible and reusable to all. It is simply part of the general political pressure in favour of Open Access in al of its forms and shapes. Let both branches of OA identified in BOAI flourish next to each other,, and even support each other wherever and whenever possible. Le mardi 10 novembre 2009 à 19:21 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On 11/10/09, Couture Marc couture.m...@teluq.uqam.ca wrote: [snip] For the two new OA journals per day in DOAJ (i.e., about 800 per year): If, say, journals are quarterly, with about 20 articles per issue, that's 80 x 800 = 64,000 new OA articles per year (out of a total of perhaps 2.5 million annual articles). That's an annual increase of 2.5% (and its growth cannot be accelerated by mandates). Compare that to the growth potential of a single institutional mandate (6000% in your example below). (This why it's a pity if gold dust gets in the way green acres!)
Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
[ 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. ] Le samedi 31 octobre 2009 à 15:16 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : [snip] (And I do try to preach it from a different angle each time, varying my diction and my style. A nice bit of reciprocation would be to actually pay attention to the content, for once, long enough to get it, and act on it. That would be the best way to get me to shut up. Failing that, just some sign of actually having grasped the simple point at hand would be a rare and welcome treat for me, rather than just the usual repetitive response of ignoring or misconstruing it for the Nth time with a groan...) I can think of nothing more counterproductive than these two needlessly lost decades insofar as OA, ever within immediate reach, is concerned (and I doubt that my relentless sloganeering has been any bit more effectual in prolonging these decades than it has been in foreshortening them). Jeremiah Due attention has been paid to the (largely repetitive) content. Extreme attention has been paid to the arguments. The logic is generally not in question, although some flaws have been detected. What is often in question is the ambit of the issue. And the kind of naive, uncompromising impatience is also in question. That Stevan Harnad has contributed much to the OA movement is not in question. That he has always acted in the best interest of the OA movement is in question. However, on balance, is contribution has been very positive. With a bit more wisdom, it would have been exceptional. And various biblical identifications do not help. The OA movement does not need a Messiah. Neither is it waiting for one. Perhaps a little bit of distance between self and issue would help. It might even help the OA movement focus more easily on its real obstacles rather than waste time on relatively minor internal dissensions. So long as we roughly pull in the same direction, the cart moves forward. We do not have to believe that a really simple and obvious solution really exists to push for OA. The Internet wisdom should serve us here: working code and rough consensus. It is what allowed the Internet community to overwhelm the resistance of the telecoms. The same philosophy will carry us forward just as well. Let us remember that the Internet started either in 1969 (Arpanet) or 1973 (Cerf-Kahn paper on TCP/IP); yet, the public still did not know about it in 1996 when Inet came to Montreal. Quite a few geeks felt frustrated then, and some may have felt that time was slipping through their fingers. As a historian, I do not fear time; I only fear processes moving away from desired objectives. Two decades is really nothing in the grand scheme of things, and we may still need another decade to bring OA to the world. And not just science articles, by the way! Just a hint... Jean-Claude Guédon
Further to Marc Couture's remarks.
[ 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. ] One of the author of the list has acknowledged that the number of entries in the SHS collection of journals that I recently advertised on this list did not correspond to the list of unique titles of journals, but to the number of occurrences through four sources (WoS, Scopus, ERIH and AERES). She confirmed the estimate provided by Marc Couture bystating that there were about 9,500 hundred unique titles in the list. She also gave the following bits of information: 1. The list should appear as a database before the end of the year; 2. An article is apparently being prepared to give details about the methodology that was used to set up this list. I have pleaded to make this database interface available in English so as to make it easier to use for most people in the world. I have also pleaded in favor of setting up some kind of network of local observers that could provide clearer and more detailed background on the existing journals in various countries. Organizations such as eIFL could perhaps help on this as they already maintain contacts on the ground in about 50 countries. Such a database should be open, perhaps in the way that Wikipedia is open, with possibilities of external input. The level of editorial control remains to be established. In short, it would be good to have a worldwide, distributed system allowing for the monitoring of all peer-reviewed journals in the world. it would be good to have a system that would not rely exclusively on Western companies or Western scientific organizations. These are quite useful, of course, but they obviously fail to cover the whole world and this situation, wittingly or not, creates grave imbalances in the visibility of research and researchers. If we are concerned by OA as a way not only to create more access, but also to create a more even-playing field for research in the world, we should work on such a project. Whether the French team is the right starting point for it remains to be assessed, but the objective, in my opinion, remains urgent. Jean-Claude Guédon
Re: Number of scholarly journals in the world.
[ 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. ] Thank you, Marc, for these useful remarks. I quickly based myself on the statement found at the beginning of the document but failed to do the sampling that Marc did. He appears to be right as to the number of journal entries. I will enquire further with the authors and report back to the list. As far as peer review is concerned, I believe all journals in Web of Science and in Scopus are peer reviewed. The ERIH and AERES lists are comprised of peer reviewed journals exclusively, so far as I know. As a result, I believe we can trust the scientific and scholarly (i.e. peer reviewed) status of these journals. With regard to the DOAJ list, this is another important point. I have already pointed out to the authors that further lists could be consulted such as Redalyc, Open JGate, etc. Australian lists also exist already and a new one will apparently appear soon. In short, much further work needs to be done. The list is patently incomplete and the authors are aware of this. The point of my remark was not to clarify the proportion of OA journals compared to the total number of journals. It was to question the assertions commonly encountered that place the total number of scientific and scholarly journals (peer reviewed) at somewhere between 14,000 (Michael Mabe's estimate) and 21-24,000 (Stevan Harnad's estimate). Personally, I suspect that it must be closer to 40 or even 50,000 journals, many of whom are part of the lost science coming from research in so-called peripheral countries.Many scientific and scholarly journals do not appear in the major bibliographies, including Ulrich's. But then many if not most of the major bibliographies originate in OECD countries (i.e. rich countries) with the possible result of a Western or developed bias. It would be useful to organize a centralized database that would verify and collate all these sources. In this fashion, a reliable list of journals would gradually be built. But Marc's correction is a useful correction to the authors' figure. I simply took it at face value, and I should not have. And I also agree that this document would be more useful in a database format. Jean-Claude Guédon Le dimanche 16 août 2009 à 11:11 -0400, Couture Marc a écrit : On August 4, 2009, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: A 721-page list of social science and humanities journals comprising around 20,000 titles has been compiled. This list is limited to SSH journals I downloaded and examined the 721-page document compiled by JournalBase and available at http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html One looks forward getting access to the database (as promised by the authors) instead of a huge text-based table, but one can readily draw some conclusions upon simple inspection: - The number of entries stated by Jean-Claude and given on the Web page (20 000) would mean an average of 27 titles per page. One can easily verify that the actual number is much lower. In fact, based upon a 15-page sample, I obtained an average of 12 different titles per page, for a total of the order of 9 000 titles (still quite a large number). One indeed obtains an average of about 30 when one includes the multiple entries one finds for most journals (one entry for each category, plus some journals appearing twice). - Although this is a fairly intuitive conclusion, the list appears indeed to comprise mostly peer-reviewed journals. - Although the authors indicate that the list includes the information on open access journals indexed in the DOAJ, JournalBase features only 350 DOAJ journals, while one can estimate the number of social science journals in DOAJ to be more in the range 700-900 (depending upon the way one defines an SSH journal, and interprets the keywords and categories in DOAJ lists). It seems that they didn't use DOAJ as a source for journal titles (and DOAJ is not listed in the Sources column), but used it to check the OA status of the journals they found in other lists (Scopus, etc.). More data and analyses are thus needed to get a reliable estimate of the percentage of OA scholarly journals. One gets 17% if one uses DOAJ's and Ulrich's data (4000 OA journals over a total of 24 000), but only 4% with JournalBase data. Although the ratio for SSH journals could well be lower than the overall ratio, I don't think we should but too much emphasis on either figure. Marc Couture Télé-université (Université du Québec à Montréal) mcout...@teluq.uqam.ca http://www.teluq.uqam.ca/spersonnel/mcouture/home.htm
Number of scholarly journals in the world.
[ 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. ] In the last few years, various attempts to estimate the number of journals in the world have been used. Figures ranging from about 14,000 (Michael Mabe) to about 23,000 (Stevan Harnad) have been regularly brought forth. Few numbers have been used beyond these two numbers, although they exist. I have often felt these numbers were much too small. A new piece of evidence supporting my feeling was recently published in France: A 721-page list of social science and humanities journals comprising around 20,000 titles has been compiled. This list is limited to SSH journals and it relies only on a small number of sources: Web of Science, Scopus, ERIH and the French list AERES. Lists such as Redalyc for Latin America have not yet been used. There are probably long lists of journals to add from India and China, and other countries. In short, although impressive, this list is still incomplete and it covers only SHS journals. The point here is that this list demonstrates the existence of a much larger set of scholarly and scientific journals than has been used in our past discussions. This impacts directly on how we evaluate various approaches to Open Access. The list can be downloaded at http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html I am sure the authors would love receiving further advice and information to complete their list. Jean-Claude Guédon
Re: From ROAR to DOAR
[ 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. ] Interesting answer: so being the older registry is sufficient to become the registry... Is it a case of age guaranteeing venerability? :-) No need to comment further. Jean-Claude Guédon Le jeudi 23 juillet 2009 à 23:59 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Original Amsci thread on this topic: From ROAR to DOAR (Jan 2006) http://bit.ly/AVdEp If ROAR is 'the' registry of Open Access Repositories, what is OpenDOAR? is it the other registry? Yes. EPrints's ROAR has been registering institutional repositories several years longer than SHERPA's DOAR (though not yet under that name). EPrints's ROARMAP has likewise been registering Green OA self-archiving mandate several years longer than SHERPA's Juliet, and covers both institutional and funder mandates (Juliet covers funder mandates only). EPrints's Romeo, in contrast, started registering publisher policy on Green OA self-archiving by authors only after SHERPA's Romeo, and is in fact just a feed from SHERPA's Romeo, created to provide and color-code exclusively the relevant Romeo information for authors: http://bit.ly/6JcyT Does a journal endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed final draft? Green. Only the unrefereed preprint OA? Pale-Green. Neither? Gray. Stevan Harnad Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal [ Part 2, Image/PNG 1.1KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]
Re: Call to Register Universities' Open Access Mandates in ROARMAP
[ 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. ] If ROAR is 'the' registry of Open Access Repositories, what is OpenDOAR? is it the other registry? :-) Jean-Claude Guédon Le jeudi 23 juillet 2009 à 07:48 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : ROAR is the Registry of Open Access Repositories http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse ROARMAP is the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php The purpose of ROARMAP is to register and record the open-access policies of those institutions and funders who are putting the principle of Open Access (as expressed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative and theBerlin Declaration) into practice as recommended by Berlin 3 (as well as the UK Government Science and Technology Committee). http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm Universities, research institutions and research funders: If you have adopted a mandate to provide open access to your own peer-reviewed research output you are invited to click here to register and describe your mandate in ROARMAP. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/sign.php#fr (For suggestions about the form of policy to adopt, see here.) http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html Registering your OA mandate in ROARMAP will: (1) record your own institution's commitment to providing open access to its own research output, (2) help the research community measure its progress (see growth curve, provided by Alma Swan in Oasis) in providing open access worldwide, http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=144Itemid=338 and (3) encourage further institutions to adopt open-access mandates (so that your own institution's users can have access to the research output of other institutions as well). Sample Institutional Self-Archiving Mandate http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html For the purposes of institutional record-keeping, research asset management, and performance-evaluation, and in order to maximize the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of our institution's research output, our institution's researchers are henceforth to deposit the final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts of all their journal articles (and accepted theses) into our institution's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. To register and describe your mandate, please click here: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/sign.php#fr Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal [ Part 2, Image/PNG 1.1KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]
Re: Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA
[ 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. ] This is an interesting and important summary of Stevan Harnad's main theses. It calls for a few comments. Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 15 mai 2009 à 18:21 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : *** Apologies for Cross-Posting *** Pre-Emptive Gold OA. [snip] the conflation of Gold OA with OA itself, wrongly supposing that OA or full OA means Gold OA -- Harnad is right here. OA is both green and gold. instead of concentrating all efforts on universalizing Green OA mandates. Harnad is wrong here. If he were right, this would be conflating OA with Green OA and the error would be symmetricla of the one he points out. Conflating the Journal Affordability Problem with the Research Accessibility Problem. Although the journal affordability problem (serials crisis) was historically one of the most important factors in drawing attention to the need for OA, and although there is definitely a causal link between the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (namely, that if all journals were affordable to all institutions, there would be no research access problem!), affordability and accessibility are nevertheless not the same problem, and the conflation of the two, and especially the tendency to portray affordability as the primary or ultimate problem, is today causing great confusion and even greater delay in achieving OA itself, despite the fact the universal OA is already fully within reach. Distinguishing affordability from accessibility is important and it is correct in my view. The reason is as simple to state as it is (paradoxically) hard to get people to pay attention to, take into account, and act accordingly: Just as it is true that there would be no research accessibility problem if the the journal affordability problem were solved (because all institutions, and all their researchers, would then have affordable access to all journals), it is also true that the journal affordability problem would cease to be a real problem if the research accessibility problem were solved: If all researchers (indeed everyone) could access all journal articles for free online, then it would no longer matter how much journals cost, and which institutions were willing and able to pay for which journals. After universal Green OA, journals may or may not eventually become more affordable, or convert to Gold OA: It would no longer matter either way, for we would already have OA -- full OA -- itself. And surely access is what Open Access is and always was about. Formally, this is perfectly correct. There are many issue that remain open, however. Harnad would call them speculative because they lie beyond the corner, beyond direct empirical view and verification. No one can predict with certainty what will happen to journals in a world where OA materials constitute the vast majority of scientific documentation. Scientifically speaking, this is entirely correct. Looking at the same situation from a strategic perspective, this clarity of vision is more apparent than real. When Harnad says that solving accessibility would mean that affordability would cease, he leaves in the background the issue of the survival of the journals. Yet, in his view, they remain crucial: they form the basis for peer review; they provide the version that can be cited, etc. Some stake holders cannot act as if the corner and what lies beyond does not matter and rely only on what is short range, but also observable and verifiable. Now, the task of OA supporters is to convince the greatest number possible of stakeholders to make OA move. Getting mandates does not depend on researchers only in most cases (although the recent developments at Harvard, Stanford alii offer some hope in this regard). Journal editors, administrators, granting agencies all have their take on this issue, as do librarians who are crucial partners. With some of them, Harnad's argument will work and have worked. With others, they don't, at least not yet. With yet others, they look scary (e.g. some journal editors who also happen to be researchers). Harnad might respond that only researchers interest him. Fair enough. However, researcher are not exactly as Harnad portrays them. Most researchers are not stellar enough to disregard other dimensions of their environment. On the contrary, they spend a great deal of time trying to manipulate this environment to their advantage. Their very fragility will make them look at Open Access with great trepidation. This, I believe, is one of the root causes behind the slow progress of
Re: On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA, Again!
[ 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. ] Here we go again with a ruinous outlook on OA where Gold and Green roads are seen as competing with each other in some crazy, absolute, way. Interest for Gold is not pre-emptive of Green. The obvious point, it looks to me, is that all these steps are useful to move forward toward OA. That universities should seek to have mandates is fine, of course; that they should seek ways to help their researchers to publish in OA is equally fine. In some universities, the people in place do not see their way through a mandate but see their way to helping authors publishing in OA; in other universities, other people find their way to a mandate. The politics of a mandate may appear far more difficult in one place, and less so in another. Are we going to stay immobile wherever mandates are very hard to secure, or cramped in a monotonous cry for the mandate despite the local immobilism? Is it not possible, in the meanwhile, to seek other ways to help OA? And is this not a bit more realistic than claim in a strident voice that universities should on no account... etc. Jean-Claude Guédon Le samedi 28 mars 2009 à 18:13 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Pre-emptive Gold Fever seems to be spreading. Following hard on the heels of University of California's Gilded New Deal with Springer -- UC subscribes to the Springer fleet of journals for an undisclosed fee, but, as part of the Deal, UC authors get to publish their articles as Gold OA for free in those same Springer journals -- now Universities UK (UUK) and the Research Information Network (RIN) are jointly dispensing advice on the payment of Gold OA fees (which is fine) but without first giving the most important piece of advice: Universities should on no account spend a single penny on Gold OA fees until and unless they have adopted a Green OA mandate for all of their refereed journal article output. There is still time for UUK and RIN to remedy this, by prominently setting the priorities and contingencies straight. I fervently hope they will do so! (Peter Suber is expressing the very same hope, but in his characteristically gentler and less curmudgeonly way.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Self-Archiving in a Repository is a Supplement, not a Substitute, for Publishing in a Peer-Reviewed Journal
[ 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 do not want the usual round of arguments, but would simply like to remind readers of this list the following points: 1. There is no good reason why repositories could not and should not achieve a state of relative autonomy with regard to the traditional publishing scene; 2. There is no reason why someone should not cite from an article placed in a reliable repository. This refers back to the question of the reference version and who controls it. I would rather have universities and research centers control the reference versions than external entities, especially when those are commercial in nature. 3. In fields where quotations are frequent and extensive, and where page numbers are required, people with no access to the published version find themselves at a distinct disadvantage, not to say worse. This is the case for most of the humanities and social science disciplines and these cover more than half of the research personnel of any typical university. First, the solution offered in 3 is generally not accepted by serious editors of serious journals. Second, the excerpts from the APA guidelines given below demonstrate the quandary very well: most if not all journal articles in electronic format *do* include page numbers. The APA recommendations for digital documents tries to cover the kinds of documents that, because they are in a sense natively electronic, do not follow a traditional page format (e.g. a web site). However, most published articles in electronic format follow the paper/print tradition and continue to include a page structure. The preeminence of pdf files underscores this fact very neatly. They clearly point to the incunabular state of our electronic publishing at this stage of history (the phrase belongs to Gregory Crane). Many thanks to Stevan for pointing out the APA recommendations because they clearly separate electronic documents without page numbers from electronic documents with page numbers. These recommendations demonstrate the wide need to cite the accessible document. 4. Point 2 is very important. If you cite the journal version of the article, do cite the repository article as well. This will underscore that there are two separate reference versions, including for archival purpose. Jean-Claude Guédon Le jeudi 05 mars 2009 à 07:54 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Colin, yes, this question has been much discussed in the Forum (not just for years, but for well over a decade now, well before the major OA developments of today), here , here and here. The answer is simple and I fervently hope it will not elicit another round of the usual back-and-forth: (1) Always cite the published version if the cited work is indeed published. (The published version is the archival work; the OA version is merely a means of access to a version of it. It is not the published work.) (2) Always give the URL or DOI of the OA version for access purposes, along with the citation to the published version. (3) In citing (in the text) the location for quoted excerpts, use the published versions page-span if you know them; otherwise use section-heading plus paragraph number. (Indeed, it is good to add section-heading plus paragraph-number in any case.) What follows is the pertinent extract from the APA Style Manual: -To cite a specific part of a source, indicate the page, chapter, figure, table or equation at the appropriate point in text. Always give page numbers for quotations. Abbreviate the words page and chapter in such text citations: (Cheek Buss, 1981, p.332)#8232; (Shimamura, 1989, chap. 3) For electronic sources that do not provide page numbers, use the paragraph number, if available, preceded by the ¶ symbol or the abbreviation para. If neither paragraph nor page numbers are visible, cite the heading and the number of paragraph following it to direct reader to the location of the material. (Myers, 2000, ¶ 5)(Beutler, 2000, Conclusion section, para.1) (Contrast (1) how the rather trivial and obvious practical advice I gave the APA years ago has been sensibly incorporated into the Manual with (2) the endless trivial and pointless niggling in some of the prior exchanges on this topic in this Forum!) Stevan On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:04 AM, C.J.Smith c.j.sm...@open.ac.uk wrote: Stevan, In terms of journal papers, what
Re: [SOAF] Please Don't Conflate Direct with Harvested CRs (Central Repositories), Or Deposit Locus With Search Locus
[ 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. ] Consider the logic of Stevan's argument. I gave an example of one central, multi-disciplinary repository, HAL, because this category of central depositories had not been overlooked in the discussion. Then, in a different point, I turned to the question of central depositories in general and brought out the fact that several of them had political foundations. Because of this political link, I suggested that such repositories might be in a better position - I repeat might - to obtain a national mandate. When I suggested this possibility, I was thinking about NIH of course. I did also write: Moreover, it has been my impression that the notion of NIH wanting to dispose of its own depository (which allows for some degree of control over file formats, for example, and this is important for the development of data mining processes) had not impeded, quite the contrary, the political process leading to the law where this mandate is contained. In his response, Stevan claims the contrary. And to demonstrate his thesis, he uses the case of HAL! HAL, he claims, is ten years old (which it is not, incidentally - more like three or four years old. The official signature with the Academy of Science dates back to 2006, but it had been in the works for a couple of years). Hal did not get a mandate; therefore, Guédon is wrong... What about NIH? I would also like to know how the mandated locus of deposit has indeed (partially) impeded (and is continuing to (partially) impede) progress in implementing and sustaining the NIH mandate. In particular, are the present and renewed threats against the NIH mandate aimed at the mandate itself, or are they aimed at the place of deposit. In particular, does Stevan know of precise arguments that use the place of deposit as a lever against the mandate? If so, could Stevan be so kind as to provide some precise citations (and quotations) to convince us. I am quite willing to be convinced, but only if the proof is brought on the table. Also, I was talking specifically about places of deposit, not depositories in general. Also, I did not fail to take into account a single one the many very specific practical and functional points that have been adduced on behalf of funders stipulating IRs instead of CRs as their designated locus of deposit, I simply took them for granted. But, as is often the case in my debates with Stevan, I simply wanted to point out that there is bit more to the situation that what he chooses to point to. This is one more case where I essentially agree with all he says, but feel the need to point out the incompleteness or the overly restrictive nature of what he says. However, it appears that, for Stevan, anything extending beyond the strict boundaries of his mental horizon is deemed to be vague. Finally, I suspect that if I had qualified Stevan's text with something equivalent to vague and cheery, and had alluded to Chairman Mao through the 100 flowers blooming, etc., I would have been called strident or something like that. And on the Am-sci list, the debate would have been summarily and arbitrarily cut off by the moderator of the list who happens to be ... Stevan in person. I will conclude by quoting Mr. Spock (of Star Trek fame): Captain, this is illogical. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 10 février 2009 à 08:36 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : if a central depository is correlated with a political entity, particularly a national government, then it may be in a position to secure a national mandate in one single move. Indeed. And France's HAL has been correlated with a political entity: the French government. But in nearly a decade there has not been one single move toward adopting a nation-wide OA mandate for HAL in France. (In the meantime, the UK, with no national repository, has adopted an OA mandate for all 7 of its national research funding councils , and 7 of its universities have already adopted institutional or departmental OA mandates too. In France one national funding council one national institute, and one laboratory have so far adopted OA mandates.) NIH wanting to [manage] its own [r]epository... ha[s] not impeded, quite the contrary, the political process leading to the law where this mandate is contained. The issue -- to repeat -- is not institutional repositories (IRs) vs. central repositories (CRs) but IRs vs. CRs as the mandated locus of direct deposit. (The rest is indeed just a matter of harvesting.) And the NIH's stipulation of a CR (PubMed Central) as the mandated locus of deposit has indeed (partially) impeded (and is continuing to
Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
[ 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. ] This is an old debate where one should carefully distinguish between two levels of analysis. 1. In principle, is it better to have institutional, distributed, depositories, or to have central, thematic, whatever depositories? 2. In practice, we know we will not escape the will by various institutions to develop central, thematic, whatever depositories (e.g. Hal in France). And these depositories will exist. The question then becomes: how do we best live with this mixed bag of situations? Pursuing the battle on principles is OK with me, but it does not get me enthused. Pursuing the battle on the pragmatic, practical level, knowing that various tools exist that will restore the distributed nature of these depositories anyway, appears to me far preferable. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mercredi 04 février 2009 à 13:14 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : This is the timely and incisive analysis (in French) of what is at stake in the question of locus of deposit for open access self-archiving and mandates. It was written by Prof. Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège and founder of EurOpenScholar. It is re-posted here from Prof. Rentier's blog. For more background (in English) on the important issue of institutional vs. central deposit, click here. Liège is one of the c. 30 institutions (plus 30 funders) that have already adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate . DéPôTS INSTITUTIONNELS, THéMATIQUES OU CENTRALISéS ? Posté par Bernard Rentier dans Open Access A lire: une remarquable revue très complète de l'OA par Peter Suber. La formule des dépôts institutionnels permettant la libre consultation de publications de recherche par l'Internet est certes la meilleure, mais elle est, tôt ou tard, menacée par une nouvelle tendance visant à créer des dépôts thématiques ou des dépôts gérés par des organismes finançant la recherche. La dernière initiative provient de la très active association EUROHORCs (European association of the heads of research funding organisations and research performing organisations), bien connue pour ses prix EURYI et dont l'influence sur la réflexion européenne en matière de recherche est considérable. Elle tente de convaincre l'European Science Foundation (ESF) de mettre sur pied, grâce à une subvention considérable des Communautés européennes, un dépôt centralisé qui serait à la fois thématique (sciences biomédicales) et localisé (Europe) sur base du principe qui a conduit à la création de PubMed Central, par exemple. L'idée part d'un bon sentiment. Elle est née d'une prise de conscience que nous partageons tous: il est impératif que la science financée par les deniers publics soit rendue publique gratuitement et commodément. Mais en même temps, elle est fondée sur une profonde méconnaissance de l'Open Access, de l'Open Access Initiative et des besoins réels des chercheurs et des pouvoirs subsidiants. La notion qui sous-tend cette initiative est que les résultats de la recherche doivent être déposés directement dans un dépôt centralisé. Mais si les résultats de la recherche ne sont pas aujourd'hui en accès libre et ouvert, ce n'est pas parce qu'il manque des dépôts centralisés, c'est tout simplement parce que la plupart des auteurs ne déposent pas leurs articles du tout, même pas dans un dépôt institutionnel. La solution n'est donc pas de créer un nouveau dépôt. Elle est dans l'obligation pour les chercheurs de déposer leur travail dans un dépôt électronique, cette obligation devant être exigée par les universités et institutions de recherche ainsi que par les organismes finançant la recherche. Si l'on se contente de laisser faire les grands pourvoyeurs de fonds tels que l'Union européenne, on ne disposera dans le dépôt central que des publications de la recherche qu'ils ont financée. On comprend donc qu'àterme, le chercheur sera amené à encoder ses publications dans autant de dépôts différents qu'il
Re: Comparing OA/non-OA in Developing Countries
[ 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. ] Just to make sure that no misunderstanding emerges: OA journals do not necessarily require author/institutional fees. In fact the majority of the journals in DOAJ do not require such fees. All SciELO journals, for example, work without author/institution fees. Let us not conflate OA journals with author-pay OA journals. A strong reason why many authors in non-OECD countries do not publish in OA journals is because the evaluation rules applied in many of these countries often rely on a mechanical use of impact factors. This is what the evaluation of quality amounts to in such cases, and this fact deeply distorts the way in which authors choose their journals, especially when impact factors are limited to the results provided by Thomson Reuters. Again, SciELO has found it necessary to develop its own metrics if only to have arguments against quantitative measurements regularly presented as authoritative. If we really want to deal with quality, we should begin by agreeing on a set of thresholds that would act as minimal requirements for quality. In parallel, if we want to evaluate excellence, i.e. an evaluation ultimately based on competition, then we should also design our metrics for that purpose. But it should also be remembered that each objective is quite different from the other. Quality is like a passing grade; excellence is like a prize. If careers are first evaluated from the perspective of passing grades, and then from the perspective of prizes, many confusions will disappear and many countries will discover that, while the great majority of their researchers may simply be passing some grades, they are nonetheless terribly useful to the country's economy and culture. So, let us be concerned with quality and let us not confuse it with excellence. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mercredi 14 janvier 2009 à 11:39 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Comparing OA/non-OA in Developing Countries [A]n investigation of the use of open access by researchers from developing countries... show[s] that open access journals are not characterised by a different composition of authors than the traditional toll access journals... [A]uthors from developing countries do not citeopen access more than authors from developed countries... [A]uthors from developing countries are not more attracted to open access than authors from developed countries.[underscoring added](Frandsen 2009, J. Doc. 65(1)) (See also Open Access: No Benefit for Poor Scientists) Open Access is not the same thing as Open Access Journals. Articles published in conventional non-Open-Access journals can also be made Open Access (OA) by their authors -- by self-archiving them in their own Institutional Repositories. The Frandsen study focused on OA journals, not on OA articles. It is problematic to compare OA and non-OA journals, because journals differ in quality and content, and OA journals tend to be newer and fewer than non-OA journals (and often not at the top of the quality hierarchy). Some studies have reported that OA journals are cited more, but because of the problem of equating journals, these findings are limited. In contrast, most studies that have compared OA and non-OA articles within the same journal and year have found a significant citation advantage for OA. It is highly unlikely that this is only a developed-world effect; indeed it is almost certain that a goodly portion of OA's enhanced access, usage and impact comes from developing-world users. It is unsurprising that developing world authors are hesitant about publishing in OA journals, as they are the least able to pay author/institution publishing fees (if any). It is also unsurprising that there is no significant shift in citations toward OA journals in preference to non-OA journals (whether in the developing or developed world): Accessibility is a necessary -- not a sufficient -- condition for usage and citation: The other necessary condition isquality. Hence it was to be expected that the OA Advantage would affect the top quality research most. That's where the proportion of OA journals is lowest. The Seglen effect (skewness of science) is that the top 20% of articles tend to receive 80% of the citations. This is why the OA Advantage is more detectable by comparing OA and non-OA articles within the same journal, rather than by comparing OA and non-OA journals. We will soon be reporting
Re: Green Angels and OA Extremists
[ 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. ] Le mercredi 03 décembre 2008 à 05:54 +, Leslie Carr a écrit : Discussion on the other side of the fence (the library side), seems to indicate that there is little enthusiasm anyway for this kind of assistance (in Michael's terms) or systematic downloading (Elsevier's). I think that the library position is that they have no resources available to do this work for the author, even if it were acceptable to the publisher. -- Les Carr I wonder what the exact situation is. My own impression is that many libraries are willing to do the job for the authors, and do so. Furthermore, in my humble opinion, libraries should be doing this work, thereby becoming the publishers of their institution. Furthermore, they should declare that the version of the article in their repository, because it has been vetted, is a reference version just as good as that of the publisher. And if anyone adds that this is a publishing reform, I will fully and heartily agree... :-) Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Green Angels and OA Extremists
[ 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 support Michael's analysis. Commercial presses will do all they can to keep self-archiving at some artisanal, confusing level while lobbying like mad wherever they can (this means governmental agencies such as NIH and other similar agencies). The artisanal dimension I am talking about refers to constraints such as preventing the use of the publisher's pdf. Making it difficult for libraries to stock their own IR's with the articles of their faculty in some bulk fashion is another way to slow down archiving. When publishers impose their own particular constraints on self-archiving, they make things more confusing for the researchers, and this slows down progress. In short, they act in such a way that they cannot be directly and clearly faulted for opposing OA, but they make sure progress will be slow, difficult, reversible and temporary. While allowing self-archiving is indeed a step forward, it is accompanied by so many side issues that the step is small, hesitant, and not always pointed in the right direction. Of course, one can always invent some work around, add yet another button, or whatever, but this ends up making things only a little more complex and a little more confusing for the average researcher and it only reinforces the elements of confusion sought by at least some of the publishers. In short, it is a very clever strategy. To achieve OA, we do need self-archiving, all the difficulties thrown into its path by publishers notwithstanding, including the devious strategies I just referred to. But we also need OA publishing. Not to say that OA publishing should come before self-archiving, but to point out a very simple fact: a pincer strategy on the scientific communication system is better than a strategy based on a single method. OA needs self-archiving, but it also needs some reform in scientific publishing. Rather than opposing green and gold strategies, it is better to see how they can support each other. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 02 décembre 2008 à 07:47 -0800, Michael Eisen a écrit : Les Carr wrote: HAVING SAID THAT, the library is in no way adverse to finding mechanisms that assist individuals and ease their tasks, and I guess that Elsevier can have no objections to that either! How about a notification email to be sent to authors of In Press papers that contains a Deposit this paper button that initiates the user's deposit workflow on the ScienceDirect Submitted Manuscript PDF. You guys are such suckers. OF COURSE Elsevier can have objections to libraries assisting individuals in self-archiving their work, because Elsevier does not want self archiving to succeed! What do they have to do to actually prove this to you? Stevan, Les and others seem to think that Karen Hunter's recent email was some kind of bureaucratic error, rather than realize it for what it clearly is - a direct statement from Elsevier that they do not want self-archiving to actually take off. It's a ploy (an apparently successful ploy) on their part to diffuse moves towards effective universal open access by a) making them seem like good guys and b) fostering the illusion that we can have universal green OA without altering the economics of publishing. And Stevan, rather than the typical retort about how green OA can be achieved now, with a few keystrokes, can you please instead explain how the policy statement from your friends at Elsevier does not indicate that they are really opposed to real OA. Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA
[ 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. ] Larry is right, and Stevan is right. Both routes should be followed and both routes should be demanded by students. Let us stop this exclusive attitude with regard to OA. Two roads exist. They are equally valuable. Rather than declaring one suprior to the other, it would be far more useful to examine how to make these two approaches help each other. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mercredi 19 novembre 2008 à 06:41 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit : At the Students for a Free Culture Conference, Lawrence Lessig advised students, on Remix Culture: I think the obvious, low-hanging-fruit fight for the Students for Free Culture movement right now is to start having sit-ins in universities where they don't adopt Open Access publishing rules. It's ridiculous that scholars publish articles in journals that then charge 5, 10, 15 thousand dollars for people around the world to get access to it. It may just be because of the wrong choice of words (Open Access publishing rules), but as stated, this does not sound like the right advice to give to students on what to do to help persuade universities to provide Open Access to their refereed research journal article output, nor does it correspond with what is being mandated by the 28 pioneer universities and departments (including Harvard and Stanford, and 30 research funders, including NIH) that have actually mandated OA. As noted in Larry's link, OA is free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide... primarily [to] research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. But that OA can be provided by two means: Gold OA publishing (authors publishing in journals that make their articles free online, sometimes at a fee to the author/university) and Green OA self-archiving (authors publishing articles in whatever journals they choose, but depositing their final refereed draft in their university's institutional repository to make it free online) The 28 pioneering universities/departments (and 30 funders) have all mandated Green OA (mandatory deposit), but Larry seems to be advocating that students strike for mandating Gold OA (mandatory publishing in a Gold OA journal). Please see The University's Mandate to Mandate Open Access on the Open Students: Students for Open Access to Research blog, where I have tried to describe what students can do to help persuade universities to provide Open Access to their refereed research journal article output. Stevan Harnad Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA
[ 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. ] Many thanks to Klaus Graf for supporting my position, but I should nonetheless like to add a little coda to his message. While all the myths listed by Klaus are real, it would be equally a myth to lean on this conclusion to refuse pushing for all the suggestions mentioned in Klaus' message. For example, getting a mandate may be difficult in Germany for legal reason, but that does not weaken the position arguing in favour of mandating wherever possible. It just makes us more aware of the real difficulties in obtaining the desired results. Getting a mandate can be very hard work indeed, as hard as getting OA journals going, or perhaps even harder in some circumstances (but not all). What is needed here is some sense of nuances. This leads me to a last remark: looking squarely at realities such as obtaining mandates can be hard is not - I repeat not - a way to object to getting mandates; it is just that: looking at reality squarely. Not all leaders agree with the method that claims that all tasks are easy is the best way to motivate followers, and that saying otherwise is defeatist or counter-productive. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mercredi 19 novembre 2008 à 17:40 +0100, Klaus Graf a écrit : 2008/11/19 Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca: Larry is right, and Stevan is right. Both routes should be followed and both routes should be demanded by students. Let us stop this exclusive attitude with regard to OA. Two roads exist. They are equally valuable. Rather than declaring one suprior to the other, it would be far more useful to examine how to make these two approaches help each other. I agree with this. Rainer Kuhlen has posted in INETBIB a question regarding Professor Harnad's position to the aims of the German Urheberrechtsbündnis (improving copyright is slowing the OA movement): http://www.ub.uni-dortmund.de/listen/inetbib/msg37662.html I have replied to this at http://www.ub.uni-dortmund.de/listen/inetbib/msg37671.html Here is a short summary in English: 1. It is a myth that green OA only works with a mandate. Have a look at the NL Cream of Science! 2 It is a myth that mandates are legally possible in all contries. At least in Germany it is impossible or very difficult to make mandates legally valid. 3. It is a myth that deposit with closed access is legally possible in all countries. At least in Germany the copyright act forbidds such depositing without the consent of the holder of the exclusive rights. See http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5193609/ 4. It is a myth that the Request Button works. See my little tests http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5193609/ http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5247312/ 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! 5. It is a myth to think that is all a question of embargo terms. There are disciplines with publishers which are making case-to-case decisions and publishers which don't accept green OA. Depositing eprints closed access which cannot be used before the last dying author is 70 years dead doesn't make sense. 6. It is am myth that the primary aim of the OA movement is to make the journal literature free. A lot of people don't share this position. For a broader definition of OA see http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5251764/ Klaus Graf . Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum
[ 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 was on the road in the last few days, cut off from the Internet. This will explain my silence. I agree with all the people that believe Stevan's interventions on this list (and elsewhere) have been invaluable. Sometimes infuriating, but invaluable nonetheless. I have long debated against some of Stevan's theses, but I have learnt a lot from these discussions. The point of my earlier remarks was absolutely not to push Stevan out of this list. This would be total nonsense. The point was a worry about a confusion of roles. As Jan Velterop states it below, doing so ended up in not making it easy on himself for Stevan. I had not thought about JaNs, BBC-inspired, host/moderator distinction, but I find it interesting and useful. It would certainly clarify Stevan's position on this list while not cramping his inimitable style, and it would free him from negative reactions, especially when these have been the result of possible technical delays rather than intent (a reference to my own, inaccurate, outburst that seems to have started this whole discussion). In conclusion, what I was arguing about was not about a vote of confidence (or nonconfidence) with regard to Stevan. I was arguing in favour of a simple clarification of roles. What Stevan has constantly striven to do ultimately strikes me as very difficult and ultimately contradictory: attempting to be as fair as possible, as Stevan has constantly tried to do, while simultaneously adopting a highly polemical style of intervention may not be mutually exclusive stances in theory, but, in practise, they are damn hard to maintain under a single brain. Jean-Claude Guédon Le lundi 13 octobre 2008 à 08:22 +0100, Jan Velterop a écrit : Apologies for the lateness of my comments on this matter. Stevan has my full support. He is fully entitled to post on this list what he wants and to withold submissions if he deems that right. Those who hold the view that a list such as this one should - or indeed can - be run 'objectively' and according to some pseudo-democratic rules are, frankly, a bit naïve. Those who don't like Stevan's judgement with regard to acceptance of submissions can always start their own list. That said, Stevan hasn't made it easy on himself, combining the task of moderator with that of host. Other lists separate these roles, and he may wish to consider drafting someone in to help him run the list and do the same (Stevan being the host; someone else being the moderator, I would have thought, given the definitions of the roles, see below). The definitions that, for instance, the BBC uses for the two roles are along the following lines: A host's job is to encourage interesting discussions and to help resolve disagreements. They post regularly on the lists, start discussions or reply to questions. Hosts do not reject messages. A moderator's job is to reject messages that break the `House Rules'. Messages will not be rejected for any other reason. Moderators do not post messages on the lists. Among the BBC `House Rules' are the following (there are more). Messages are rejected that ...Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable ...Contain swear words or other language likely to offend ...Break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity. ...Are considered to be off-topic ...Are considered to be `spam', that is posts containing the same, or similar, message posted multiple times. Apart from the possible problem of finding such help, the only difficulty of my suggestion that I can foresee is perhaps dealing with the last house rule mentioned. But then again, Stevan is free to set his own house rules. Jan Velterop Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Nihil obstat
[ 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. ] The truth is on both sides. I did believe Stevan had not posted my message because it showed up late in my in-box. At the same time, I also objected to Stevan's summary because it was not faithful at all to my own words. The task of summarizing is tricky and the phrase as [the moderator] understands it is not sufficient. Stevan should refrain from summarizing, especially when he summarizes something he does not agree with. Even an achievangelical being remains human and errare humanum est to use Stevan's apparently favourite language. I agree with Stevan that the issue of censorship should be completely separated from the question of the potential dual role moderator/contributor. Censorship is no longer an issue with me. This said, I believe a moderator should, like the chair of a meeting, remain in the background, above the discussions, and not intervene except in extreme cases (as when a chair casts a vote in tied situations). Obviously, Stevan does not subscribe to this notion. But in full fairness, Stevan, in his dual role, has constantly striven to act in the right way. Personally, I have no objection to Stevan's role as moderator, only reservations. And these reservations do not aim at Stevan, but at the duality of the role he occupies. Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 03 octobre 2008 à 07:04 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 3:52 AM, Andy Powell andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk wrote: To be fair, I think Jean-Claude is primarily accusing you (Stevan) of summarising his arguments back to the list incorrectly rather than censorship per se, No, actually I think he thought I had not posted his posting. I think every poster, whether moderator or not, has the right to summarize to postings of other posters, as he understands them, and to criticize them as he sees fit (as long as the criticism is not ad hominem, defamatory. libelous, or off-topic). then noting that having the role of both moderator and prime activist doesn't always sit comfortably. As moderator all I do is keep the list on-topic, and filter out flaming and spamming. As poster, I do what everyone else on the list does: I express my own views to the best of my ability and knowledge. In this discussion, please let us separate the question of whether I have, as moderator, suppressed relevant postings, from the question of whether there is some sort of incompatibility between being moderator and poster. On the few occassions that I posted to this list, I have tended to do so in response to (and sometimes in disagreement with) a post by Stevan and if I'm honest, I do find it odd that my post then has to wait for moderation by the person I'm arguing with. Have any of your postings failed to appear? All of which leads to a very simple question... does this list actually need moderation? Unless you want to see the dozens of spams that appear in my gmail box every day, you better keep this a moderated list. But I repeat, if there is a plurality opposed to my moderation, I am happy to hand over to someone else. Stevan Harnad Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Jean-Claude Gu�don is wrong, and so is Zinath Rehana
[ 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 believe that my position is now clear. The long delay in seeing my message appear in my own in-boxled me to believe that it had been censored. It was not. I repeat: it was not! As for the unexpected support from Mr. Rehana, it came as a total surprise and only muddied the waters further. I wrote back privately the following message to Mr. Rehana (with a copy to Stevan) : I am in no position to evaluate your claim. I have not studied the situation and have not asked to do so. Best, Jean-Claude Guédon Cc Stevan Harnad This will give a clear measure of my position with regard to Mr. Rehana. I have not engaged at all in this particular debate because it did not look important to me. I hope all is clear now. Best to all, Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 03 octobre 2008 à 06:10 +0100, Alma Swan a écrit : I've changed the subject line for this message and I hope the moderator of this forum will let it stand even though it breaks the thread. I do not wish to be associated in any way with the sentiments of those previous comments about the management of this list. No doubt Jean-Claude will also wish to dissociate himself from the new bedfellow he has unwittingly acquired. All people respectful of the professional endeavours of Richard Poynder must surely have shared my disgust at the tone and the content of SJI co-founder Zinath Rehana's original post (linked to below). To level public accusations of libel, harassment, intimidation and arrogance at a journalist whom many of us know from personal experience to pursue his practice with skill, balance, courtesy, respect and complete professionalism is rotten enough. To resort to a smear of racism is well beyond the pale. It would be even if there had been the slightest hint that any racism were in play in Poynder's investigations. That there wasn't, and that he was going about his business employing his usual rigorous, professional standards, makes it all the more disgraceful. This list is no place for such histrionics and dirty play and I register my full support for the moderator for making a judgment not to post a message that was way past the point of decency and respectful argument and which appears (to my non-legal eye) to have strayed into libellous territory. Posting such a message would have been a bad decision. Alma Swan Key perspectives Ltd Truro, UK On 03/10/2008 01:18, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote: Rehana is absolutely right. I did not approve for posting on the American Scientist Open Access Forum Rehana's posting entitled Lies, fear and smear campaigns against SJI and other OA journals because it was my judgment as moderator that the posting was libelous and defamatory. I stand by that judgment. The curious may see the posting in question at: https://arl.org/lists/sparc-oaforum/Message/4526.html See also: OA Needs Open Evidence, Not Anonymous Innuendo http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/455-guid.html I invite the Forum to let me know whether they would prefer a moderator who allows such postings. If so, I will obligingly end my 10-year tenure as moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum, as I would under no circumstance moderate a Forum that allowed such postings. Be advised, though, that this Forum has about 1000 members, and to be voted down as moderator, I would expect to hear from a plurality of the members, not just from the inevitable disgruntled few. I am, however, quite ready to step down, if that is the prevailing wish. Stevan Harnad On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Rehana i...@scientificjournals.org wrote: Jean-Claude Guédon is absolutely right! This is not the first time the moderator of AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM has resorted to censorship. He has censored our response to misinformation posted by someone on the forum. It is really sad that a forum that is set up to promote open access, is resorting to censorship. I am copying this message to Jean-Claude Guédon so that this message is not censored by the moderator. Jean-Claude Guédon has my permission to include this message in his post as another example of censorship. I would not be surprised if my account is closed by the moderator so that I would not be able to receive any more updates and challenge such censorship. Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Author's final draft and citing
[ 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 find this form of behaviour unacceptable. It borders on unacknowledged censorship. Let me give a quick example: I never conflated citability and branding, but Stevan does in his summary. So beware of Stevan's summaries. They read more like polemical devices or editorials. It also and clearly illustrates how he often misreads what people write. I call on Stevan simply to post the whole message I sent last night. It is not very long and it points out how Stevan does not dialogue well. It is not for him, as moderator, to judge what is tedious or not, monumentally trivial or not. A moderator should address the issue of relevance, not tediousness. He or she should also carefully distinguish between his (her) role as moderator and as party in a discussion. Perhaps Stevan should give up the moderation of this list and thus enjoy greater polemical freedom. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mercredi 01 octobre 2008 à 09:19 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : I think AmSci Forum readers may be finding this exchange rather tedious. I will summarize, and then let Jean-Claude have the last word. (1) Jean-Claude thinks there is a problem for specifying the locus of quoted passages when citing a work if the pagination of the OA postprint one has accessed differs from the pagination of the publisher's PDF. (2) He does not like the solution of citing the published work, as usual, linking the postprint's URL, for quote-checking, and specifying the locus of the quote by paragraph number instead of page number. (3) He prefers to upgrade the status of the postprint in some way, so as to brand it as citable, and then citing the postprint instead of citing the published work. Judicat Emptor. This strikes me as a monumentally trivial non-problem and an unnecessary and incoherent proposed solution. Stevan Harnad On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:02 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Sigh... I will respond below Le mardi 30 septembre 2008 à 17:48 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Jean-Claude Guedon thinks that because an article published by Joe Bloggs in Nature (2008, volume X, Number Y, pp NN-MM) is not OA, and Joe Bloggs's OA postprint of the final, refereed draft of his Nature article, self-archived in his Institional Repository (IR), is unpaginated, hence one cannot specify the location of a quoted passage in the Nature version except by paragraph number, one should not cite the Nature version, but the self-archived postprint. 1. I am not going to introduce a new way of locating quotations by using paragraph numbers. I do not even feel like counting paragraphs. 2. I never said that the archived article was unpaginated; I said it may be paginated differently from the journal pagination. 3. It is not that one should not cite the Nature version; it is that one cannot cite the Nature version completely. What I ask is: What does it mean to cite the postprint of a published Nature article? I would think you cite the publication, the Nature article, and give the URL of the postprint for access purposes. So I have a quote and I refer to the journal article and its general citation, and then I send the reader to the archived version and explain how to find the exact passage in the archived version? This is quite complicated, it seems to me. Jean-Claude seems to think the postprint itself should be upgraded into a publication in its own right: How? And what does that mean? It is not upgraded into a publication. It is de facto a publication. The article has been peer reviewed and it is publicly accessible. That instead of proudly listing his paper in his CV as having been published by Nature, a peer-reviewed journal of some repute, Joe Bloggs should list it as having been published by his own Institutional Repository? That again is stretching my words in strange directions. I am pointing to something lacking in referring precisely to a quotation. This does not prevent me from putting the journal reference (and the repository reference) in my cv. I dom not even begin to understand how that issue ever arose. And what does published mean under these circumstances? With Nature, it means Nature conducted a peer review, to determine whether the article met Nature's quality standards. the self-archived article is the same as the peer reviewed article in the journal. The archived article will also mention the general citation from the journal. It may even link to that journal. This still does not allow me to clarify completely a specific quotation from the journal. But the article in the repository has clearly been perr reviewed. No problem there. Is the author's institution to conduct yet another peer review on the same peer-reviewed article, to determine whether it has met that institution's
Re: Author's final draft and citing
[ 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. ] Regarding point 2, how does one cite the published work if one has no access to it, and has only access to a version which is not paginated in the same way (e.g. Elsevier articles cannot be archived in the publisher's format)? In many disciplines, citing requires mentioning the page number of the citation. What to do if that remains inaccessible. And please, do not tell me that you then write to the author(s). This point has been made many times too, but without ever receiving a correct answer, i.e. an acknowledgement of its unsolved nature. One solution for this problem is simply for IR's to declare (after inspection) their version to be citable. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 30 septembre 2008 à 10:29 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : This question has been raised many times and it has a simple, clear and correct answer, in two parts: (1) Do not conflate the question of what to CITE -- that is always the canonical published work itself, if the work is published -- with the question of what version of it you managed to ACCESS. (2) If you cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version, then you access the OA version deposited in the OA Repository, but you always cite the published work (and, preferentially, add the URL of the accessed version too). That's it. The only two other minor details are: (3) If the work is unpublished, or not yet published, you cite it as unpublished, and, again, add the URL of the version that you accessed. (4) The two reasons why it is vastly preferable that OA mandates should specify that it is the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft (the postprint) that is deposited in the OA repository, rather than the publisher's proprietary PDF is (4a) that far more publishers endorse setting access to the author's deposited postprint as OA immediately, rather than after and embargo, and (4b) PDF is the least useful and functional format, for both human users and for robot data-mining. Some comments below: On 9/29/08, Delasalle, Jenny j.delasa...@warwick.ac.uk wrote: I like to quote the Versions toolkit which mentions in a survey response that most academics prefer to cite the final, published version... Of course, and so they should. But we are talking about what to do if you cannot ACCESS the publisher's proprietary version, and the answer is, access the author's OA postprint version -- but cite the canonical published work, as always. whichever version they have read (p9: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/VERSIONS_Toolkit_v1_final.pdf) Exactly. Whilst you're speaking to academics, you could survey them to ask what they would do... Good question, but the right answer is, as always: If the work is published, I cite the published work. And the URL of the OA version should be added to the citation, as the accessed version. But there is no evidence that I know of to indicate that anyone will cite any papers they have read in a repository. There is abundant evidence that they cite them, as preprints, and once published, as the published work. While only the unpublished preprint is available, they cite that, as an unpublished preprint. As soon as the paper is published, they cite the published version. While they can only access the preprint or the postprint, users access that; if they can access the publisher's proprietary version, they access that. Henneken, E. A., Kurtz, M. J., Warner, S., Ginsparg, P., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C. S., Thompson, D., Bohlen, E. and Murray, S. S. (2006) #8232;E-prints and Journal Articles in Astronomy: a Productive Co-existence #8232;ArXiv, Computer Science, cs.DL/0609126, 22 September 2006, in Learned Publishing, Vol. 20, No. 1, January 2007, 16-22 http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0609126 For those with no option (no subscription access), a bland looking draft of the article is better than not being able to read it at all, though. Yes, but if it is published, the published version is still the one to cite. One more point to note here: what do we mean by a citation? Our academics are chiefly concerned with citations in journals that are indexed by Web of Science. But there are other kinds of citations: links from others' web pages and reading lists, and from papers in less prestigious journals or in disciplines not well covered by WoS and grey literature This is mixing apples and oranges: A scholarly/scientific citation is just that: The citation, by a scholarly work or another scholarly work (usually text to text). This is true whether or not ISI happens to index the work. Citations to and from non-ISI journals, as well as to and from books, are all classical citations. Web links, however, and reading lists are certainly scholarly impact metrics, but they are not citations. that will help to raise the academic's
Re: Author's final draft and citing
[ 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. ] Quoting means extracting a passage from a text and inserting it within another text one is writing. It is often placed within quotation marks, but not always as quoting conventions obey complex and variable rules. Citing means giving a reference for a quoted text, or for some facts or opinions found in another article, book, etc. This distinction has been dealt with repeatedly in the past. Even if I follow Stevan's distinction, I need both to quote and cite (in Stevan's sense of the words) when I work and I cannot be satisfied with only citing. I am not the only to have this need. Consequently, not having access to the citable version prevents me from doing all of my work because the precise location of what I need remains unknown to me. However, if an IR declares that an article under its stewardship is also citable, then, I can do all my work, including giving a precise location for a quotation, or a fact, or an opinion, etc. This simply means that I recognize the IR as a publication instrument, i.e. it makes documents public and not simply as a collection of texts open to reading and nothing else. In fact, limiting IR texts only to reading would contravene the requirements for something to be truly in open access. At this junction, the question of which version(s) is (are) reference versions emerges. I submit that articles archived in IR's can become references as much as the version appearing in a journal. There is a well-known precedent for this. Articles are sometimes reprinted in a different journal or an anthology. Once this is done, either version can be cited and is cited. Sometimes, it is the reprinted version that becomes the better known citation. Stevan may not like this line of reasoning because it blurs the distinction he tries so hard to maintain between journals and IR's. His thesis is that IR's and journals can coexist simply because they do not fulfil at all the same functions. However, this is Stevan's thesis, not a universally accepted situation and it cannot be mistaken for a fact. A more sensible representation of reality is to state that the functions of journals and IR's, although not identical, overlap. We can then discuss the amount of overlap. To say this amounts to claim a publishing role for IR's and for self-archiving. I claim that role. The fact that IR's can be harvested by powerful search engines supports the thesis that depositing an article in an IR is a form of publishing. Only if IR's worked like the drawer of my desk (which I gladly leave in open access to anyone wanting to access it), could we say that it is not a form of publishing. IR's are not shy silos of knowledge that just sit there, in open access, but with no way to attract attentiuon to themselves. on the contrary, they can be found and used thanks to some Google scholar or OAIster. The relationship between an article published in a journal and another version residing in a repository is quite different from that between an original piece of art and a copy. I believe Walter Benjamin has meditated significantly on this topic (The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility). The article in the repository is not a copy of an original article; it is a version of an article. The journal article is also a version, another version, and nothing more. The article is identified by its title and its author(s) Y and its content. This is how copyright law would identify it. The ways in which a given version is branded depends on a number of variables (authors' names, authors' institutions, journal titles, etc. ). For the moment, IR's do not yet know very well how to brand, but nothing prevents thinking about ways to achieve this result. Personally, I believe we should be thinking hard about this precise issue. jcg Le mardi 30 septembre 2008 à 15:29 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Regarding point 2, how does one cite the published work if one has no access to it, and has only access to a version which is not paginated in the same way (e.g. Elsevier articles cannot be archived in the publisher's format)? Assuming this refers to quoting rather than citing, this query was already explicitly answered in my prior posting (and many past ones): Published works for which one lacks the pagination should be quoted by section heading and paragraph number. (In fact, these digital days, it is probably better to quote paginated works that way too!) In many disciplines, citing requires mentioning the page number of the citation. What to do if that remains inaccessible. And please, do not tell me that you then write to the author(s). I am not sure whether Jean-Claude is referring to citing or quoting (i.e., specifying the
Re: Author's final draft and citing
[ 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. ] Sigh... I will respond below Le mardi 30 septembre 2008 à 17:48 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Jean-Claude Guedon thinks that because an article published by Joe Bloggs in Nature (2008, volume X, Number Y, pp NN-MM) is not OA, and Joe Bloggs's OA postprint of the final, refereed draft of his Nature article, self-archived in his Institional Repository (IR), is unpaginated, hence one cannot specify the location of a quoted passage in the Nature version except by paragraph number, one should not cite the Nature version, but the self-archived postprint. 1. I am not going to introduce a new way of locating quotations by using paragraph numbers. I do not even feel like counting paragraphs. 2. I never said that the archived article was unpaginated; I said it may be paginated differently from the journal pagination. 3. It is not that one should not cite the Nature version; it is that one cannot cite the Nature version completely. What I ask is: What does it mean to cite the postprint of a published Nature article? I would think you cite the publication, the Nature article, and give the URL of the postprint for access purposes. So I have a quote and I refer to the journal article and its general citation, and then I send the reader to the archived version and explain how to find the exact passage in the archived version? This is quite complicated, it seems to me. Jean-Claude seems to think the postprint itself should be upgraded into a publication in its own right: How? And what does that mean? It is not upgraded into a publication. It is de facto a publication. The article has been peer reviewed and it is publicly accessible. That instead of proudly listing his paper in his CV as having been published by Nature, a peer-reviewed journal of some repute, Joe Bloggs should list it as having been published by his own Institutional Repository? That again is stretching my words in strange directions. I am pointing to something lacking in referring precisely to a quotation. This does not prevent me from putting the journal reference (and the repository reference) in my cv. I dom not even begin to understand how that issue ever arose. And what does published mean under these circumstances? With Nature, it means Nature conducted a peer review, to determine whether the article met Nature's quality standards. the self-archived article is the same as the peer reviewed article in the journal. The archived article will also mention the general citation from the journal. It may even link to that journal. This still does not allow me to clarify completely a specific quotation from the journal. But the article in the repository has clearly been perr reviewed. No problem there. Is the author's institution to conduct yet another peer review on the same peer-reviewed article, to determine whether it has met that institution's quality standards? Why? I never said that. And would this mean that all postprints in that IR meet the same quality standards (Nature's)? I never even began to come close to this issue. Please read what I write carefully. Sounds closer to in-house vanity publishing to me, except that it's more like in-house vanity RE-publishing. I suppose so, but it does not concern me. I never said that. This is science-fiction. I think this line of thinking is not only unrealistic but incoherent -- and, most of all, unnecessary, since it is trying to solve a non-existent problem: What work to cite when you have access only to the OA postprint of a published article? The answer is obvious: You cite the *published article*, and add the OA postprint's URL to the citation for those who cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version. (And quote passages by paragraph number.) The proposed solution is not satisfactory. It is not satisfactory because, when I give a reference to a precise quote, I must add the page number. Now, this page number may mean nothing to citation calculators, but it means a whole lot to the reader and to the conventions carefully taught in class about ways to cite a quotation in a scholarly piece of work. Adding a URL is not enough. For example, if someone wants to quote my quotation, that person should be able to quote an original source, not a derivative. If that person does not have access to the journal either, the problem I initially encountered recurs for that second author. Jean-Claude Guédon Stevan Harnad On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:54 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Quoting means extracting a passage from a text and inserting it within another text one is writing. It is often placed within quotation marks, but not always as quoting conventions obey complex and variable rules. Citing means giving a reference for a quoted text, or for some
Re: Value-Neutral Names Needed for the Two Forms of OA
[ 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. ] At the risk of disturbing symmetries that always look pleasant to th eeye and the mind, I would suggest taking the first two suggestions fronm the transparent category and work them together as follows: Read OA vs Re-use OA Otherwise, like Stevan, I have the feeling that the distinction between basic and full will win the day, precisely because it is a little fuzzy. However, it clearly marks the presence of an important distinction. There is an interesting case stuck cleverly somewhere in the middle of all of this: it is the case of documents digitized by Google. They can be easily accesed and read. If you accept Google's tools, they are searchable. However, if you download them, you end up with inert, paper-like digital material because you are stuck with page images. You can OCR them anew, of course, but ... In short, as Clifford Lynch has pointed out, the computational potential of these documents is locked up unless you are ready to redo Google's indexing work. Is this basic OA? Is it more as it appears to be? I would be interested in knowing what others think about this. Best, Jean-Claude Le vendredi 02 mai 2008 à 23:07 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : The Two Forms of OA Have Been Defined: They Now Need Value-Neutral Names SUMMARY: Our joint statement with Peter Suber noted that both price-barrier-free access and permission-barrier-free access are indeed forms of Open Access (OA) and that virtually all Green OA and much of Gold OA today is just price-barrier-free OA, although we both agree that permission-barrier-free OA is the ultimate desideratum. What we had not anticipated was that if price-barrier-free OA were actually named by its logical condition as Weak OA (i.e., the necessary condition for permission-barrier-free OA) then that would create difficulties for those who are working hard toward the universal adoption of the mandates to provide price-barrier-free OA (Green OA self-archiving mandates) that are only now beginning to grow and flourish. So we are looking for a shorthand or stand-in for price-barrier-free OA and permission-barrier-free OA that will convey the distinction without any pejorative connotations for either form of OA. The two forms of OA stand defined, explicitly and logically. They are now in need of value-neutral names (e.g., BASIC vs. FULL OA). Weak/Strong marks the logical distinction between two forms of OA: price-barrier-free access is anecessary condition for permission-barrier-free access, and permission-barrier-free access is a sufficient condition for price-barrier-free access. That is the logic of weak vs. strong conditions. But since Peter Suber and I posted the distinction, noting that both price-barrier-free access and permission-barrier-free access are indeed Open Access (OA), many of our colleagues have been contacting us to express serious concern about the unintended pejorative connotations of weak. As a consequence, to avoid this unanticipated and inadvertent bias, the two types of OA cannot be named by the logical conditions (weak and strong) that define them. We soon hope to announce a more transparent, unbiased pair of names. Current candidates include: Transparent, self-explanatory descriptors: USE OA vs. RE-USE OA READ OA vs. READ-WRITE OA PRICE OA vs. PERMISSION OA Generic descriptors: BASIC or GENERIC or CORE OA vs. EXTENDED or EXTENSIBLE or FULL OA SOFT OA vs. HARD OA EASY OA vs. HARD OA (My own sense it that the consensus is tending toward BASIC vs. FULL OA.) The ultimate choice of names matters far less than ensuring that the unintended connotations of weak cannot be exploited by the opponents of OA, or by the partisans of one of the forms of OA to the detriment of the other. Nor should mandating weak OA be discouraged by the misapprehension that it is some sort of sign of weakness, or of a deficient desideratum The purpose of our joint statement with Peter Suber had been to make explicit what is already true de facto, which is that both price-barrier-free access and permission-barrier-free access are indeed forms of Open Access (OA), and referred to as such, and that virtually all Green OA today,
Re: Publisher's requirements for links from published articles
[ 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. ] Let me summarize the procedure I envision. This may help clear things up. 1. An IR checks if the deposited article is the same as the published article. 2. The IR declares that it is the same as the published article, for example in a general header that is visible from any part of the site. 3. Because the article in the IR has been declared equal to the journal article, it can be cited in its IR version and not in the journal version. if IR's agreed to use a common persistent identifier, this would be very useful. 4. Because the IR version is citable, its way of laying out the document is as good as any. If it uses pages, then the IR pagination is fine for the citation. The need to go back to the journal version to check the page number for citation purposes disappears. 5. As a courtesy, a reference could be optionally added to the effect that the article is also available in a given journal. 6.The IR ought to mention the journal version. This would allow aggregating the citations coming to the same article through various channels. It would also allow directly measuring the role of OA IR's in citation counts. Does this clarify matter? jc Le vendredi 25 avril 2008 à 03:20 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote In many disciplines, citability requires going to the page level. If the deposited article in an IR is not paginated in the same fashion as in the journal, it is no longer citable as a journal article and one has to go back to the journal to cite the passage correctly, down to the page number. My suggestion is that the IR simply declares that the article deposited is conformant to the published version and, as such, citable as is. In other words, the version of the article would be as good a reference as the peer-reviewed version of the article. My perplexity is genuine: If I cannot afford access to the toll-access version of a published journal article, but I do have access to a self-archived Open Access version of it, lacking page numbers, I understand how it might be useful to have a reliable version-comparer confirm that the two texts are substantially the same -- as http://valrec.eprints.org/ does -- and I said so in my original comment below: Authentication (institutional or otherwise) of the self-archived draft is welcome and useful (but not a priority: the drafts themselves, mostly still not self-archived today, are the priority). But how on earth does the version-authentication of the self-archived draft of a published, peer-reviewed journal article take care of the page-reference problem (and is it really a problem?)? If the problem is finding the page-span for the journal reference, and the self-archived draft lacks it, one can of course always find it in a bibliographic database (or one can let the copy editor of the journal in which one is publishing one's own article find it). If it is to find the pages on which quoted or noted passages appear, I would say section headings plus paragraph numbers pinpoint them just as well, if not better, in the PostGutenberg era. If an editor is pedantic enough not to be prepared to settle for section headings plus paragraph numbers to specify cited passages in the original published journal article, it is highly unlikely that he will want to settle instead for section headings plus paragraph numbers to locate the same passage in the supplementary version of that article, self-archived in the author's IR, in order to make it OA for those who cannot afford access to the published version (whether or not that supplementary version has been institutionally verified as a bona fide doppelganger of the original published article -- in all but the page numbers)! (I won't even consider the even more baroque variant of generating a paginated PDF of the self-archived supplement, merely in order to satisfy the residual Gutenberg compulsion to have page numbers at all costs, even when it puts them in competition with the official published version!) Stevan Harnad On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: I think Jean-Claude has perfectly understood the question and it is one that was debated some time ago. In many disciplines, citability requires going to the page level. If the deposited article in an IR is not paginated in the same fashion as in the journal, it is no longer citable as a journal article and one has to go back to the journal to cite the passage correctly, down to the page number. My suggestion is that the IR simply declares that the article deposited is conformant to the published version and, as such, citable as is. In other words, the version of the article would be as good a reference as the peer-reviewed version of the article. As for branding issues, I do not remember raising them
Re: Publisher's requirements for links from published articles
[ 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 think Jean-Claude has perfectly understood the question and it is one that was debated some time ago. In many disciplines, citability requires going to the page level. If the deposited article in an IR is not paginated in the same fashion as in the journal, it is no longer citable as a journal article and one has to go back to the journal to cite the passage correctly, down to the page number. My suggestion is that the IR simply declares that the article deposited is conformant to the published version and, as such, citable as is. In other words, the version of the article would be as good a reference as the peer-reviewed version of the article. As for branding issues, I do not remember raising them in the message mentioned here. Best, jcg Le mercredi 23 avril 2008 à 14:56 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit : I think Jean-Claude may have misunderstood the question at issue here: It concerns the depositing of peer-reviewed, published articles in the author's Institutional Repository so that they can be accessed by all would-be users, not just those who can afford access to the journal in which it was published. The specific question was about how to provide the link to the publisher's official version, if authors wish to provide it (for scholarly purposes, as they should!), or because a Green publisher has requested that it be provided, in exchange for their blessing on immediate OA self-archiving. There is not issue of citability: The published article is perfectly citable, as always. Nor is there any issue of institutional branding: the branding is done by the peer-reviewed journal and its track-record for quality. The institution merely provides access to the final refereed draft: On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: One important suggestion in this regard is to make the stored article citable. The stored article is (the author's final refereed draft [postprint] of) a published, peer-reviewed journal article. Journal articles are already citable (author, date, title, journalname, volume, issue, pages, etc.). In addition, it is a good idea to have a link, in the citation itself, to an openly accessible version of the published article (not just the publisher's toll-access version). That is what depositing the postprint in the author's Institutional Repository is for: To provide free access to the published article. Not to provide something else, citable in its own right (except of course the pre-refereeing preprint, is should only be consulted and cited until the refereed postprint becomes available). Any academic institution with a good name can provide the check needed to guarantee this status to any stored article. It is ambiguous whether what Jean-Claude means here is that the institution should make sure that what has been deposited by the author as a postprint of the journal-published article is indeed the final refereed draft of the published journal article. (Such institutional authentication is welcome, but it is not, strictly speaking, necessary, as what is mostly missing now is the postprints themselves, not their authentications.) Or what Jean-Claude may mean here is an extension of the branding that has been discussed before -- and that (in my view) conflates unpublished papers, unrefereed preprints, and published postprints. The query below pertained to refereed postprints, OA's target, not to unpublished papers in need of an institutional brand. Harnad, S. (2005) Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold. Ariadne 42. (Japanese version) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10675/ From that point on, the link to the publisher, even if needed, loses importance because the open nature of the article will steer users in its direction. The link to the publisher of a published article loses its importance? I agree it is not important for access, given that the OA version is accessible and the user cannot afford the toll-access version. But surely the publisher link is useful for the scholarly record -- and in case anyone may wish to compare the versions. (Not to mention that some publishers require it as a condition for self-archiving the postprint.) Of course, some persistent access means will also be needed. IR's provide persistent access; so do publishers. What's still missing today is 85% of the postprints to which persistent access can then be provided! (That's what the mandates are for.) Meanwhile, no harm in accommodating publishers' minor conditions on endorsing Green OA self-archiving -- especially if it also serves a useful scholarly purpose.) Stevan Harnad Le mardi 22 avril 2008 à 10:36 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On 22-Apr-08, at 10:12 AM, dspace-general-requ...@mit.edu wrote: Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008
Re: Books in Open access : OAPEN has been approved by EU
[ 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. ] It is hard to know if it differs from the GAP project when the URL Thomas gave us leads only to one page with an e-mail. Can you clarify, Thomas? As for funding, research is funded by governments and publishing should be made a part of research funding. Waving the fearful banner of unreliable government funding is totally gratuitous here as 1. Many government programs have been run for decades if not centuries. Scientific research is one of them; 2. Private companies are jknown to go belly up with some regularity and then all hell breaks loose. The reality is that all human endeavours are fragile, not only governmental ones. As to the fickle nature of government policies, it is rarely exceeded, except by the fickle nature of corporate decisions driven, as they are, by stockholders' greed and the profit motive. Best, Jean-Claude Guédon Le dimanche 17 février 2008 à 16:21 +0600, Thomas Krichel a écrit : Jean Kempf writes The project is the first of its kind How does it differ from the (failed?) GAP project http://www.gap-portal.de/ and, if funded, is intended to start in September 2008. Could not such a project be running without funding? Looking at GAP, it was ok when the DFG funded it, when that money ran out, it went South. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal
Re: Harvard Faculty Vote on Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Today
[ 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. ] Let me comment briefly on this. 1. The issue of books regularly recurs. Let us remember that we are talking about research results, especially those financed by public funds, and let us remember that, in the humanities and social sciences, books remain the primary research currency and let us finally remember that in many countries, the publication of research monographs is subsidized ($1.5M/yr in Canada, for example). As a result, they belong to the OA debate. 2. The issue of the proportion of journals that allow some form of deposit: the figure given by Stevan deals with the percentage of Romeo surveyed journals, not with the total number of peer-reviewed journals in the world - we do not even know this number accurately. It also seems that many SSH journals, perhaps because of the fragility of many of their publishers , have more restrictive attitudes than large commercial publishers. 3. As Peter Suber and I have commented in the past, permissions to deposit are informal agreements, not formal contract. They could be rescinded given the right circumstances. Acting on the hypothesis that this will never happen is not realistic.. On the other hand, the Harvard debate will have a deep educational impact on the SSH faculty. It will, if passed, bring about a whole series of similar debates in other universities. In so doing, more and more faculty members will begin to understand better the publishing environment within which they are forced to operate. And it does not threaten the self-archiving mandate in any way. Finally, while I agree with Stevan that holding the copyright is not essential (although it can be useful), it is a good way to start grabbing the attention of many faculty members. Jean-Claude Guédon Le mardi 12 février 2008 à 13:42 +, Stevan Harnad a écrit : ** Apologies for Cross-Posting ** Fully Hyperlinked Version of this Posting: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/361-guid.html Optimizing Harvard's Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Harvard faculty are voting today on an Open Access (OA) Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835 The Harvard proposal is to try the copyright-retention strategy: Retain copyright so faculty can (among other things) deposit their writings in Harvard's OA Institutional Repository. Let me try to say why I think this is the wrong strategy, whereas something not so different from it would not only have much greater probability of success, but would serve as a model that would generalize much more readily to the worldwide academic community. (1) Articles vs. Books. The objective is to make peer-reviewed research journal articles OA. That is OA's primary target content. The policy has to make a clear distinction between journal articles and books, otherwise it is doomed to fuzziness and failure. The time is ripe for making journal articles -- which are all, without exception, author give-aways, written only for scholarly usage and impact, not for sales royalty income -- Open Access, but it is not yet ripe for books in general (although there are already some exceptions, ready to do the same). Hence it would be a great and gratuitous handicap to try to apply OA policy today in a blanket way to articles and books alike, covering exceptions with an opt-out option instead of directly targeting the exception-free journal article literature exclusively. (2) Unrefereed Preprints vs. Peer-Reviewed Postprints. Again, the objective is to make published, peer-reviewed research journal articles (postprints) OA. Papers are only peer-reviewed after they have been submitted, refereed, revised, and accepted for publication. Yet Harvard's proposed copyright retention policy targets the draft that has not yet been accepted for publication (the preprint): That means the unrefereed raw manuscript. Not only does this risk enshrining unrefereed, unpublished results in Harvard's OA IR, but it risks missing OA's target altogether, which is refereed postprints, not unrefereed preprints. (3) Copyright Retention is Unnecessary for OA and Needlessly Handicaps Both the Probability of Adoption of the Policy and the Probability of Success If Adopted. There is no need to require retention of copyright in order to provide OA. 62% of journals already officially endorse authors making their postprints OA immediately upon acceptance for publication by depositing them in their Institutional Repository, and a further 30% already endorse making preprints OA. That already covers 92% of Harvard's intended target. For the remaining 8% (and indeed for 38%, because OA's primary target is postprints, not just preprints), they too can be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, with access set as Closed Access instead of Open
Re: Stimulating the Population of European Repositories results out
[ 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. ] What Mike says is indeed interesting. It fits within a more general approach where, at various institutional levels, the administrative procedures are based on what is available in the relevant repository(ies). This approach can be extended to grant adjudication and national evaluation exercises. For example, the research quality framework in Australia, completed by the ASHER programme, does that (if the new government chooses to continue with it): Australian universities will see their research output evaluated in terms of what is deposited in their institutional repository. Mandates are fine wherever you can get them. Incentives are fine wherever you can put them in place. Evaluative procedures based on repositories offer a third way, somewhere between mandates and incentives, to populate depositories. Get them wherever possible. Clearly, all three approaches should be pushed forward as much as possible. Should there be priorities? perhaps... Should a prioritized solution lead to excluding the other approaches. IMHO, no! Strictly speaking, Mike's account is still a little bit different: the procedure does not explicitly rely on the repository, but the repository advertises itself and makes itself useful by offering a service to the procedure. Before long, we can expect that the repository will become indispensable to the procedure because those managing the procedure tend to follow a least-effort approach to just about everything. The reliance on impact factors, however absurd it may be, illustrates this trend. This is a most interesting tweak where the initiative comes from the repository. I am not sure it amounts to a policy but it certainly will influence policy in the future. Jean-Claude Le dimanche 27 janvier 2008 à 03:53 +, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Culhane, Mike wrote: At my organization, publications lists used for promotion cases are generated from the repository. Therefore it's in the author's best interest to deposit their publications, and as a result we have close to 100% compliance. Mike, That's extremely interesting and sensible! Is the policy documented anywhere, and would you consider registering it in ROARMAP? http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/sign.php Stevan Mike Culhane Manager, Library/Internet Services Institute for Research in Construction National Research Council Canada Mike.Culhane -- nrc-cnrc.gc.ca http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list Sent: January 23, 2008 9:41 AM To: JISC-REPOSITORIES -- JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Stimulating the Population of European Repositories results out Thank you for posting this information about the need for mandates. But I am wondering about the emphasis on mandating deposit. It seems that in our enthusiasm for securing a mandate at our institutions we neglect the other half of these policies; i.e., how is compliance to be monitored, and most importantly, how enforced? It would be useful if other institutions with mandates could share their solutions to these issues. many thanks Stephanie Stephanie Meece Project Assistant Surrey Scholarship Online University of Surrey, Guildford http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/
Re: OA deposit requirement from the French Research National Agency (ANR)
[ 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 would say that demande here stands somewhere between requires and requests. But the pressure implicit in this statement is quite real... Perhaps Jean Kempf could comment on this as he understands translation from English to French (and backward) much better than I. One must also take the style of French institutions into account to interpret this demande. If only we could leave faux amis aside and translate by demand... :-) Jean-Claude Guédon Le samedi 08 décembre 2007 à 10:29 +0100, Thierry Chanier a écrit : Dear all, On the 14th November the French Research National Agency (ANR) which gives financial support to research projects in many disciplines has published a press release (copied hereafter) which says that the ANR requires (one may discuss whether the French verb demande is an exact synonym of require) all publication made out of the projects it financed to be deposit by the researchers from now on in the open archive system HAL (i.e. the centralized French open archive system). We were expecting such position. I cannot check whether this position is already written in the legal contracts researchers sign when their project is accepted by the ANR. It was not in the one I signed at the beginning of 2007. It is a good step forward but we still have to see whether it will be enforced (with statistics, published regularly) or will just be un effet d'annonce. Thierry Chanier http://chanier.net recherche *** Published on the ANR website * http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/actualite/13?lngInfoId=159 mercredi 14 novembre 2007 L'ANR incite les chercheurs à intégrer leurs publications dans le système d'archives ouvertes La diffusion des publications scientifiques liées aux projets financés par l'ANR dans les archives ouvertes, en particulier HAL contribue à renforcer la visibilité et l'attractivité de la recherche française. Elle peut aussi aider à simplifier le suivi et l'évaluation en évitant la saisie multiple des informations et en rendant les documents aisément accessibles à tous les chercheurs impliqués dans les différentes étapes de ces processus. Dans le cadre de la préparation de son système d'information, l'ANR demande donc que, dans le respect des règles relatives à la propriété intellectuelle (propriété littéraire et artistique et propriété industrielle), et des règles de confidentialité inhérentes à des recherches, toutes les publications consécutives aux projets financés par elle soient d'ores et déjà intégrées par les chercheurs au système d'archives ouvertes HAL avec lequel elle collaborera. (contact ANR : pierre.glorieux @ agencerecherche.fr)
Re: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates
[ 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. ] A much better way is to work with the union. Unions are not against open access, especially when they understand the issues. The problem is more one of ignorance than one of hostility. Student unions can also be approached. Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 30 novembre 2007 à 16:55 +, FrederickFriend a écrit : Trade unions may not strike over copyright, but I still have the bruises to prove that copyright can cause a furore. At UCL a few years ago I dared to suggest that UCL might own the copyright in some of the work of its academic staff. I was vilified internally, the AUT (as it was then) were up in arms, and I was pilloried in Private Eye for daring to make the suggestion. As you can tell I survived to tell the tale, and appearing in Private Eye did wonders for my image, but don't under-estimate the seething passions under the calm surface of copyright. Fred Friend - Original Message - From: j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 3:57 PM Subject: Re: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates 'the general fear of the employer about possible trade union action based on copyright issues relating to academic research' A fanciful argument. As Stevan often points out, scholarly papers - the subject of this forum - are not money-making propositions anyway. Campus trade unions and university managements have much more important issues to fight about. I can't imagine a strike about copyright! Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK (President, Loughborough University branch of the Association of University Teachers, 1999-2003)
Re: On Planning vs. Speculation Concerning Open Access
And when I advocate institutional repositories to link up together to form a network (such as D-Space institutions are beginning to do, I believe I am at the planning stage, as I am when I add that these institutional networks can organize editorial boards of faculties of 1,000. If planning a first, then a second, then a third step, that is still planning, not speculating. jcg On Tue October 5 2004 09:02 am, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, David Goodman wrote: Where do you, personally, draw the line between planning and speculation? The short answer is that planning is based on the extrapolation of current trends, based on the evidence and reasoning, and speculation is the positing of jumps, discontinuities or other contingencies for which there is little or no current evidence. Speculation can of course be right or wrong. And I am quite as capable of speculating and counterspeculating as anyone else (and have done more than my share of it!). But what is now abundantly clear from the overlong (at least 10-year) history of Open Access (OA), is that it has been very long on speculation and very short on OA. Extrapolating that, one comes to the rational conclusion that it might now be a better idea to speculate less and provide OA more. (Besides, every OA speculation and counterspeculation has by now been heard, many, many times over! It is boring, and gets research access/impact absolutely nowhere, no matter how much fun it may be [for the speculator and counterspeculator] to keep doing.) Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum. html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
Re: How To Support Institutional OA Archive Start-Up and OA Content Provision
Responses below. On Sun October 3 2004 10:51 am, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, Jean-Claude Guedon wrote: OSI is not subsidizing OA journals. It is subsidizing authors from disadvantaged countries and institutions so that they may submit to OA journals. OSI has also supported the setting up of repositories and of guides to help doing so. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/grants-awarded.shtml (The posting to which you replied was about both OSI and JISC, which *is* subsidizing journal conversion to OA publication.) Then your wording was ambiguous at best. Perhaps it would be a good idea if OSI subsidized authors from disadvantaged countries and institutions to provide OA to their articles by self-archiving them in their institutional archives: Then the subsidy might generate more OA articles from the same author and institution for the same amount of subsidy money! Why would authors need subsidies to self-archive, given all you have written in the past about the ease with which this is done? My recommendations would extend substantially OSI's current efforts on behalf of setting up and filling institutional OA archives. (1) The cost of subsidising the conversion of an institution to OA self-archiving is far less than the cost of subsidising the conversion of a journal to OA-publishing. OSI does not do the latter. Maybe it would be a good idea -- per OA subsidy dollar spent -- to consider doing so, then. The subsidy could be reserved to the Developing world, if preferred. Are you saying now we should be supporting the conversion of journals to OA, at leas tin the Developing World? I do not understand you at all now. (2) The return -- in annual number of OA articles -- on subsidising the conversion of one institution to self-archiving is far greater than the return on converting one journal, and far more likely to propagate to other institutions of its own accord. Again, OSI does not do the latter. Always worth keeping an Open Mind on such matters... Indeed, and I suppose that if we did follow this recommendation, you would immediately turn around and berate OSI for supporting journal conversion rather than archive building. This is becoming quite silly. (3) Converting one institution to OA self-archiving (unlike converting one journal to OA publishing) propagates over all institutional departments/disciplines. (*This is also the reason why it is so important that the national self-archiving mandates should be for distributed institutional self-archiving, as recommended by the UK Select Committee, rather than for central self-archiving, as recommended by the US House Committee.*) This is an interesting hypothesis, but it is only a hypothesis. And your pending posting, to which I shall reply shortly, is likewise a hypothesis. And rival hypotheses must be weighed on the basis of the supporting and contrary evidence and reasons, as I will try to do in a later posting. The data on the rate of both actual and potential growth in central archives, institutional archives, and OA journals tends to support my hypothesis. So does logic, if one thinks through the possibilities, probabailities, and practicalities. (And so does a forthcoming analysis by Rowland Swan, commissioned by JISC.) http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=analysis Result of this exchange: I have one interesting idea that I shall look into; for the rest, I see hypotheses and statements that do not apply to OSI's present policies. Try to keep an Open Mind on policy: The Open Access landscape is changing, and so is the Open Society's potential contribution to it! And we have to keep thinking until we get it right... May I return the compliment. Try to keep an open mind too and not define too narrow a path to paradise. Stevan Harnad
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Here we go... On Sat October 2 2004 08:16 am, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: While OAI compliance is a sine qua non condition of some measure of inter-operability, it does not (yet?) ensure the kind of ease of retrieval that other forms of archiving can provide, including some form of central archiving. This is incorrect. It is entirely correct. Distributed archiving is bound by the limitations put on the OAI protocol; a centralized archive is not bound by such limitations. It is, therefore, easier for a centralized archive to make retrieval easy, in any case easier than with a distributed system. Just so I am not misread, I am not saying this to claim that we should forget about distributed archives; I am saying this to respond to Stevan's misgivings about some institutions or individuals supporting centralized archiving. In the end, it does not really matter. This erroneous view that central archiving is somehow better or safer than distributed/institutional archiving is exactly analogous with older views that on-paper publication is somehow better or safer than on-line publication. The latter papyrocentric habit and illusion has happily faded, thanks mainly to the force of the example and experience with the growing mass of on-line content and usage. (But this obsolete thinking did not fade before it managed to delay progress for several years; nor has it faded entirely, yet!) I have only argued that retrieval could be made easier in a centralized archive than in a distributed archive by virtue of the simple fact that a protocol such as OAI has to be kept simple. Therefore, compromises have to be made which a centralized archive does not have to deal with. This has nothing to do with papyrocentric - incidentally, I have never used papyrus myself, only paper which, at worst, would make me paperocentric... - habits, illusions or obsolete thinking. The instinctive preference for central over distributed archiving is a remnant of that same papyrocentric thinking (the texts are safer and more tractable when they are all be in the same physical place) and will likewise fade with actual experience and more technical understanding. The trouble is that the preference (in both cases) is invariably voiced in contexts and populations that lack both the technical expertise and the experience with the newer, untrusted modality. This has strictly nothing to do with my argument. And it always appeals to an uninformed audience that is a-priori more receptive to what more closely resembles the old and familiar than what resembles the new and less familiar, and that bases its sense of what is optimal not on objective experiment and evidence, but on subjective habit. Ditto. The place to voice any doubts of uncertainties on technical questions like this is among technical experts with experience, such as the OAI technical group, not in the wider populace that is still naive and leery about the online medium itself, archiving, and open access. Ditto Let us not forget that OAI-compliance may also lead to a mixing of various levels of documents, for example some peer-reviewed, others not. The Eprints software includes the tag peer-reviewed and not peer reviewed. This means documents can be de-mixed according to the metadata tags, as intended. In addition, the journal-name tag is an indicator. The old idea that physical location is the way to de-mix is obsolete in the distributed online era that the Web itself so clearly embodies. So this means an extra-step in the retrieval technique and it must rely on some degree of trust in all the registered depositories... Thank you, Stevan, for demonstrating my point so clearly. As for the rest of the paragraph, it is irrelevant. Moreover, the mixing of types of documents is a function of the archiving policy, not of the archive-type (institutional or central) or location. Exactly what I said above: how do you trust the institutions to have the same policies or the same rigor in applying them, if they are the same. Lastly, the inclusion of both peer-reviewed journal articles *and* both preprints and post-publication revisions and updates is a desirable complement, and can likewise be handled by various forms of pre- and post-triage using both the metadata and meta-algorithms based on metadata and full-text (de-duplication, dating and versioning at the harvester level). True because of this, the perception of archives that are only OAI-compliant may not be entirely favorable. Scientists/scholars may not make much or even any use of these sources simply because they consider them as too noisy or worse. Are we then to recommend policy not on the basis of the actual empirical and technical facts, but on the basis of the prevailing perception? If we had adopted that strategy, we would have renounced the online medium itself a-priori, and renounced also the notion of Open
Re: No Reply to Next Two Postings
Let me nevertheless correct your misreadings of my position. On Mon October 4 2004 07:55 am, Stevan Harnad wrote: As I detect signs of a trend toward tumbling into intemperateness if the exchange continues, I will not reply to the two postings by Jean-Claude Guedon that follow this one. The attentive reader can, I think, draw his own conclusions from what has already been said. The rest would just have been repetition. One substantive point, however, should be noted. At some point Jean-Claude Guedon introduces his overlay journal notion into the discussion of institutional self-archiving. It must be pointed out that this notion betrays a profound misunderstanding of the very nature and essence of institutional self-archiving: The purpose of institutional self-archiving is to make all the articles published by the institution's authors in peer-reviewed journals today Open Access (OA), today. It is the peer-reviewed journal articles that are self-archived. These have already been peer-reviewed and published. Hence they are not looking for peer-review, or a publisher, or an overlay journal. They are only looking for OA, so that all their would-be users can access and use them. Jean-Claude seems to keep thinking of self-archiving as something authors do with their unpublished, non-peer-reviewed preprints, rather than with their published, peer-reviewed articles, something that still requires peer-review and publication by overlay journals. This is an error, and it is not what OA is about, or what self-archiving is for. False. Self-archiving has to do with peer-reviewed articles. However, articles can be peer-reviewed more than once and articles can be peer-reviewed by editorial boards that do not belong to any established journal, but which can nonetheless demonstrate an ability to review existing writings. BMC does this with its Faculty of 1,000. The idea can be extended and refined. Once again, Stevan the fact that he is so focused on his just line - I suspect he will call me a deviationist one of these days - that he fails to take all possible hypotheses into consideration. snip Hence the overlay journals proposal is really just another speculative hypothesis about the course that journal publication might or might not eventually take. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the nature and purpose of institutional self-archiving, which is to provide OA to all articles published by the institution's authors (mostly in non-OA journals) in order to maximize their usage and impact. Not a speculative hypothesis, but, on the contrary a strategy or a scenario to achieve OA in yet another way. This straightforward, atheoretical, non-hypothetical rationale for institutional OA self-archiving -- already well-demonstrated empirically to be both feasible and to produce the desired benefits -- should be strictly separated from any speculative hypotheses about the future course that journal publication might or might not one day take. And here we go with the just line once again. I am glad I do not live in the Soviet Union and I am not embroiled into some debate that would end up with my poor little self being hanged or shot for lack of orthodoxy. Come, come, Stevan!
Re: Open Archiving: What are researchers willing to do?
In times of transition, laws sometimes become obsolete and fetishizing such laws has never been very helpful. If my memory serves me right, English law long kept the requirement that any car going through a city had to be preceded by a man on foot wearing a red flag to warn the population. That law, again if my memory serves me right, was finally removed from the books in the 60's, having been openly flaunted by everybody for decades. It seem that we are facing a similar situation here with regard to the handling of copyright in the area of scholarly publishing. As Stevan Harnad rightly points out, the intellectual property at stakes is the individuals' own, not somebody else's . As a rule, they have not sold it, but given it away and it increasingly looks foolish, exactly as the man with the red flag looks foolish. The real nature of scientific papers is becoming increasingly clear to a growing number of people and its commodity status is being increasingly questioned. Laws that appear foolish are dangerous laws because they cannot be obeyed and, as a result, they threaten the whole legal structure. Yet. we do need a solid legal structure and there is no reason to weaken our legal structure through blind obedience to stupid laws or unjust laws. In short, we are quickly moving to the brink of a wholesale re-evaluation of how copyright should be handled in the case of scholarly publishing and it may be that the law will have to be modified in the process. Scientific authors are interested in moral rights (to use a continental terminology), not financial or commercial rights. Jean-Claude Guédon Le Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Marvin a écrit : - Original Message - From: Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 12:31 PM Subject: Re: Open Archiving: What are researchers willing to do? On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Marvin Margoshes wrote: tw From: Thomas J. Walker t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu tw To find out what those attending my two most recent talks were willing to tw do to promote free access, I asked in a questionnaire if they would... tw (3) post their old articles on their home pages without permissions from tw copyright-holding publishers? [80% would] mm Interesting that 80% said that they will break the law. mm Is ignorance of the law or something else behind this? I think it is the very opposite of ignorance that is behind this. It is an awakening to what is actually at stake here for research and researchers, and how fundamentally different the copyright function is for the fee/royalty-based literature, for which it was intended, as opposed to the give-away literature that is at issue here: the refereed journal literature. snip Very interesting! It appears that to a large group of intelligent, educated persons, the letter and spirit of the law simply don't matter. Or do they think that copyright law leaves them the right to the material that they signed away? You base your argument on a distinction; does copyright law make that distinction? Not to my knowledge, but I'm willing to learn. -- - Jean-Claude GuédonDépartement de littérature comparée Université de Montréal CP 6128, Succursale « Centre-ville » Montréal, Qc H3C 3J7 Canada Tél. 1-514-343-6208 Fax 1.514-343-2211 INTERNET IS FOR EVERYONE! Join the Internet Society and help to make it so. See you at INET2000, Yokohama, Japan July 18-21, 2000 http://www.isoc.org/inet2000 --
Re: Library cancelations
Sorry about this, old chap, but I probably know the smell of coffee a bit better than you! This said, what you say about profits applies only (at best) to US *private* Universities. Check the Canadian situation and you will see a very different landscape. Look at American public universities, and I suspect you will see a very different landscape again. All administrators are not Duke administrators! Now check Germany, Japan, Britain and France and, again, you will see a situation quite different from your few private universities that probably made a killing on the stock market. I will place the rest of my comments in your own text below. Le Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Albert Henderson a écrit : on 27 Sep 1999 Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: I would really like to support Kitty Porter's reaction to Mr.Henderson's comment. I do not exactly know on what planet Mr. Henderson lives, but it certainly is not on mine. University profits? A wonderful oxymoron in my opinion. Wake up and smell the coffee. The CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION recited the numbers last year. (Oct 23, 1998:A39-58) Duke reported $200 million revenue after expenses and cut its library spending (according to ARL statistics) by $168 thousand. Princeton's profit was $268 million, while cutting the library $376 thousand. Chicago had $130 million profit and cut its library by $1.2 million. Other universities also reported multimillion dollar profits and gave their libraries increases ranging from 1% to 13%. The total excess of revenue over spending for 39 research universities totaled $8.5 billion. How many public universities in this group? Elsevier and other greedy publishers ensure 40% profit rates Which official financial report is the source of this 40% profit figure? I have not had time to find that precise figure again, but I will give you two sources: - One for a 35% profit that dates back to 1995: Franc A. Reed Elsevier met en vente sa presse et son edition grand public. Le Monde (Paris), 1995 July 20;51(15701):15. As you may know, Le Monde is the premier daily in France, the equivalent of the NY Times for the States. - The second one is a recent Reed-Elsevier press release (8/5/1999) where, for scientific operations, the profit rate is quoted at 37.7% (download the first item at the following URL: http://www.reed-elsevier.com/share.htm#Financial97 and look on page 5.) So I haven't got the 40% figure? 37.7 will be close enough for the moment! and soothe university libraries' anxieties by telling them that they are going to make the price increases predictable (of the order of 10-15% per year while the inflation rate is a small fraction of this) rather than containing their own prices. The largest part of journal price inflation comes from (A) increased papers and (B) reduced circulation. If universities dealt with the former, and maintained some parity of library/RD financing, the latter effect would be no problem. Interesting argument : why isn't the price of monographs climbing as fast. is their paper less expensive than journals' paper? Reduced circulation? Basic economics teaches that the rise in prices will reduce the number of items sold... Library/RD financing? Perhaps! But can you demonstrate that the price of instruments and other elements of RD (mainly R in the universities, by the way) evolves at the same pace as scientific publications? Let these publishers first behave decently or let us do what is needed to drive them out of business (by supporting initiatives such as Ginsparg's and PubMed Central). They and not university administrators are to blame and we should not let the likes of Mr. Henderson work toward dividing our own house! Why should American taxpayers subsidize Canadians? My dear friend, when a scientist publishes, he or she does so with taxpayers' money and it is meant to be scrutinized by the whole world. Einstein's work was not meant to be tucked away in publications so expensive that only a few rich institutions could buy them. The value of the Einsteins of the world was never meant to create an inelastic demand that would leave libraries like sitting duck in front of the Elseviers of the world. That is what basic reasearch publishing is all about. Right now, American taxpayers are subsidizing wealthy Dutch, English, German publishers (plus a few American ones as well). And Canadian taxpayers are doing the same! American taxpayers would save money if Ginsparg and PubMed Central became the general format of publishing. To go back to your coffe metaphor, you ought to learn how to distinguish between good Arabica and hot milk! Profit and market fetishism are really the plagues of this century! Yes, universities expanded their profits by cutting libraries and instruction over the objections of faculty and faculty senates. They
