Re: The No Man's Land of Reward Systems and Open Access Publishing

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

Dear Colin and list in general,

I can agree with almost everything Colin writes. If you are committed to
OA as a moral imperative I can see that you may want to force the academic
population to act, though in our countries it is not usually the practice
to use force (mandating). However most publishers and most academics do
not (it would appear) believe that the current system of scholarly
communication has broken down (for academic views see the CIBER survey)
and do not want to overturn it in favour of an uncertain future.

I see I have also got into military metaphors - sorry.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin Steele" <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:05 AM
Subject: The No Man's Land of Reward Systems and Open Access Publishing

> I feel as though I am entering the intellectual equivalent of No Man's
> Land in World War I!  Nevertheless, emerging from my Harnadian bunker, I
> do feel I am crossing into the occupied territory, for the purpose of this
> email, of Sally Morris and Anthony Watkinson.
>
> Unless the reward systems or executive directives are in place the vast
> majority of the academic community, from my recent experience, are not
> going to change their practices quickly. Remember ANU set up one of the
> first major eprint repositories in 2001. Interchanges at several recent
> academic conferences here and in New Zealand, plus contact with several
> research assessment exercises, have revealed a wide spread ignorance of
> open access practices at the individual academic level. Indeed, there is
> an increasing pressure, for a whole variety of reasons, to publish in ISI
> cited journals. Academics have said that even if it means a reduction in
> perceived quality they will still have to publish more because of
> increasing university pressures. But as was indicated in our 2003
> Australian "Houghton" report for the Department of Education, Science and
> Training, mode 2 research is still remaining strictly within the
> traditional mode 1 publishing frameworks.
>
> A couple of us persuaded the leading Australian universities - the G08
> Group and their Vice Chancellors, to sign off on an Open Access policy
> which was posted on their website last year but the reality is that the
> practical steps to implement such policies within their universities have
> as far as I know, not been put in place to any great extent.
>
> There is indeed a gap between the OA rhetoric and the realities of what is
> happening on the ground, where increasingly, the impact of RAE's and
> University League Tables is being felt. What Professor A F J van Raan of
> the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Leiden
> has called, "the fatal attraction". The vast majority of academics will
> not self-deposit unless the library physically goes out and does it for
> them or deposit is tied into local research office practices. The role of
> the Librarian, or the Pro Vice Chancellor/Chief Information Officer is
> crucial in this respect.
>
> As the recent Canadian Research Strategy (see
> http://www.kdstudy.ca/results.html )revealed, a much wider scholarly
> communication framework needs to be adopted which then feeds down into the
> individual academic level - so that the wider generic benefits in
> scholarly communication change are tangibly seen at the "selfish" level of
> the academic creator as author. The political ups and downs of the UK
> House of Commons and US NIH Reports provide a reality check of some of the
> pressures involved.
>
> Change will be a necessarily slow and hybrid process (not in the context
> of the second half of the twentieth century and the rise and rise of
> multinational science publishers), but it will occur, perhaps coinciding
> with a re-examination through more detailed economic studies of the public
> good input-output mechanisms of universities and their scholarly knowledge
> frameworks. The work on this has hardly yet started and we need some
> detailed studies.
>
> I now recall that the seeds of the Second World War were sown in the
> First, so maybe I will not pursue the images of the first sentence!
>
> Colin Steele
> Emeritus Fellow
> University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
> and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
> The Australian National University
> Australia