[no subject]

["Stevan Harnad" <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> Gold OA journals joining the pack every day. No question that 
> OA is a success, if you mean by success an increase in the 
> number of publishing outlets and in the accessibility of 
> journal articles. But does anyone really know if this means 
> that the quality of knowledge has increased? What this world 
> doesn't need is more stuff to wade through to find the good 
> stuff worth spending one's time reading.

No. Making the 2.5 million articles published annually in the 
planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals accessible to all would-be 
users (rather than just those whose institutions can afford 
subscriber access) does not increase the quality of knowledge, 
just its accessibility.

And that was all OA was intended to do. Of course, increased 
usage, access and impact will probably also increase the quality 
of knowledge, but that will be an eventual side-effect. For now 
we don't have OA yet, just 15% OA, so let's focus on that.

Harnad, S (1997) The Paper House of Cards and Why It is Taking So 
Long to Collapse). Ariadne 8: 6-7. http://cogprints.org/1693/

I do agree that adding a lot of extra journals at this point 
(when there are already plenty, with all papers, of all quality 
ranges, eventually being published, somewhere) is not urgent. 
Journals vary in quality; their quality is known from their 
track-records. And users are quite capable of selectingon the 
basis of journal track-record what they do and don't wish to 
spend their limited time reading.

What is certain is that the constraints of their institutional 
subscription budget was not a rational basis for that selection! 
Powerful search tools, plus user judgment, on a complete OA 
corpus, will be infinitely preferable.

But I am an advocatet of Green OA: making the existing 
peer-reviewed corpus 100% OA in OA institutional repositories 
(IR) through Green OA self-archiving by authors and Green OA 
self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders.

So those who (like Joe Esposito, when, in more unguarded moments, 
he likens OA to "research spam are concerned that OA means adding 
low-quality junk to the research corpus are (yet again) 
conflating OA with (certain lower forms of) Gold OA.

It alas seems to be true -- as the ever-vigilant Richard Poynder 
is now investigating for us all -- that "gold fever" has been 
generating some fleets of start-up junk-OA journals simply 
because the risks and access-barriers for Gold OA journal 
start-ups are so low: All you have to do is (1) spam 
prestige-hungry academics for "peer reviewers," (2) spam 
publication-hungry authors for papers, (3) offload "peer-review" 
onto automatic software, email form-letters plus 1, charge 2 
whatever fee the market will accept, and suddenly you are the 
publisher of a fleet of Gold OA journals.

In sum: OA is not the same thing as Gold OA publishing. Gold OA 
publishing is just one of the roads to OA, and not the fastest or 
surest one. OA itself is just about making the existing 
peer-reviewed corpus freely accessible online, such as it is. 
Improving the quality of science and scholarship is another, 
bigger agenda. OA will help in that too, but that is certainly 
not its primary purpose: Maximizing research access and usage 
online is.

*Stevan Harnad