* Posts by StevanHarnad

2 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2012

EU wants open science publication by 2020

StevanHarnad

IMMEDIATE OA IN EU BY 2020?

The means are still somewhat vague but the determination to reach the goal of having all scientific articles freely accessible (OA) immediately by 2020 is welcome. The goal is definitely reachable, and well worth reaching — in fact it’s long overdue.

It would be helpful, however, if the means of reaching the goal were made much more explicit, and with equal determination:

1. The EU can only ensure that its own scientific article output is OA by 2020. The EU cannot ensure that the scientific article output from the rest of the world (which is also the scientific article output to the EU) is OA by 2020 too. But if the EU adopts the right means for providing its own output, there is a good chance that it will be matched by the rest of the world too.

2. The right means for the EU to make all of its own scientific article output OA by 2020 is to require that it be deposited in the institutional repository of the author(s) of the article. This is called “Green OA.” The deposit should be made immediately upon acceptance for publication (because if the 2019 scientific article output is deposited in 2021, that is certainly not OA in 2020).

3. The deposit need not be the published version of the article; it need only be the final, peer-reviewed, accepted version.

4. The plan mentions Green OA, Gold OA (paying to publish in an OA journal) and hybrid combinations of the two. The EU is welcome to spend whatever funds it finds worthwhile to spend to pay for Gold OA, as long as immediate Green OA is required for all EU scientific article output. The rest of the world will match the EU’s provision of Green OA, but it is much less likely that the rest of the world will match the EU’s expenditure on Gold OA.

High-energy physics opens up

StevanHarnad

SCOAP3 "MEMBERSHIP": UNNECESSARY, PREMATURE, UNSCALABLE & UNSUSTAINABLE

1. High Energy Physics already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxiv (both before and after peer review) since 1991 ("Green OA").

2. Hence SCOAP3 is just substituting the payment of consortial "membership" fees for outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher ("Gold OA") that it already had from self-archiving (Green OA).

3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription fee negotiation, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is open access, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch.

4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines.

5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines.

6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions.

7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone, per individual paper, out of a portion of the windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial "membership."