Re: Southampton Workshop on UK Institutional OA Repositories Jan 25-26 2005

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 23:06:28 +0000

Below are excerpts from a useful news article about which no
reasonable person can have any cavils (but I have a few comments!):

    Southampton Uni goes Open Access
    By Lucy Sherriff
    Monday 10th January 2005
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/10/southampton_academic_research/

> Southampton University has made all of its academic and scientific
> research output available for free on the web. The University said
> the decision marks a new era in Open Access to research in the UK;
> it will host workshops for other academic institutions thinking of
> making a similar transition.

http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/
http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3D13

> Southampton describes the self-archiving project's purpose as
> "to make the full text of the peer-reviewed research output of
> scholars/scientists and their institutions visible, accessible,
> harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access
> to the Internet". This is not a bypass of the traditional publishing
> mechanism, but another form of access to already published material.

Lucy Sherriff makes it clear here that author/institution self-archiving
is not a substitute for publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, but
a supplement to it, in order to provide wider access.

This is followed by several paragraphs (which I omit here) with
quotes about about GNU Eprints and Southampton. Then this:

> Southampton's ePrints database has run as an experiment since 2002. It
> was established as part of a project to explore issues around Open
> Access publishing. The repository provides a publications database
> with full text, multimedia and research data, and it will now become
> a core part of the university's publishing process.

The issues explored were not around Open Access *publishing*; they were
around Open Access *provision* (via the self-archiving of supplementary
verions of published articles). The database of published Southampton
University articles will now be a core part of the university's
infrastructure for maximising worldwide access to -- and thereby alsothe
worldwide usage and impact of -- its published research article output.

> The question of public access to scientific research has become
> increasingly controversial in recent years, particularly since the
> summer of 2004, when the House of Commons Science and Technology
> committee published its report... "Scientific Publications:
> free for all?".

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm

> The situation can be rather simplistically described as follows: The
> more prestigious a journal, the more important it is for scientists
> that their work is published in that journal. This means that the best
> work goes to few journals, whose publishers have free rein to charge
> what they like for subscriptions. But not many people can afford to
> subscribe to journals that can cost over£2,000 per year, each.

This is all true, but not quite the point: About 2.5 million articles
are published annually in 24,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide.
There is certainly a problem with the affordability of those journals,
some of which are quite pricey. But that is not the research access problem,
for even if all 24,000 journals were sold at-cost (zero profit)
there would still be the research access problem -- which is that not all
would-be users of those articles could access them because no institution
could afford all, or most, or even many of the 24,000 journals, even then.

    http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/
    http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats

(It is mostly institutions that subscribe these days, by the way, with
online site-licenses for all their users; individual subscriptions have
been dying away for some time.)

> In addition, once the article is accepted and published, the
> journals own the copyright. Unravel this one: we have a situation
> where government-funded research is being published in proprietary
> journals. For other public bodies to subsequently access this
> research, more government funding is needed [to] pay for subscriptions
> to these same journals.

True, but it is also true that 93% of the nearly 9000 journals surveyed
so far (and that includes all the top journals) have given their official
"green light" to author/institution self-archiving. So those authors and
institutions that wish to provide supplementary access to their research
article output for those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford
access to them can already do so (and that is what the Southampton
workshops are about -- and what the GNU Eprints software is for.)

    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

> The House of Commons reports [sic] says the Institutional Repositories such
> as the one being permanently funded at Southampton, will "help improve
> access to journals, but a more radical solution may be required
> in the long term". The report points out that re-publishing papers
> accepted for publication in journals does have copyright implications
> - although at the beginning of the enquiry, 83 per cent of publishers
> did allow authors to self-archive after publication.

That figure has since risen to 93% (and self-archiving a supplementary
copy of a publication does not mean re-publishing it). Moreover, it
is not clear what requires a more radical solution! If 100% of authors
self-archive, no would-be user is denied (online) access, anywhere. The
trouble is that not even 93% of authors are self-archiving yet: at most
15% are.

    http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

> In June last year, Reed Elsevier, one of the biggest academic
> publishers, dipped a toe into the choppy waters of open access. It
> said that authors may put a plain text version of their papers up
> on their own websites or websites of their non-commercial research
> institutions. However, Reed insists that the sites link back to
> its own front page, and say there must be no external links to the
> re-published text. Campaigners in favour of author-pays publication
> denounced the move as a cynical public relations stunt, pointing
> out that research articles often consist of more than just text.

It is only good scholarly practice (and costs and loses no one anything)
to link the self-archived supplementary copy to the publisher's official
version. Moreover, Elsevier did not stipulate a "plain text" version,
and it is not even clear what "no external links to the re-published text"
might mean! (Can anyone be stopped from linking to or from anything on the Web?)

I suspect that some of this confusion was inherited from a prior newspaper
article already that has already been commented on in this Forum:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3780.html

Rather than denouncing Elsevier and the publishers of the other 93% of
journals that are green for behaving responsibly in the interests OA,
should we not rather prod the remaining 7% to follow suit? Or, more
important, prod the authors of the remaining 85% of articles to go ahead
and self-archive them?

> The internet provides an obvious alternative venue for publishing
> research. But making information freely available online has
> its downsides: where is the peer review, for example? How can a
> person accessing a research paper online judge the merits of the
> research? The problem now is not too little information, but too much,
> and of varying quality.

It is not clear how we have segued from self-archiving to re-publishing
to publishing, but clearly there is no problem judging the merits of a
self-archived article if it has already been published in a peer-reviewed
journal!

> Various solutions to this have been proposed, such as author-pays
> publishing systems, or a scoring system where papers are ranked by
> how many other research papers cite them, and so on. But peer review
> is a cornerstone of the scientific process, and many researchers
> would be loathe to bypass it altogether.

Right: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What's broke is access, not peer review!

> The debate on this issue does not look like fading anytime soon. The
> House of Commons report recommended that all academic institutions
> establish repositories of their research, and admonished the
> government for doing so little to support such action. "The UK
> government has failed to respond to issues surrounding scientific
> publication in a coherent manner," it said. "We are not convinced
> that it would be ready to deal with any changes to the publishing
> process. The Report recommends that the government formulate a
> strategy for future action as a matter of urgency."

The government has already formulated a strategy, and has expressed it
clearly: All UK research article output should be self-archived.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm

It remains only to put that strategy into practice, as a matter of
urgency. That is what the Southampton workshops are about.

----
See also:
http://www.elearningscotland.org/SnippetAccess.aspx?id=275
Received on Mon Jan 10 2005 - 23:06:28 GMT

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