RE: University of Marlyland's Open Access Deliberations

["Sally Morris \(Morris Associates\)" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

I suspect this usage suggests a depressing lack of clarity about 
what 'publishing' actually is.  Years ago, Martin Blume of the 
American Physical Society made a nice distinction between 
publishing with a small p (= merely making public) and Publishing 
with a capital P (with all the added value that entails).  I wish 
I could find the original reference - perhaps one of his former 
colleagues can help?

Sally

Email: sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guedon
Sent: 29 April 2009 01:57
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: University of Marlyland's Open Access Deliberations

On this resolution, I can well imagine what Stevan Harnad will
say and I can add that I will agree fully with him.

A resolution that calls for publishing in free online databases 
makes little sense. To the extent that authors can self-archive 
and, in many cases, can immediately expose the deposited article 
to the world, such a request makes little sense.  Looking for a 
mandate to deposit articles in a suitable repository is the right 
way to go. Making sure that the repositories link up in a 
synergetic way should be the librarians' first order challenge.

This does not preclude advocating for OA publications, but this 
is clearly a separate (and parallel) issue.

The only silver lining in such a debate is the educational effect 
that, hopefully, emerged from it. My own efforts in my own 
university show how little my colleagues understand the issues. 
It is not difficult to understand why. Up until tenure at least, 
and even until full professorship, faculty members are driven by 
the urge to publish, publish, publish. In the STM disciplines 
plus some SS disciplines, this urge to publish is structured by 
various forms of reference to impact factors. Tenure and 
promotion committees rely on this metric to the point of 
absurdity. This is not a very good starting point to provide the 
distance and the critical perspective needed to contemplate the 
full nature of the problem. As a result, we should not be 
surprised to see issues confused. Add to this the separate 
agendas of faculty members, librarians and administrators, and 
you have the recipe for a first rate cacophony.

Librarians, to their credit, have been the canaries in the mine 
regarding scholarly and scientific publishing. They were so 
simply because they paid the bills and felt the financial pain. 
However, coming at the issue from this procurement perspective 
can also distort the vision. Let us remember that scholarly and 
scientific publishing is meant to serve the "great conversation" 
of science, not the reverse, as publishers sometimes seem to 
think. Ironically, by focusing mainly on price issues, librarians 
tend to be trapped into the argumentative structure of the 
publishers, albeit sometimes in an adversarial mode. Between 
librarians who protest against high prices and librarians who 
want to help publishers set a fair pricing point (an argument I 
recently heard), there are differences, of course, but both 
groups work within the same paradigm whether they realize it or 
not. The point for librarians is to adopt a new paradigm that 
does not equate (and limit) service to the community with 
procurement.

In the end, what counts is making the research process as 
efficient as is possible. In the present context of a possible 
pandemic, one may recall what was said about the SARS scare a few 
years back: had it not been for early and totally open release of 
the results that were pouring in, we would have faced a much more 
dire situation. Exceptionally, research was allowed to move 
forward as efficiently as it was capable of doing in this 
emergency situation. The goal is to achieve the same research 
efficiency in normal conditions. The means to that goal is called 
"Open Access".

Jean-Claude Guedon