The repeated use of terms such as "gold fever" or "gold rush" impels me to weigh
in a little on this thread.
For back ground, let me remind readers that I favor both green and gold.
However, I do not favor all flavors of gold, and I do not favor saying that
green is superior to gold.
I have strong reservations against "author-pay" approaches, if only because it
discriminates economically against authors from poor countries or poor
institutions. However, I do believe libraries can and ought to get involved with
their resources and know-how to support both green and gold. On the green side,
there is no question that libraries should support repositories and should
support getting mandates to fill these repositories. On the gold side, I could
easily see libraries taking a fraction of their acquisition budget, say 10%, and
put this in a consortial pool (but beware of existing consortia as they tend to
be little more than procurement offices that actually do the job publishers want
them to do) to support national or regional (i.e. multi-national) journals of
quality (I leave the details aside here) and promote them internationally
through Open Access. It is in effect what the SciELO people are doing, although
not with library money, but Redalyc and SciELO could both be supported by such a
scheme. Social science and humanities journals could form a very interesting
first wave of experiments, followed by the creation of important new scientific
journals in all fields, in open access, that would compete on the market of
ideas. Europe is an obvious place where to begin thinking about this sort of
things, and Latin America already owns some of the crucial ingredients. And this
scheme could also extend to monographs, thus encompassing projects such as OAPEN
in Europe.
Meanwhile and in parallel, and I want to underscore this, all efforts should be
extended for repositories and mandates, including the best of mandates, i.e. the
faculty-organized mandates initiated at harvard a couple of years ago.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le samedi 18 septembre 2010 à 10:51 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> AAA:
> During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and
> Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption
> of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged
> by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako
> Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of
> Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and
> faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to
> adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access
> problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan
Splendid news from AAA, Asian Archivangelist!
> and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who
> nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited,
> unless published in an OA journal)
This is the familiar "gold rush," which impels institutions to imagine,
unthinkingly, that what they need to do in order to have OA today
is to spend their scarce resources to subsidize the costs of Gold OA
publication -- even though most of the potential funds to do so are
still tied up in paying the institutional subscriptions that are covering
the costs of journal publication today. And meanwhile these institutions
are not adopting the cost-free Green OA self-archiving mandates that would
provide OA to all their subscription journal articles too!
University of Michigan is the latest US University that has, like
Hokkaido, committed to subsidizing Gold OA without first mandating Green
OA:
http://bit.ly/pregold
University of Michigan is the 9th university to commit to COPE. Only two
(Harvard and MIT) of the nine COPE signatories to date are among the 170
institutions, departments and funders that have already mandated Green
OA self-archiving for all of their refereed research output. The other
seven COPE signatories should first emulate Harvard and MIT on providing
Green, before provisioning Gold:
http://www.oacompact.org/signatories/
So should Hokkaido University.
For the record: An institution or funder committing to COPE (or SCOAP3
or pre-emptive Gold OA "Membership" deals) is fine *after* the institution
or funder has already mandated Green OA self-archiving of all of its
refereed research output; but it is both wasteful and counterproductive
*before* (or *instead*).
Here are some links that might help you at Hokkaido and Otaru during
OA week in explaining the logic and pragmatics of subsidizing Gold only
after mandating Green:
Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/576-guid.html
Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/563-guid.html
On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/557-guid.html
University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without...
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/546-guid.html
SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/421-guid.html
Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/222-guid.html
Best wishes,
Stevan Harnad
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Received on Sat Sep 18 2010 - 17:20:14 BST