Heidelberger Appell Abgepellt
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Matthias Spielkamp [MS] has just participated in an International
Copyright Conference in Berlin (May 7-8) and is participating in
a radio debate on open access today (May 9). MS has cast some
revealing new light on the original source of Roland Reuss's animus
against Open Access (OA) in the Heidelberg Appeal, which Reuss
co-drafted. (The following exchange with me [SH] is posted with MS's
permission.)
Fuller posting is here .
____________________________________________________________________________
SH: The Heidelberger Appell is all based on pure
misunderstanding.
MS: It is indeed. Reuss is not talking about
journal articles. He says he is not even
talking about OA. He says that he "does not
want to be forced to publish" his works
(classics editions, in his case) [books] in
any form other than what he chooses himself.
Why does he say that? Because he apparently
had the experience that one of his funders
demanded that a classic edition he was going
to publish in cooperation with a mid-size
book-publisher be made OA a year after
publication. The publisher said he would not
produce the book under these circumstances.
SH: Matthias, first, thanks so much for at last
discovering and revealing the original source of the
misunderstanding!
Second, it is still Reuss's fault, for having immediately
launched a petition that made this scattershot attack on
all forms of free online access without taking the
trouble to see and separate what is benign and desirable
from what is not (and what is and is not OA's target).
Third, it sounds as if the fault here lies also partly
with the research funder too. I will state it very
bluntly: At a time when (Green) OA for OA's primary
target content -- refereed journal articles -- is still
not yet mandated by most institutions and funders, hence
articles are not being made OA, even though they are all,
without exception, author give-aways, published solely
for research impact, there is no excuse for (or sense in)
research funders targeting books instead, for being made
OA.
Books are a far more complicated, far less uniform, and
far less urgent case insofar as OA is concerned. Not all
(nor even most) book authors want to give their books
away free online today. Nor is it yet apparent whether
there is a viable, sustainable economic model for book
publication if it turns out (as it might -- the evidence
is far from clear yet) that book cost-recovery is not
viable if the book is made free online (at least not for
book publication that still generates a printed book
too). A funder that arbitrarily insists on book OA today
-- when what is unambiguously and urgently needed is
journal article OA -- has no more clearly thought through
the meaning and priorities of OA than Reuss did, and this
should be clearly and fairly stated too.
(Note that it is not that I am at all against book OA, by
the way. I actually believe it is already the right
solution today for esoteric scholarly and scientific
monographs that have difficulty finding a publisher, and
for which the only edition will be the online edition. I
also think that for some -- though not all -- print
books, a free online version may not hurt -- and
may perhaps even help -- sales of the print edition. But
there is still a lot of testing and evidence needed
before authors and publishers can be confident of that.
And last, I think that the power and potential of making
journal-articles OA will encourage more scholars and
scientists to report their important findings rapidly,
via journal articles, and to make those articles [Green]
OA. What later becomes of their elaborations and
syntheses in the form of books is a far less urgent
matter for research progress at this time.)
MS: The "Heidelberger Appell" gives the
impression that it's talking about OA, when
it is not. Reuss is not at all interested in
journal publishing. He is talking about
books, about being "the author" whose
autonomy must not, under any circumstances,
be subjected to any conditions made by the
funder. It may be feudalistic (I think it is)
but it is understandable if it renders
impossible a project of his. It's not about
royalties, it's about models that rely on
multiple-volume book subscriptions where a
publisher wants to recoup his investments.
Some of them don't even make a profit; we're
not talking about Springer / Wiley / Elsevier
here.
SH: I agree. And the right thing to do is to make it
crystal clear when one is talking only about books, and
not about journal articles, nor OA nor OA mandates. This
is what Reuss has not done, but rather the contrary.
Funders and institutions too, for their part, must make
it crystal clear that OA's primary target is refereed
journal (and conference) articles, and that those are
the only targets of Green OA self-archiving mandates.
MS: The problem is that everyone (including
myself) read his Appell as an attack on open
acces. Was this the biggest mistake of all? I
don't think so, because politicians perceive
it the same way so, a riposte was
appropriate.
SH: The mistake was definitely Reuss's, for not
specifying his target. (Both Reuss, in his "Con Crema
(Open Access als Enteignung)" and his fellow-author Uwe
Jochum ("Open Access gepusht") write very specifically
against "Open Access" in the side-bar of the Heidelberg
Appeal.) But it is partly also the fault of the German
research institutions and research funders, for falling
behind the rest of the world, in not mandating Green OA
self-archiving of journal articles (and even trying
awkwardly and idiosyncratically to insist on OA for a few
books, which no institution or funder elsewhere has
done).
If the ?Alliance of German Scientific Organisations? had
done as other funders and institutions worldwide are
doing or preparing to do, which is to unambiguously
identify OA's target content -- refereed journal articles
-- and to mandate that they be self-archived to make them
OA (asFraunhofer-Gesellschaft has more-or-less done),
then this systematic misunderstanding and confusion would
not have been possible.
Received on Sun May 10 2009 - 01:42:47 BST
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