tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post3436064354734453405..comments2024-03-17T08:30:21.129+00:00Comments on Open and Shut?: Dominique Babini on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?Richard Poynderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-19621229092796483702013-07-26T18:49:28.327+00:002013-07-26T18:49:28.327+00:00Pablo de Castro: "I am slightly disappointed ...Pablo de Castro: <i>"I am slightly disappointed that interviews, keynotes and interventions are generally so keen and unanimous in highlighting the advantages of OA (especially the conceptual ones, since the technical ones hardly ever get mentioned) while completely failing to address at the same time some of the key issues about OA beyond the at this point dreary Gold vs Green debate."</i><br /><br />I too think that many OA advocates oversell the benefits of OA. In fact, I can envisage a number of scenarios in which the research community (or certainly sections of it) discovered that it was considerably worse off in an OA environment. <br /><br />That is why the specifics of how OA is implemented are so important; that is why the distinction between Green and Gold is so important; and that is why Dominique is right to call for a <b><i>global</i></b> debate.<br /><br />That said, I am not sure I would agree that all those taking part in this Q&A series are over optimistic.Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-72037615565841479902013-07-26T14:49:59.494+00:002013-07-26T14:49:59.494+00:00Another very valuable insight into the future of O...Another very valuable insight into the future of OA. I would like to see more contributions from colleagues in South America and Africa to the debates on the future of scholarly communication, not only on Richard's blog but also on the email discussion lists. We share many issues in common and where there are differences it is good to know about them. We all live on the same planet.Fred Friendnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-74841200222260841572013-07-26T11:34:56.945+00:002013-07-26T11:34:56.945+00:00Pablo de Castro says: "Many researchers simpl...Pablo de Castro says: "Many researchers simply loathe final manuscripts and won't take less than a final publisher version."<br /><br />I think that's true, and that it's an important truth.<br /><br />But I also can't help thinking it's nothing more than habit. I think if you were to ask what it is that publishers actually <i>do</i> between final-manuscript stage and final-publisher version, they'd be hard-pressed to make a case that it yields a qualitative difference.<br /><br />I admit I share this prejudice to some extent myself. And yet I have been happily citing the Solomon/Bjork paper on APCs from <a href="http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/" rel="nofollow">its preprint</a> for ages. When I discovered (only today, coincidentally) that it's since been "published" in a journal, I just shrugged. There's no point in linking to <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.22673/abstract" rel="nofollow">the "published" version</a>, after all, it's paywalled. And I can't imagine Wiley did anything important to it.<br /><br />So I suspect that our habit of expecting final-publisher versions is no more rational than the habit most of us had until relatively recently, of expecting read science to be printed on paper.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-84114552953889395872013-07-26T11:13:43.473+00:002013-07-26T11:13:43.473+00:00Thank you Mike for your comments, and for this inf...Thank you Mike for your comments, and for this information about arXiv. You are right, we need similar figures for our region. I will encourage this survey.Dominique Babinihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11712526705506475832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-5963725475510781162013-07-26T11:12:50.768+00:002013-07-26T11:12:50.768+00:00Thanks to Richard Poynder for such a great initiat...Thanks to Richard Poynder for such a great initiative.<br /><br />While sharing many of the arguments expressed by different interviewees, I am slightly disappointed that interviews, keynotes and interventions are generally so keen and unanimous in highlighting the advantages of OA (especially the conceptual ones, since the technical ones hardly ever get mentioned) while completely failing to address at the same time some of the key issues about OA beyond the at this point dreary Gold vs Green debate - which does otherwise very well fit strong ideologically-charged discussions that last for ages and lead nowhere (it reminds me very much of the institutional vs subject repository discussion a few years ago).<br /><br />Such as the fact that many researchers simply loathe final manuscripts and won't take less than a final publisher version. Or the fact that after ten years the repository community has not yet been able to agree on a single repository directory that will serve the movement. Everything is gradually being taken care of (incidentally with little involvement from the most vocal OA advocates) and the challenges the OA repository movement is taking are ever more complex - with altmetrics and author identification being two of the main current ones that will incidentally require some level of public-private cooperation, probably with the publishers as well.<br /><br />The two issues I point at -namely severe disconnection from researchers and the lack of a collective governance- have been respectively addressed to some extent by Danny Kingsley and Dominique Babini, but I think a more solid discussion needs to be held in this regard, leaving aside just for a while the Gold vs Green controversy if possible. The figures provided by Dominique on SciELO, Redalyc and AJOL are great, and there is a general agreement in the international repository community that Latin America is nowadays the most dynamic world region in terms of OA infrastructure development, but I don't think the argument that "70% of journals do not charge APCs" <br />is too solid when applied to the 'Global North' - we would instead need to get into a lengthy discussion of what the actual rate looks like for <i>relevant</i> journals.Pablo de Castrohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08507478327613019011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-8401742457644525942013-07-26T07:58:00.718+00:002013-07-26T07:58:00.718+00:00Thank you Dominique, for this excellent and inform...Thank you Dominique, for this excellent and informative perspective. I must say I have a lot more sympathy for your vision of an OA future than for the hybrid-driven vision that the Finch committee members seem to have had in mind (perhaps because it genuinely didn't occur to them that there was a viable alternative).<br /><br />It's well known that, when the operating costs of arXiv are divided by the number of deposits, it comes out to cost about $7 per manuscript that it makes freely available (though that does not provide peer-review infrastructure). Is it possible to provide similar figures, however vague, for published papers on SciELO, Redalyc and AJOL? It would be very interesting to see what funding bodies get for their money in these setups, compared with the costs of APCs with legacy publishers.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.com