Open Access Archivangelism

On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote:

Arun: "We should try to understand why many people have problems in understanding what we think is simple English. For example, Lord Sainsbury, you say, has misunderstood the RCUK proposal as well as the earlier Select Committee proposal. He is [ Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Science and Innovation] in the UK Government and obviously must be an educated person. And English is his mother tongue...

"My point is scientists, like the British Minister, are highly educated and yet they find it difficult to appreciate what to you and me appear to be simple.

"We must think through this phenomenon and come up with a good workable solution."

Dear Arun,

You are quite right that it is both puzzling and frustrating that such simple, transparent and even trivial things keep being systematically misunderstood by people who not only speak the language but are quite intelligent.

There are only a few possible explanations. I have no idea which is correct (though I have my hunches), but here they are:

(1): The premises of Open Access are wrong. There is in fact either (1a) no need for all those who do not currently have access to have access, or, if there is a need, then there is (1b) no way for all of them them to have access, or, if there is a way for all of them to have access, then (1c) it is either illegal or financially nonviable.

(2): (1) above is false, but people do not know how or why.

(3): (1) above is false, and people know how and why, but they have reasons for preferring that it should not come to pass anyway, hence they treat (1) as if it were true.

My own hunch is that (2) is closest to the truth. There may be some in the publishing community who are closer to (3), but I do not believe that it is they who are holding back OA. OA is provided by and for the research community. It is in reality 100% in their hands, and always has been. Hence if they are not yet providing it, it is certain that this is not because of publishers. It is because of (2): the research community does not (yet) know that (1) is false, nor how, nor why.

And if you want a functional analogy to this state of anosognosia (a neurological condition in which a patient -- with intelligence fully intact -- keeps systematically failing to perceive what is amiss, and what to do about it), here is an example.

A professor, an intelligent professor, with full command of the English language, has a stroke that leaves all of his intellectual faculties unimpaired but (temporarily) paralyses the left side of his body, leaving it unable to move or feel. You visit the professor in his hospital bed and he is of course perfectly lucid, sharp as ever, reading the latest edition of PLoS Biology, etc., but his left leg is dangling off the side of his bed.

You ask him "What is happening here?"

He asks what you mean.

"I mean this" (pointing to the leg).

The professor seems not to have noticed it, but now that you draw it to his attention to it, he says: "Oh, that. It's a leg. It was in my bed, so I pushed it out."

Astonished, you reply: "But it's your leg!"

Professor (not astonished, but puzzled): "My leg?"

"Yes, your leg. Look, I'll start from the foot and trace it up: you see it is connected to and leads to your body!"

Professor (still puzzled): "Quite so, I suppose you are right."

"Here, I will put it back in your bed for you: But are you in the habit of seeing disembodied legs, and merely pushing them out of your bed without asking any further questions?"

Professor (still puzzled): "No, of course not, you are quite right. How silly of me. I don't know what came over me!"

The conversation continues, on other matters. Ninety seconds later, the professor pushes his leg out of the bed, without missing a beat. -- Anosognosia.

And that is what it has felt like for years, painstakingly explaining OA and self-archiving to researchers, till they nod with apparent understanding, only to relapse within 90 seconds. I've even given the syndrome a name -- Zeno's Paralysis" -- and prescribed the FAQ to be ingested whenever any of its 32 symptoms (so far known) manifest themselves.

Let us hope that an appeal to their employers and funders will be more successful. After all, it is not their leg that is in question. Perhaps, like hospital attendants, they can see to it that researchers do the right thing. Then the patients can go back to reading and writing their journals...

Chronicling the epidemiology and time-course of the pandemic can then be left to the psychohistorians.

Cheers, Stevan

PS I suspect that conflating/confusing green and gold will turn out to have played a big part in the long road road to the optimal/inevitable recovery.

Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
"Drubbing Peter to Pay Paul"

It would be very helpful if it could be drawn to the attention of Great Britain's Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Science and Innovation, Responsible for Promoting World Class Science & Innovation, Lord Sainsbury, that 93% of the 8620 journals indexed by Sherpa/Romeo have already given their green light to authors self-archiving their own research on the web, whereas it is Lord S who appears to be ambivalent about RCUK's proposal to mandate this practise, despite its obvious benefits to research, to researchers, and to the British tax-payer who funds the research. Lord S wrote:

Lord S: "what [RCUK] said effectively is we want you to publish it as soon as you can, subject to reaching agreement with the publishers as to when that would be. That seems to me to put researchers in an impossible position, ie, every individual researcher has got to start negotiating with the publisher as to what that means."

I would say that the one nearer an impossible position is not the researcher, but Lord S, who does not appear to have understood the RCUK proposal; he has (yet again) conflated OA publishing (which is not what RCUK is proposing to mandate) with OA self-archiving (of published articles), which is what RCUK is proposing to mandate. Lord S is (yet again) drubbing Peter (OA self-archiving, green) to pox Paul (OA publishing, gold), as he did with the proposal of the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology, which he also misunderstood:

"Drubbing Peter to pox Paul"
Thursday December 2, 2004
Guardian Education

With about 93% of journals already green on OA self-archiving, Lord S is being more royalist than the sovereign, more catholic than the pope...
The following (extremely hirsute) passage from Lord S alas does not attest to a clear grasp of what is at issue, even when he endeavours to consider OA self-archiving separately:

Lord S:"The question of institutional repositories is a slightly different one because I think there is a role for institutional repositories [SH: So far so good], but in rather specific circumstances, which is there is a whole series of fields of research where the people like publishing their papers and what they are doing before they send them to the journals, and this is a very good way of communication between research communities. The question here is what is the requirement or the desire for people to publish them alongside publishing them in the actual journals? [SH: Lord S seems here both to be conflating (1a) publishing with (1b) providing access to the publication and (2a) pre-peer-review preprints with (2b) post-peer-review postprints] I think that is for individual universities to decide for themselves as to whether that is a cost [SH: Cost? Cost of what? Cost to whom?] that they think is justified subject to whatever agreement is reached with the publishers on what is the proper thing to do."

Agreement? 93% of journals have already given their blessing to author self-archiving. But so preoccupied is Lord S with the costs to and of the journal trade that he seems to be missing entirely the fact that the RCUK self-archiving mandate is meant to recover a needless ongoing cost to the British tax-payer, who funds RCUK research, namely, the loss of at least 50% of citation impact (i.e., about £1.5 billion's-worth) on the RCUK's annual £3.5 billion investment in research, a loss that occurs because currently the only researchers who can access a UK research finding are those whose institutions can afford access to the journal in which that finding happens to be published. Access denied to all the rest of its would-be users.

The RCUK self-archiving mandate is intended to make RCUK-funded research output accessible also to those would-be users who cannot afford the journal in which it happens to be published, so as to remedy the needlessly lost usage and impact of UK research findings, to maximise their uptake, usage, and applications, and thereby to maximise the benefits to British tax-payers resulting from the research that they have paid for.

Where do journal-costs and publishing-models figure at all in this equation? The transaction seems to be primarily one between the British tax-payer and the British research community that it funds to produce research, research which is in turn intended to be used and applied for the benefit of the British tax-payer, not to serve as a product to be sold, as in a supermarket, for the benefit of some other party. Publishers certainly add value (and earn revenue) from this transaction too, but their retail side-trade surely is not what it is all about!

Lord S is not merely another one of UK's trade ministers, but UK's science minister as well. As such, he should avoid conflating trade matters with research matters, for in this case it amounts to the tail (publishing) wagging the dog (research).

Stevan Harnad