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Correction for defective "Click here" URL below. It should
be:
http://tinyurl.com/dkgbtq
On 25-Apr-09, at 12:00 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
On 25-Apr-09, at 9:48 AM, David Prosser wrote:
Interestingly, the main objection against the
policy as reported was:
"Open access will kill the journals you need during your
career," women's studies professor and university senator
Claire Moses said. "It's as simple as that."
That is not a gold/green OA misunderstanding. That?s
just a misunderstanding. It is not clear to me that this
would have been cleared-up if the Maryland resolution had
removed all mention of journals ? some academics fear
that green OA will destroy journals.
(David, I am assuming that what you meant was "all mention of
Gold OA journals" rather than "all mention of journals,"
because it is impossible to formulate a Green OA self-archiving
mandate at all without mentioning that it is
refereed journal articles that need to be self-archived!)
But, yes, my reply is this: In formulating a Green OA
self-archiving mandate, the requirement itself should be stated
clearly, distinctly, and independently of any ancillary,
speculative or other detail:
(1) Publish your articles in whatever refereed
journal you wish.
(2) Deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft in
your institutional repository immediately upon
acceptance for publication.
That's the core policy. If it is decided that access embargoes
are permitted, add:
(3) Most journals already endorse making the
deposited article Open Access immediately. For
articles published in journals that do not yet
endorse immediately setting access as Open Acces,
you may set access to the deposit as "Closed
Access" for an embargo period of XX months
(specify).
(4) During the embargo period, the repository's
semi-automatic "email eprint request" button will
allow all would-be users who reach the metadata for
your Closed Access article and need the full text
to insert their email address and the reason for
their request. One click from the requester
forwards the request automatically to the author,
who can, if he wishes, authorize the automatic
emailing of one individual eprint to the requester
for research purposes, again with one click.
The mandate can be accompanied by a FAQ, which can answer
authors' questions about such things as "will this kill
journals".
The answer is definitely not: "No, because we are making
research money available to pay for the publishing fees of
fee-based Gold OA journals."
The correct answer is:
All evidence to date is that self-archiving does
not generate journal cancelations. Self-archiving
and self-archiving mandates do not affect
individual journals separately: they affect all
journals at once. If and when self-archiving ever
generates enough journal cancelations to make the
subscription-fee model no longer sustainable for
cost-recovery, journals will convert to the Gold OA
publication-fee model for cost-recovery, and the
money used to pay for it will be the institutional
windfall savings from the very same institutional
subscription cancellations that generated the
conversion to Gold OA. About one-sixth of journals
are already Gold OA, though only a minority of them
as yet charge for publication because they are
still being sustained by subscriptions or
subsidies.
That is all that need be said about Gold OA at this time.
I know that some feel that all the world?s ills can be
layed at the door of gold OA, but this really doesn?t
look like a case of so-called ?gold fever?.
Not all the world's ills, David, but a goodly portion of the
world's delay in achieving OA.
Click here to see some of the many other instances of gold
fever that have been and are still slowing the progress of
Green OA (hence OA).
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat Apr 25 2009 - 17:13:05 BST