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

["Colin Steele" <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>]

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
--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
W.K. Hancock Building (043)
The Australian National University  
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia

Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Fax +61 (0)2 612 55526
Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au