RE: University of Marlyland's Open Access Deliberations

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

Further to my previous message, Marty Blume has now helped me to 
track down his original (1998) piece on the nature of publication

It's at http://www.aaas.org/spp/sfrl/projects/epub/ses1/Blume.htm

Sally Morris
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 Sally Morris (Morris
Associates)
Sent: 30 April 2009 00:13
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: University of Marlyland's Open Access Deliberations

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