Re: China Syndrome: Paying For Gold OA Before Mandating Green OA Wastes Money and Delays OA

From: Iryna Kuchma <iryna.kuchma_at_EIFL.NET>
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:31:07 +0200

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Dear Stevan,

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has a coherent Green OA
strategy. In 2004, Dr. LU Yongxiang, President of CAS and Dr. CHEN
Yiyu, Director of National Natural Science Foundation of China signed
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities. National Science Library (NSL) is an institution
promoting OA in CAS (e.g. via the Chinese Open Access Portal:
http://www.open-access.net.cn/). In February 2009 NSL launched a
Knowledge repository (http://ir.las.ac.cn/) and mandated the NSL
members to deposit all their articles 1 month after the publication.
The deposited articles will be the indicators of research performance
during the annual performance evaluation, which impacts salaries,
tenure and promotion. NSL also provides organisational and
technological framework for a CAS wide IR infrastructure helping
every institute to set up an IR, implementing a harvester-based
cross-repository search and browse service to enhance exposure of the
CAS?s research outputs and building blocks for national or
international wide repository infrastructure. 39 CAS institutes
participate in the project and 29 of them have already deployed IRs
(these figures are from October 2009). NSL provides a policy
mechanisms and technology support to them. So we can expect more
mandates in CAS in the coming year when China will be hosting the 8th
Berlin Open Access Conference.  

References:
1. Open Access Practice in National Science Library, Chinese Academy
of Science, written by LI Lin, LIU Xiwen and ZHANG Xiaolin, NSL, CAS,
presented at the 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly: Libraries
create futures: Building on cultural heritage, 23-27 August 2009,
Milan, Italy:
http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/142-lin-en.pdf
2. Introduction to the Cooperation between CAS and DRIVER by Jianxia
Ma, Xiaolin Zhang and Zhongming Zhu presented at  DRIVER
Confederation Summit, October 20, 2009, Ghent University Library:
http://www.driver-repository.eu/PublicDocs/DNET-implementations-CAS.ppt
3. China and OA: Welcoming and Contributing by Zhang Xiaoling
presented at the 7th Berlin Open Access Conference, Panthéon-Sorbonne
University in Paris, 2-4 December 2009:
http://www.berlin7.org/IMG/ppt/B8-China.ppt

With best wishes,
Iryna Kuchma
eIFL Open Access program manager
eIFL.net

2009/12/20 Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_gmail.com>
>
> Hyperlinked version:
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/677-guid.html
>
> Re: "Chinese Academy of Sciences embraces open access"
>
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/presscenter/pressreleases?pr=20091209
>
> The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has joined a costly prepaid
> "membership" deal with one Gold OA journal-fleet publisher while
> continuing to neglect to mandate cost-free Green OA for all the
rest
> of its research output.
>
> This is brilliant marketing by the publisher but a myopic waste of
> money (and especially time) for China.
>
> The misapprehension that this token gesture somehow represents a
> substantive leap forward for Chinese OA will now likely delay for
> several years more China's doing the real, substantive thing that
it
> could so easily do to make its entire research output OA: mandate
> Green OA self-archiving rather than just squandering scarce funds
to
> pay needlessly for a small amount of Gold OA in one publisher's
> journal-fleet.
>
> If anyone could easily mandate Green OA nationally, it is China.
(This
> is not necessarily a virtue!)
>
> But instead China too -- like the Netherlands (and U California, U.
> Goettingen, Max-Planck Institutes, the COPE members, and indeed
> SCOAP3) -- has got caught up in global gold fever (which all
amounts
> to much ado about very little OA at high cost in both money and
lost
> time -- and it does not scale).
>
> The CAS "membership" cannot be paying for an annual quota of
articles
> that successfully pass peer review. (How can that be decided in
> advance?) So "membership" is just a preferential discount -- 50%
off
> the list price -- on one publisher's standard Gold OA publication
fee,
> should any article happen to be accepted for publication in any one
of
> its fleet of journals.
>
> This is certainly a marketing triumph for the publisher, but the
> client benefits are far less clear; for CAS authors could instead
> submit to (and if accepted, publish in) any (subscription) journal
in
> the world (and most OA journals), at no cost, and still have OA for
> their published articles -- by just self-archiving them. And China
> could afford incomparably more OA that (cost-free) way...
>
> Or have wires unwittingly got crossed here, notionally -- in a
country
> that's rightly eager to enhance its publishing footprint worldwide
--
> between paying to get Open Access and paying to get published?
>
> Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Dec 20 2009 - 22:23:54 GMT

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