Re: Berlin-3 Open Access Conference, Southampton, Feb 28 - Mar 1 2005

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

I am grateful to Professor Harnad for setting out his arguments with such
clarity. Although his postings are always interesting to read they are not
usually self-contained and it is actually quite difficult to point
students to something short which encapsulates them.

The bigger numbers here are the numbers who signed the Budapest document.
I would submit that the number of individual academics is tiny compared
with the total and that the great majority of the organisations were not
organisations representing scholars. The PLOS signatories are much more
impressive in number. It is good to have the reference to the piece of
history because it is now well buried on the PLOS site and I cannot trace
any more the list of signatories. To remind younger readers of the list
the signatories pledged:

"To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, we
pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or
review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and
scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free
distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they
have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public
resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date".

I may be totally wrong but I would be very surprised if all those who made
this pledge have stuck to it. It would be quite easy for someone with time
and money to go check the list of signatories against the publication
records so kindly provided by ISI - but why bother?

However this is the past. If the academic community in large numbers
accepted what Professor Harnad believes in as self-evident by changing
their behaviour, publishing will change. Publishers follow what their
authors want. If they do not follow what their authors want they do not
get authors.

Please also note that I am not arguing against the contention (in answer
to Adam Hodgkin's comments) that some important academics support OA.
Certainly some do.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: "liblicense" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 11:38 PM
Subject: Re: Berlin-3 Open Access Conference, Southampton, Feb 28 - Mar 1
2005

> On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Anthony Watkinson wrote:
>
> > I find no evidence here that scholars particularly want to deposit their
> > refereed research in institutional repositories.
>
> Professor Watkinson is quite right to point out a historic puzzle here.
> Let us itemise what we can be sure that scholars want, and then what they
> appear either not to want -- or not to want enough to do until/unless
> nudged:
>
> Scholars want:
>
> (1) to do research
> (2) to have their research articles read
> (3) to have their research articles used
> (4) to have their research articles cited
> (5) to have as much research impact as they can
> (6) to have access to the research articles of other scholars, for their
>     own work
>
> Scholars
>
> (7) to have employment, promotions, tenure, grants, prizes, prestige
> (8) to publish their research articles (or perish)
> (9) to have their research output and impact measured (and rewarded)
>
> Scholars are willing:
>
> (i) to seek access to research articles that are freely available on the
> web
> (ii)  to sign petitions (in their tens of thousands) to publishers to make
>       access to the articles they publish freely available on the web
> (iii) to publish in suitable Open Access journals, when they exist (5%)
> (iv)  to self-archive their own research articles so as to make them
>       freely available on the web (15%)
>
> Scholars have not yet wanted the above enough:
>
> (o) to self-archive 100% of their articles to make them freely available
>     on the web, thereby maximising their impact and its rewards
>
> Only a historian of scholarship, science, and its institutions can tell
> us when and how the universal "publish or perish" carrot/stick system
> came to be adopted, but (human nature being what it is), we can assume
> that a good deal less research would be done and reported if it were not
> rewarded. In other words, we are already rewarding publishing, and
> penalizing non-publishing, we are already weighting the rewards by
> reckoning in research impact (rather than just doing raw bean counts),
> so it is hardly a radical or unprecedented step to naturally extend this
> existing carrot/stick system to include self-archiving as a means of
> maximising the access to and the impact of research output -- in the
> joint interests of researchers, their institutions, their funders, and
> their research.
>
> These are the real causal considerations -- still not worked out in many
> or most researchers' minds -- about whether they really do or don't
> "particularly want to deposit their refereed research in institutional
> repositories."
>
> The surveys of Swan & Brown, Hajjem, and De Beer are all confirming that
> the token is at last beginning to drop, worldwide. Whether it first
> clinks bottom for researchers or their employers and funders -- the
> purveyors of the carrots and sticks -- is still an open question. But
> that the outcome, 100% OA, will be as optimal for science and
> scholarship as it is inevitable, is a foregone conclusion.
>
> > The various surveys by Key Perspectives are well known but the samples
> > are small and not to my mind representative of any population except
> > those who decided to fill in the questionnaires...
>
> That's often the way it is with surveys. But unless Professor Watkinson
> imagines that the direction of the self-selection bias was such as to
> exclude those who were more knowledgeable and active in Open Access and
> Self-Archiving, all the surveys show a consistent pattern of
> uninformedness and non-archiving on the part of most of "those who
> decided to fill in the questionnaires."
>
> Yet most of those same uninformed, non-archiving respondents responded
> that they felt a university self-archiving policy was necessary (75% in
> the Hajjem UQaM study) and that they would self-archive *willingly* if
> required by their employers of funders to do so (69% in the first Swan &
> Brown international study, 79% in the latest replication, not yet
> published).
>
> > I cannot understand why OA advocates still feel they have to pretend
> > that the academic community is behind them in their endeavour
>
> Perhaps the 3622 individuals and 302 organizations that have added their
> names to the Budapest Open Access Initiative
>     http://www.soros.org/openaccess/view.cfm
> and the 34,000 signatures to the PLoS Open Letter
>    http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml plus the growing number of
> small surveys like the ones above will eventually start to make the token
> begin to drop for Professor Watkinson too?
>
> > Which institutional repositories have been set up as a result of calls
> > from scholars and reseachers to provide OA? Why pretend that this is
> > the case?
>
> Here Professor Watkinson is again quite rightly (though perhaps
> unawares) putting his finger again on the puzzle for future OA
> historians: Yes, scholars and researchers are calling for OA in
> substantial numbers (see above). They are willing to do the keystrokes
> required to fill out surveys on it and to sign declarations and
> petitions for it. But they are not yet willing to perform the few
> additional keystrokes required to actually *provide* it, by
> self-archiving their own articles. They have not yet made the causal
> connection. The token has not yet dropped. Perhaps it will drop for
> their employers and funders first, and then they will do the keystrokes
> (which they have already told as they would do willingly, if/when
> required to do so!).

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