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Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

We seem to stuck on the same point, destined to repeat it forever. Besides the gratuitous criticism of Fenton and Schonfeld's excellent article--which does exactly what it sets out to do, namely, analyze the situation for LEGACY PRINT journals--Professor Harnad insists on creating a problem where none exists. His method simply is to assert a definition that probably no one in the world shares besides himself, and that is his idiosyncratic definition of Open Access. I could say that "gay" means bright and cheerful, but surely most members of this list will read with the meaning "homosexual" in mind. Harnad's OA is of the lowest-common-denominator variety, but he insists on confusing everyone with OA classifications that draw on all the colors of the rainbow. Few besides Harnad believes what he proposes is worth anything. His view may be correct, but his insistence on shutting down discourse on the subject is simply not in keeping with the conventions of the intellectual community. Why he should impugn Charles Schwartz's diligence is beyond me.

Perhaps someone with grant money and time on their hands is willing to Google "open access" and impose a typology on the 21,600,000 instances of its appearance in the Web index and end up with Harnad's "approval rating." I note that among the top ten sites listed is one for open access to health care.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; "AmSci Forum"
<american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 2:59 PM
Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

    Prior Amsci Subject Thread:
    The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access (began Nov 2003)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3148.html

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Ann Okerson wrote that Charles Schwartz wrote:


November/December issue of College & Research Libraries: Prospects for
open access

http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crljournal/backissues2005a/crlnov05/crlnov05.htm


The goal of open access is to make academic research available free
through online journals, an approach that would overturn the traditional
subscriber-based business model of printed journals.

This is simply incorrect, no matter how often Charles Schwartz or anyone
else somnambulistically repeats it. The goal of open access is open access
(OA). OA is not OA publishing (gold). OA publishing is merely one of the
two ways to reach 100% OA. There is also OA self-archiving (green) of
articles published in non-OA journals.


Supporters of open access say the research, often financed with taxpayer
dollars, should be made freely available instead of helping pad the
bottom line of the publishing companies and scholarly societies that
produce the journals.

Supporters of OA say the research should be made OA, period. Those who
demand more are demanding more than just OA.


Critics say open access is based on an economically unfeasible business
model that will damage the societies, hurt peer review, and undermine
the research enterprise.

Critics are talking about the OA publishing model, not OA.


Mr. Schwartz says that open access will restructure academe...

Mr. Schwartz is speculating about OA publishing, not OA.


There will not be one, climactic tipping point. Rather, he says,
cost-effective open-access business models will develop, discipline by
discipline. ... disciplines... have their own logics...

100% OA can and will be reached before any major shift to OA publishing,
and no one (no one) knows whether (and if so when) 100% OA will be
followed by a transition to OA publishing. One can speculate with Mr.
Schwartz that *if* there were ever a transition after 100% OA to OA
publishing, that transition would be gradual, and preceded by journal
cost-cutting. (No reason to expect journals to convert cost-recovery on
the basis of "discipline logic.")

    http://cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#4.2


...."The open-access movement will progress the way other innovations do
in a loosely coupled system, on the strength of weak ties: the diffusion
and eventual aggregation of professional communities' best practices."

The OA movement is not just, or primarily, the OA publishing movement
(gold); it is also the OA self-archiving movement (green) which, having
demonstrated OA self-archiving's benefits to research access and impact,
and having already been given the green light by 93% of journals, is now
in the process of making self-archiving a requirement, alongside "publish
or perish." The policy of requiring immediate OA self-archiving has
already been adopted by four universities plus CERN
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ It is on the verge of
being adopted by the UK research funding councils, and has been
half-adopted by the Wellcome Trust (6-month delay) and CURES (4-month
delay); NIH (12-month delay) is moving from a request to a requirement
(and, one hopes, no delay).


The article, "Reassessing Prospects for the Open Access Movement," is
available to subscribers at
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crljournal/backissues2005a/crlnov05/crlnov05.htm

Nonsubscribers will have to wait to see whether Mr. Schwartz elects to
self-archive it.

It would be a good idea if, in addition to reading Mr. Schwartz's article,
those with a serious interest in what is going on and why, look at what is
actually going on, and particularly along the green road...

    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

PS: For another thoroughly out-of-date, off-the-mark article (but one that
is at least openly accessible), see:

     The Shift Away From Print
     Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld
     Inside Higher Ed
     http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/08/schonfeld

This article is so out of date that I wouldn't know where to begin to
comment on it. Online is already here, for virtually all journals. How
long we will want to keep paying for the print run is anyone's guess, but
who cares. What matters is OA (i.e., free online access), but the authors
are positively paleolithic: It would be a chore to get them to even twig
on the 17th century, let alone the 21st...  (The intrepid Chris Green,
however, has had a go: See his comment.)

Stevan Harnad