tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post4969474222060460452..comments2024-03-17T08:30:21.129+00:00Comments on Open and Shut?: Open Access: Profile of Eberhard HilfRichard Poynderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-58608946846742653582009-10-14T16:20:27.262+00:002009-10-14T16:20:27.262+00:00Thanks for your comment David. In the light of wha...Thanks for your comment David. In the light of what you say I wonder if it might help to refer readers to the details of the<br /><a href="https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/2612.html" rel="nofollow">FoI Request</a> you made in December 2005?Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-42632066179369326682009-10-14T15:51:00.253+00:002009-10-14T15:51:00.253+00:00An excellent article, as ever. One small point ca...An excellent article, as ever. One small point caught my attention. On page 20 we have:<br /><br />"There is, says Sietmann, some irony in this. "Unlike the UK, where the government has taken a stand against OA,...'"<br /><br />I think it is rather strong to suggest that the UK government has taken an anti-OA stand. It has been pretty-much neutral, but allowed agencies (the research councils, JISC, etc) the freedom to pursue OA agendas - with mandates from the research councils, repositories programmes from JISC and such like.David Prosserhttp://sparceurope.org/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-75752210426533042182009-10-07T10:37:06.400+00:002009-10-07T10:37:06.400+00:00CULTURAL DIVERSITY ACROSS DISCIPLINES
The way to ...<b>CULTURAL DIVERSITY ACROSS DISCIPLINES</b><br /><br />The way to <i>"relieve the authors from their fears and intimidations of some publishers"</i> [and] <i>"decouple the OA process from the publishing process"</i> is (1) for authors' funders and institutions to reinforce and legitimize OA self-archiving with an official <a href="http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/" rel="nofollow">mandate</a> to deposit all final refereed drafts in the author's own <a href="http://roar.eprints.org/" rel="nofollow">institutional repository (IR)</a> immediately upon acceptance for publication and (2) for the IRs to implement the <a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html" rel="nofollow">"Almost OA" Button</a> that enables automated individual eprint requests in the <a href="http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php" rel="nofollow">minority</a> of cases where the publisher does not yet endorse immediate OA (and the author elects to honor the publisher embargo by making the deposit "Closed Access" during the embargo instead of OA).<br /><br />The details matter, however. The mandate has to be carefully chosen to be the <a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html" rel="nofollow">right</a> one: <br /><br />Not only do <i><b>(a) authors have to be given the "Almost-OA" option so they can comply fully with the mandate without any constraint on their choice of which journal to publish in</b></i> (otherwise one invites author resistance to mandates and hence to OA) but <i><b>(b) authors have to be allowed to make their own choice as to whether or not they wish to make their pre-refereeing preprints OA too</b></i>. <br /><br />(Otherwise one would be attempting to impose the Procrustean physics preprint OA model on many unwilling disciplines and individuals, rather than allowing best practice to evolve naturally. This is also the reason why the "Almost OA Button" option at last made immediate OA and OA mandates universally possible, whereas the earlier Oppenheim/Harnad <a href="http://bit.ly/mhujJ" rel="nofollow">"preprints + corrigenda"</a> option did not. This is also what makes the <a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html" rel="nofollow">immediate-deposit/optional-access [ID/OA] mandate</a> the optimal compromise, far preferable to a <a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/364-guid.html" rel="nofollow">copyright-retention mandate</a> like Harvard's, which many authors may resist, again because it needlessly constrains their journal choice.)<br /><br />That said, I am (for what it's worth) all for preprint self-archiving too, personally speaking, and copyright-retention too...<br><br>Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-65023792643506000702009-10-07T08:55:24.390+00:002009-10-07T08:55:24.390+00:00Stevan Harnad is right. Given the great variety of...Stevan Harnad is right. Given the great variety of learned fields with their different traditions and requirements, a <a href="http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf/vortraege/cern01/" rel="nofollow">variety of online publishing culture</a> may develop. <br />Since I believe that <i>OA-first, publish then</i> is the way to a competing market, in some fields, as you mentioned, it would mean 'first a copy to the local OAI-IR, but with a classified-tag' until it is accepted by the publisher. This (then delayed) OA-first would relieve the authors from their fears and intimidations of some publishers, that is, decouple the OA process from the publishing process.Eberhard R Hilfhttp://www.isn-oldenburg.de/~hilfnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-68742060499705941472009-10-06T19:07:16.575+00:002009-10-06T19:07:16.575+00:00DISCIPLINE DIFFERENCES IN THE RISKS AND UTILITY OF...<b>DISCIPLINE DIFFERENCES IN THE RISKS AND UTILITY OF POSTING UNREFEREED FINDINGS</b><br /><br />Hail to my comrade-at-arms, Ebs Hilf.There's no disagreement with him on any point of substance, strategy or priority. And I'm certainly just as happy with calling OA free online access! <br /><br />I'd just like to remind everybody that although free access to peer-reviewed research is desirable and beneficial in all scholarly scientific disciplines, there was good reason that that was declared OA's primary target content, rather than unrefereed preprints. <br /><br />The posting of unrefereed preprints is a practice that does indeed predate not only OA and the subversive proposal and Arxiv, but it even predates the Web and the Net. Physicists were sharing preprints since much earlier, as Ebs points out (and that was probably the main reason physicists -- along with computer scientists -- were the first to begin providing what eventually became called OA).<br /><br />However, unlike the universal, pandisciplinary desirability of providing OA to refereed research, the inclination, desirability and practice of posting unrefereed research is definitely not universal. For example, in branches of biomedicine where the posting of unrefereed results could be dangerous to public health, it is, thankfully, shunned. There are also fields (and within fields, individuals) who prefer not to make their raw drafts public, only sharing them among a few colleagues, and waiting till they have successfully passed peer review before posting them. Preprint sharing was especially desirable in physics because it speeded up the research cycle. But many fields don't have that fast a turnaround time, and in such fields the cost (and risks) of having to sift through raw unrefereed content might slow progress more than making it public even before it is refereed would accelerate it.<br /><br />So whereas there will no doubt still be many dramatic changes in research reporting and publishing practices in the online era, I don't think they will all be clones of what (some branches of) physics have long found congenial.<br /><br />In any case, Ebs and I agree fully that OA itself (to refereed research -- plus whatever pre-refereeing findings researchers feel they wish to publicize) is a foregone conclusion and certainly need not and should not wait for any of the other actual and possible changes the online era will also eventually usher in. Agreed to is the fact that universal OA is already reachable indeed already shamefully overdue...<br><br>Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.com