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Fwd: US University OA Resolutions Omit Most Important Component

Dear Stevan,

Maybe the problem is reality.

Maybe scientists is fighting for their freedom.

Maybe scientists feel that Your alternative is taken that freedom from
them.

Maybe their is something wrong when you make it compulsary.

In Russia under the Stalin rule many things were compulsory to force
people into the communist heaven.

Maybe scientists are sceptical when their employer makes something
compulsary.

Scientists just trust other scientists. That is the problem with the green
way.

Sincerely Yours

Jan
Jan Szczepanski
Frste bibliotekarie
Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek
Box 222
SE 405 30 Goteborg, SWEDEN
Tel: +46 31 773 1164 Fax: +46 31 163797
E-mail: Jan.Szczepanski@ub.gu.se



Stevan Harnad wrote:

University Open Access (OA) Resolutions, even toothless, purely abstract
ones with no concrete policy proposals, are better than no University OA
Resolutions, one would have thought, just as some sort of NIH OA Policy is
better than none (one would have thought).

    "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4307.html

But, we must ask ourselves, is this really true, at a time when 100% OA is
fully within reach and already long overdue, with research access, usage,
impact and progress continuing to be needlessly lost, the loss compounded
daily, weekly, monthly, as we continue making false starts that miss the
point and keep heading us off in the wrong directions (and mostly no
direction at all)?

[SNIP]


What was missing from both was the core component of a targeted university
OA policy, the only component with the capacity to move universities to
100% OA rather than continuing to drift aimlessly, as they do now.

Of all the US University Statements and Resolutions, the only one that
does contain this all-important component (albeit in a needlessly
circuitous and somewhat hobbled form, because the part in square brackets
is at least 92% superfluous -- http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php) is that
of the University of Kansas:  [SNIP]

All the rest of the US university statements and resolutions so far fail
to mention self-archiving at all, going on and on instead about {3} the
high costs of journals, about {4} the (putative) need to reform copyright
and retain ownership, and about {5} the (putative) need to favor
"alternative publication venues" (by which is meant OA journals), not only
by helping to fund them (i.e., {2} above), but even by more favorably
evaluating the work that appears in them; and of course there is much
abstract and ideological praise for {6} the abstract principle of free(r)
access.

[SNIP]


The only thing universities need to do in order to make the content that
they themselves already provide openly accessible is to keep on publishing
it in journals exactly as they always have done, but in addition, to make
an online copy of it openly accessible to all would-be users webwide who
cannot afford the official published version -- by self-archiving a
supplementary draft of every published article in the university's own OA
eprint archive.

With 92% of journals having already given their green light to university
self-archiving it is nothing short of absurd to keep harping on retaining
copyright {4} and favoring "alternative venues" {5} instead of simply
adopting a policy of self-archiving all university journal article output:

    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

[SNIP]


Let us hope that other universities (US and non-US) as well as research
institutions and research funders world-wide will not copy/clone diffuse
and directionless statements/resolutions such as Columbia's and Berkeley's
but instead include the critical concrete component {1} that will convey
us all at long last to the optimal and inevitable (and long overdue)
outcome for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and
their funders' funders, the tax-paying public: 100% OA

Stevan Harnad