Re: Five Universities Sign Open Access Funding Compact

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

On 19-Sep-09, at 7:17 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

I applaud these five universities for putting their money where 
their mouth is. This will help obviate one of the perils of the 
Green OA system that Stevan Harnad advocates, viz., the 
proliferation of different versions of articles as publishers 
allow peer-reviewed but unedited articles to be posted while 
reserving the right to distribute the final versions themselves 
exclusively.

But by all rights OA should apply to monographs, too. It makes no 
intellectual sense to isolate book-length works in print form in 
a few hundred libraries while making journal literature on the 
same subjects accessible worldwide for free. So, when will these 
universities, and others, step up to the plate and pay author 
fees for monographs, too?

Comment:

Sandy raises a very good point.  My own perspective is that while 
the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) is a huge 
leap forward towards a sustainable OA future, it would be most 
beneficial for COPE members, current and future, to consider 
expanding their mandate, to cover other forms of open access 
support, such as local hosting and support services for OA 
journals and monographs, and also commitment to open access 
archives.

In other words, COPE is not so much the solution, as a 
cornerstone on which we can build and growl

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com