Saturday, February 17. 2007
Impressions from Brussels EC Meeting
My impressions of the Brussels EC Meeting: Researcher and industrial support for OA and OA Self-Archiving Mandates will now be very vigorously consolidated.(1) The petition demonstrating the very broad-based support for the proposed EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate was presented to the EU Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potocnik.
(2) The conference itself (which was organized before the petition) then proceeded with its programme, heavily weighted toward publishing and publishers' concerns rather than the access and impact concerns of the research community.
(3) Hence, predictably, most of the time and energy was spent on publishing finances rather than on research access and impact.
(4) Nevertheless, the overall impression (from the minority research and researcher representation at the meeting) was that the relentless focus on publishing finances was not their primary concern, Open Access was.
(5) The (rather bland) statement released at the beginning of the meeting had also been drafted before the meeting and the petition (and apparently with some involvement of the publishers, as there was evidence that they had seen it in advance).
(6) But my impression was that the EU Commissioners, Directors-General and Directors (or rather those of their delegates who were in attendance) were favorable to OA, and that concrete developments can be expected as a result of the conference and the petition.
Stevan Harnad
PS I think a bit of a storm is now brewing in the physics community over the CERN initiative to promote an immediate transition to Gold OA publishing in particle physics. The concern is that this will divert scarce funds from research. I think the concern is warranted: that it is indeed premature to push toward gold OA when most fields [including many parts of physics] don't yet have green OA. CERN should work to generalise its own admirable and successful green OA self-archiving mandate to the rest of the world, and meantime make use of the complementarity between conventional publication and green OA, co-existing in parallel, rather than needlessly pressing for an immediate transition to gold OA publishing at a time when gold OA is neither needed -- publication still being funded by (and potential publication funds still tied up in) subscription expenditures -- nor are funds available to pay for gold OA without taking them from elsewhere, most probably research. Gold fever also distracts from the pressing, immediate basic need for OA itself, as well as from green OA's immediate availability, at no cost. We need to stop fussing about publishing and publishing costs, and focus on access, and providing it in the fastest and surest way available: by mandating green OA self-archiving.
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Thank you for this.
It might be useful to add this link [1]: The long awaited "COMMUNICATION DE LA COMMISSION AU PARLEMENT EUROPÉEN, AU CONSEIL ET AU COMITÉ ÉCONOMIQUE ET SOCIAL EUROPÉEN".
This Communication was, after all, the raison d'être and basis of the entire meeting.
The conclusion of the Communication is «La Commission invite le Parlement européen et le Conseil à débattre de ces problématiques sur la base de la présente Communication» or "let's keep talking".
What did you find out during your trip to Brussels regarding views in the European Parliament and in the Council?
Richard Hardwick
[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:FR:PDF
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:DE:PDF
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:EN:PDF
It might be useful to add this link [1]: The long awaited "COMMUNICATION DE LA COMMISSION AU PARLEMENT EUROPÉEN, AU CONSEIL ET AU COMITÉ ÉCONOMIQUE ET SOCIAL EUROPÉEN".
This Communication was, after all, the raison d'être and basis of the entire meeting.
The conclusion of the Communication is «La Commission invite le Parlement européen et le Conseil à débattre de ces problématiques sur la base de la présente Communication» or "let's keep talking".
What did you find out during your trip to Brussels regarding views in the European Parliament and in the Council?
Richard Hardwick
[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:FR:PDF
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:DE:PDF
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0056:FIN:EN:PDF
Richard Hardwick asks: "What did you find out during your trip to Brussels regarding views in the European Parliament and in the Council?"
I found that the publishing lobby had been successful in again deferring any decision on concrete action.
The EC's proposal (A1) in January 2006 had been "Let's mandate OA self-archiving."
That was since been strongly seconded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB), and now by both the EC petition (20,000 signatories, 1000 organisations) and the poll of the population to which the Mandate would apply, the FP6-eligible applicants (85/15 in favour of EC A1 Self-Archiving Mandate).
But, thanks to the publishers' lobby (which had successfully persuaded the EC to focus the conference itself on publishers and publishers' concerns, instead of on research, and the concerns of researchers, the research applications industry, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit -- not the publishing industry -- the research is funded and conducted), the outcome, as you note, was "Let's keep talking" instead of "Let's mandate OA self-archiving, as proposed."
In other words, the publishing lobby's filibuster of the optimal and inevitable outcome -- for research, researchers, research institutions and funders, the (vast) research industry, and the tax-paying public -- has again been successfully deferred by the (tiny) flea on the tail of the dog.
It is my opinion, though, that patience with the flea is wearing thin, and good sense will prevail imminently in Europe, as it already has in the UK (with 5 of the 8 Research Councils plus the Wellcome Trust already adopting the mandate) as well as in Australia, and soon also in the United States (FRPAA) and the rest of the world.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
Stevan Harnad
I found that the publishing lobby had been successful in again deferring any decision on concrete action.
The EC's proposal (A1) in January 2006 had been "Let's mandate OA self-archiving."
That was since been strongly seconded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB), and now by both the EC petition (20,000 signatories, 1000 organisations) and the poll of the population to which the Mandate would apply, the FP6-eligible applicants (85/15 in favour of EC A1 Self-Archiving Mandate).
But, thanks to the publishers' lobby (which had successfully persuaded the EC to focus the conference itself on publishers and publishers' concerns, instead of on research, and the concerns of researchers, the research applications industry, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit -- not the publishing industry -- the research is funded and conducted), the outcome, as you note, was "Let's keep talking" instead of "Let's mandate OA self-archiving, as proposed."
In other words, the publishing lobby's filibuster of the optimal and inevitable outcome -- for research, researchers, research institutions and funders, the (vast) research industry, and the tax-paying public -- has again been successfully deferred by the (tiny) flea on the tail of the dog.
It is my opinion, though, that patience with the flea is wearing thin, and good sense will prevail imminently in Europe, as it already has in the UK (with 5 of the 8 Research Councils plus the Wellcome Trust already adopting the mandate) as well as in Australia, and soon also in the United States (FRPAA) and the rest of the world.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)
Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA)
Quicksearch
Syndicate This Blog
Materials You Are Invited To Use To Promote OA Self-Archiving:
Videos:
audio WOS
Wizards of OA -
audio U Indiana
Scientometrics -
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.
The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)
You can sign on to the Forum here.
Archives
Calendar
|
May '21 | |||||
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||
Categories
Blog Administration
Statistics
Last entry: 2018-09-14 13:27
1129 entries written
238 comments have been made