Sunday, December 10. 2006Don't confuse AIP (publisher) with APS (Learned Society)
In Open Access News, Peter Suber excerpted the following from the AIP Position On Open Access & Public Access:
It is important not to confuse AIP (American Institute of Physics) with APS (American Physical Society). AIP is merely the publisher of the journals of APS, which is a Learned Society (and one of the most progressive on OA)."AIP is fearful of and against government mandates that provide rules in favor of one business model over another. Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society) (began Dec 1999)Don't take the grumbling of AIP too seriously. The APS/AIP division-of-labor is optimal, because it allows us to separate the scientific/scholarly interests from the publishing interests (which are so thoroughly conflated in most other Learned Societies, notably the American Chemical Society!). ACS meeting comments on e-printsThe AIP is basically saying that the interests of generating and protecting AIP's current revenue streams and cost-recovery model trump the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the interests of the tax-paying public that funds their funders. In contrast, the international Open Access movement, five out of eight UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust, a growing number of Australian and Canadian Research Councils, CERN, the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), the provosts of most of the top US universities, the European Commission, the Developing World, and a growing number of individual universities and research institutions think otherwise. (By the way, self-archiving mandates do not "favor of one business model over another": They are not about business models at all. They are about maximizing the access, usage and impact of publicly funded research.). AIP is the publishing tail, yet again trying to wag the research dog. Soon we will see an end of this sort of nonsense. Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. Technical Report, Department of Electronics and computer Science, University of Southampton.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, December 9. 2006Open Research MetricsPeter Suber: "If the metrics have a stronger OA connection, can you say something short (by email or on the blog) that I could quote for readers who aren't clued in, esp. readers outside the UK?"(1) In the UK (Research Assessment Exercise, RAE) and Australia (Research Quality Framework, RQF) all researchers and institutions are evaluated for "top-sliced" funding, over and above competitive research proposals. (2) Everywhere in the world, researchers and research institutions have research performance evaluations, on which careers/salaries, research funding, economic benefits, and institutional/departmental ratings depend. (3) There is now a natural synergy growing between OA self-archiving, Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA self-archiving mandates, and the online "metrics" toward which both the RAE/RQF and research evaluation in general are moving. (4) Each institution's IR is the natural place from which to derive and display research performance indicators: publication counts, citation counts, download counts, and many new metrics, rich and diverse ones, that will be mined from the OA corpus, making research evaluation much more open, sensitive to diversity, adapted to each discipline, predictive, and equitable. (5) OA Self-Archiving not only allows performance indicators (metrics) to be collected and displayed, and new metrics to be developed, but OA also enhances metrics (research impact), both competitively (OA vs. NOA) and absolutely (Quality Advantage: OA benefits the best work the most, and Early Advantage), as well as making possible the data-mining of the OA corpus for research purposes. (Research Evaluation, Research Navigation, and Research Data-Mining are all very closely related.) (6) This powerful and promising synergy between Open Research and Open Metrics is hence also a strong incentive for institutional and funder OA mandates, which will in turn hasten 100% OA: Their connection needs to be made clear, and the message needs to be spread to researchers, their institutions, and their funders. (Needless to say, closed, internal, non-displayed metrics are also feasible, where appropriate.) Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, December 8. 20065th Australian Mandate (8th Funder, 9th Institution, 17th Worldwide
On the good authority of Arthur Sale (and Peter Suber), the classification of the Australian Research Council (ARC) self-archiving policy in ROARMAP has been upgraded to a mandate.
There are now 17 self-archiving mandates worldwide, 5 of them in Australia: A departmental and university-wide one at U. Tasmania, a university-wide one at QUT, and a funder mandate at ARC, joined soon after by another funder mandate (NHMRC) and reinforced by the Research Quality Framework (RQF) (the Australian counterpart of the UK Research Assessment Exercise, RAE). Congratulations to Australia, and especially to Tom Cochrane, Paul Callan, Colin Steele, Malcolm Gillies, and to the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale. Thursday, December 7. 2006Unbiassed Open Access Metrics for the Research Assessment ExerciseThe UK Research Assessment Exercise's (RAE's) sensible and overdue transition from time-consuming, cost-ineffective panel review to low-cost metrics is moving forward. However, there is still a top-heavy emphasis, in the RAE's provisional metric equation, on the Prior-Funding metric: "How much research funding has the candidate department received in the past?" "The outcome announced today is a new process that uses for all subjects a set of indicators based on research income, postgraduate numbers, and a quality indicator."Although prior funding should be part of the equation, it should definitely not be the most heavily weighted component a-priori, in any field. Otherwise, it will merely generate a Matthew-Effect/Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (the rich get richer, etc.) and it will also collapse the UK Dual Funding System -- (1) competitive proposal-based funding plus (2) RAE performance-based, top-sliced funding -- into just a scaled up version of (1) alone. Having made the right decision -- to rely far more on low-cost metrics than on costly panels -- the RAE should now commission rigorous, systematic studies of metrics, testing metric equations discipline by discipline. There are not just three but many potentially powerful and predictive metrics that could be used in these equations (e.g., citations, recursively weighted citations, co-citations, hub/authority indices, latency scores, longevity scores, downloads, download/citation correlations, endogamy/exogamy scores, and many more rich and promising indicators). Unlike panel review, metrics are automatic and cheap to generate, and during and after the 2008 parallel panel/metric exercise they can be tested and cross-validated against the panel rankings, field by field. In all metric fields -- biometrics, psychometrics, sociometrics -- the choice and weight of metric predictors needs to be based on careful, systematic, prior testing and validation, rather than on a hasty a-priori choice. Biassed predictors are also to be avoided: The idea is to maximise the depth, breadth, flexibility, predictive power and hence validity of the metrics by choosing and weighting the right ones. More metrics is better than fewer, because they serve as cross-checks on one another; this triangulation also highlights anomalies, if any. Let us hope that the RAE's good sense will not stop with the decision to convert to metrics, but will continue to prevail in making a sensible, informed choice among the rich spectrum of metrics available in the online age. Stevan HarnadSome Prior References: American Scientist Open Access Forum Indiana University: OA Mandates, OA Metrics, and the Origins of Language
Three talks by Stevan Harnad at Indiana University on December 4-5:
(1) Maximising the Return on Resource Investment in Research at Indiana University by Mandating Self-Archiving (2) Open Access Scientometrics (3) Origins of Language (Over a hundred thousand years ago, language evolved as a way of providing Open Access to the categories that human beings acquired. Publishing and providing online access to peer-reviewed research findings is just a natural -- indeed optimal and inevitable -- PostGutenberg upgrade of this ancestral adaptation.) Wednesday, December 6. 2006Brunel University: 9th departmental/institutional mandate
Brunel University's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics has just adopted the 9th departmental/institutional self-archiving mandate. (Together with the 6 research funder mandates, that now makes 15 mandates worldwide, and the 8th for the UK.)
Brunel University School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics (UNITED KINGDOM mandate)This is an instance of Prof. Artur Sale's recommended "Patchwork Mandate" -- departments first, then the university as a whole. Other examples are Prof. Sale's own University of Tasmania's departmental and university-wide mandates and University of Southampton's ECS departmental mandate (soon to become a university-wide mandate). If your own university or research institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, November 25. 2006Open Access Archiving in FranceFranck Laloë (2006) Les archives ouvertes (AO) et la communication scientifique directe (CSD). Une présentation à la réunion du CNRS sur les archives ouvertes (Paris, 16 novembre 2006). (blog Libre Accès INIST)Bravo to France and to Franck Laloe for the progress of the French national repository, HAL! As noted before in the AmSci Forum, it just might be that France -- an exception among western nations in this regard -- is a sufficiently centralised country to be able to manage 100% self-archiving of its research output of 120,000 articles per year in a centralised national archive (HAL) instead of a distributed network of Institutional Repositories (IRs). But what is unlikely is that France is so much of an exception that it will be able to do this without a national self-archiving mandate. (See the graphs of HAL's current and projected growth rate in Franck's presentation and draw your own conclusion about whether and when 100% OA is likely to be reached in France without a mandate. Its present desposit rate seems to be about 12% of French output, which is about the international average for spontaneous [unmandated] self-archiving.) The advantage of such centralisation, however, is that one national mandate will be enough. Here are some sentimental flashbacks: Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Are things otherwise in France? (began May, 1999)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, November 23. 2006Research Journals Are Already Just Quality Controllers and Certifiers: So What Are "Overlay Journals"?The notion of an "Overlay Journal" is and always has been somewhat inchoate -- potentially even incoherent, if construed in a way that conflates (1) access-provision with peer-review service-provision, (2) pre-peer-review preprints with peer-reviewed postprints (or posting with publishing), (3) archives (repositories) with journals, or (4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) in particular with distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs) in general. (1) Access-Provision vs. Peer-Review Service-Provision. A research journal is and always has been both (i) an access-provider (producing, printing and distributing the print edition; producing and licensing the online edition) and (ii) a quality-control service-provider (implementing and certifying the peer review process -- but with the peers independent and refereeing for the journals for free). In the Open Access (OA) era, the access-provider functions of the research journal can and will be supplemented by author self-archiving of the final, revised, peer-reviewed postprint (in the author's own IR and/or a CR) in order to ensure that all would-be users have access, rather than only those whose institutions can afford access to the journal's subscription-based version.It is also possible -- but this is hypothetical and it is not yet known whether and when it will happen -- that the distributed network of IRs and CRs containing authors' self-archived postprints may eventually substitute for the traditional access-provision function of journals (i), at least insofar as online access is concerned. This does not mean that IRs and CRs become journals. It just means that the online access-provision function (i) is unbundled from the former double function of journals (i, ii), and offloaded onto the IR/CR network. And this is merely hypothetical at this time. Only the supplementary function is a reality today, not yet the substitute function. (Is this hypothetical outcome what is meant by "Overlay Journals"? If so, let's forget about them for now and work on reaching 100% OA self-archiving, crossing our "overlay" bridges only if/when we ever get to them.) (2) Unrefereed Preprints vs. Refereed Postprints (Posting vs. Publishing). Authors self-archive both their pre-peer-review preprints and their peer-reviewed postprints in IRs and CRs, but the primary target of the OA movement, and of OA self-archiving mandates, is the peer-reviewed postprint (of all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals). Self-archiving preprints (usually done in order to elicit informal peer feedback and to assert priority) is neither publication nor a substitute for publication. To post a preprint in an IR or CR is not to publish it; it is merely to provide access to it. In providing access to preprints, IRs and CRs are certainly not substituting for journals. (Preprints are not listed in academic CVs as "Publications" but as "Unpublished Manuscripts.")So what is an "Overlay Journal"? The idea arose (incoherently, almost like an Escher drawing of an impossible staircase) from the idea that journals could simply "overlay" their peer-review functions on the self-archived preprint. The idea was first mooted in connection with a CR (Arxiv), but it was never coherently spelled out. (I will not be discussing here any of the speculations about "overlay" and "disaggregated" and "deconstructed" journals that are based on untested notions about scrapping peer review altogether, or replacing it with open peer commentary; nor will I be discussing far-fetched notions of "multiple-review/multiple-publication" (in which it is imagined that peer review is just a static accept/reject matter, like a connotea tag, and that papers can be multiply "published" by several different journals, taking no account of the fact that referees are already a scarce and over-used resource, nor of the fact that peer review depends on answerability and revision): These conjectures are all fine as possible supplements to peer review, but none has yet been shown to be a viable substitute for it. The notion of an "Overlay Journal" is accordingly only assessed here in the context of standard peer review, as it is practised today by virtually all of the 24,000 journals whose peer-reviewed content is the target of the OA movement.) One rather trivial construal of "Overlay Journal" (not the intended interpretation) would be that instead of submitting preprints to journals, authors could deposit them in CRs (or IRs) and simply send the deposit's URL to the journal, to retrieve it from there, for peer-review. This would not make the journal an "Overlay" on the CR or IR; it would simply provide a more efficient means of submitting papers to journals (and this has indeed been adopted as an optional means of submission by several physics journals, just as the submission of digital drafts instead of hard copy, and submission via email instead of by mail has been quite naturally adopted, to speed and streamline submission and processing by most journals, in the digital era). So submitting preprints to journals via IRs or CRs is not tantamount to making the IR or CR into an underlay for "Overlay Journals," nor to making journals into overlays for the IR or CR. (In the case of IRs, because the authorship of most journals is distributed across many institutions, depositing in IRs would have meant "Distributed-Overlay Journals" in any case, but let us not puzzle about what sort of an entity those might have been!) What might be meant by an "Overlay Journal" in something other than this trivial optional-means-of-submission sense, then? Could the users of the term mean the hypothetical outcome contemplated earlier (1), with journals offloading their former access-provision function (i) onto the IR/CR network and downsizing to become just peer-review service-providers (ii)? Possibly, but at the moment journals don't seem to be inclined to do so, and if they did, it is likely that they would prefer to continue to be thought of as what they have always been: journals, with a name and an imprimatur. Paper journals were not "overlays" on libraries. Journals that abandon their print edition are still journals, not "overlays" on their electronic edition. If their electronic edition is jettisoned too, they're still journals, not "overlays" on IRs/CRs. Once we recognise that access-provision (i) (whether on-paper or online) was always just an incidental, media-dependent function of peer-reviewed research journals, whereas peer-review service-provision and certification (ii) was always their essential function, then it becomes clear that -- medium-independently -- a journal was always just a peer-review service-provider and certifier of a paper's having successfully met its established quality standards: It has always provided a quality-control tag, -- the journal name -- affixed to a text, whether the text is on-paper on a bookshelf, in the journal's proprietary on-line archive, or in an OA IR or CR. In this very general sense, all journals already are (and always have been) "overlay journals": overlays over all these various media for storing and providing access to the papers resulting from having passed successfully through the journal's peer review procedure (which is not itself a static tagging exercise, but a dynamic, interactive, feedback-correction-and-revision process, answerable to the referees and editors). In other words, throughout the evolution of research communication -- from On-Paper to On-Line to Open Access -- peer review remains peer review, a journal remains a journal (i.e., a peer-review service-provider and certifier), and texts tagged as "published" by "journal X" remain texts tagged as published by "journal X." All that changes is the access-medium and the degree of accessibility. (And possibly, one day, the cost-recovery model.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, November 21. 2006Solving the Article Accessibility Problem Moots the Journal Affordability Problem
On the premise that the Article Accessibility problem is solved, there is no longer any Journal Affordability problem left. Let us suppose (and hope) that researchers' institutions and funders soon mandate, at long last, that their employees/fundees (or their assigns) do the pathetically small number of keystrokes it takes to self-archive all their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their own Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.
That will generate 100% Open Access (OA). Once it is no longer true that any would-be user is unable to access an article because his institution cannot afford the journal in which it happens to have been published, there is no longer any Accessibility Problem. Librarians' annual agony over which journals to keep and which to cancel within the constraints of their finite serials budgets (never anywhere near enough to afford all published journals) will be over. They can purchase as many as they can afford from among those journals for which their users indicate that they would still quite like to have them in-house (whether out of desire for the paper edition or for online add-ons, or out of habit, sentimentality, loyalty, civic-mindedness or superstition): Nothing important hinges on the choice or the outcome once it is sure that no potential user is any longer doing without (hence no research or researcher is any longer needlessly losing impact because of access denial). To ever have thought otherwise is simply to have conflated the Accessibility and Affordability problems: Accessibility was always what made Affordability a problem at all. And before the inevitable, tedious question is asked about how the essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing will continue to be covered if/when subscriptions become unsustainable, please consult the prophets. (Publishing will adapt, cutting the costs of the inessentials, downsizing to the essentials, possibly right down to peer-review service-provision alone; those irreducible essential costs will then be covered on the OA cost-recovery model, out of a fraction of the annual institutional windfall savings from the institutional journal cancellations. Till that income stream is released, however, OA Publishing is OA-Publicatio Praecox...) Stevan Harnad http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/ Poynder Again on Point
Richard Poynder has done it again: In his latest essay "Open Access: Beyond Selfish Interests" he characteristically takes the OA debate and developments several layers deeper than the one at which most of the usual suspects customarily think and reason. Not that I agree with his (implicit) conclusions (implicit, because, being a carefully dispassionate journalist, he does not actually express his opinions, though he most definitely has them!).
But I won't do a critique, because his essay is just too good to harry with niggles. Read it and make up your own mind. But please remember that Richard is not a researcher, salaried by an institution and funded by a grant to write up his findings. In short, this is not OA writing, but writing from which the author endeavours to earn his living. Yet Richard is performing an invaluable service for OA, and for the history of research communication and publication. He is taking a big risk by blogging his writing instead of selling it to a publisher. I hope his grateful readers will do the right thing beyond selfish interests. (Otherwise we risk losing this splendid resource, which would be -- dare I see it -- rather like the tragedy of the commons!) Stevan Harnad http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
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