News

Richard Poynder, the de facto chronicler of the Open Access Movement (and beyond), has at long last done one of his characteristically probing and always insightful interviews with "the de facto leader of the open access (OA) movement," Peter Suber. Read, learn, and admire.

Has anybody noticed
on the QWERTY keyboard
if you overshoot OA
then you have typed
PS?

Slides for the presentation (in Portuguese and English)

Acesso livre:
Que? Por quê? Como? Onde? Quando?
Métricas e mandatos

at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science -- Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC) -- session on Publicar ou Perecer: Acesso Livre é Sobreviver ("Publish or Perish: Open Access and Survive") Belém, Brazil, 8-10 July 2007, are available as:

PDF or PPT

In his series "The OA Interviews," journalist Richard Poynder, a specialist in digital rights issues, interviews me (Stevan Harnad) about "Open Access: From Glottogenesis to the Category Commons".

Another interview (by Ligia Café; and Hélio Kuramoto) appears (in Portuguese and English) in Encontros Bibli.

Readers of this blog who do not regularly read Peter Suber's splendid Open Access News (OAN) should! OAN provides a wealth of immediate information about OA developments. It has been my first (and most frequent) daily port of call for years now.

Yesterday Peter did two characteristically fair and gentle -- but resolutely firm -- rejoinders to the increasingly shrill (but remarkably shallow) attempts by representatives and partisans of some -- certainly not all, possibly not even most -- sectors of the journal publishing industry to oppose the growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates being adopted and proposed by research funders and universities worldwide.

The two articles Peter rebuts are by Brian Crawford, Chairman of the PSP Executive Council of AAP and an editorial by the CEO of ALPSP about a similar -- but somewhat more reasoned -- article by Nevada librarian Rick Anderson. As usual, the claim is that the Green OA self-archiving mandates that have been adopted and proposed will destroy journals and peer review by destroying subscription income. As usual, the reply is that (1) there is to date no evidence at all that Green OA self-archiving will not co-exist peacefully with subscription-based cost-recovery, but (2) if and when it no longer does, then there will be a conversion to Gold OA publishing-fee-based cost-recovery, paid for out of the very same money that institutions now spend on subscriptions, money they would have saved in having cancelled subscriptions (not money redirected from research). But the fact that 100% OA is both attainable via the Green OA mandates and highly beneficial -- to research, researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public that funds the research -- is beyond dispute. Research is not funded and conducted in order to guarantee the journal publishing industry's current revenue streams and current ways of doing business.

For Peter's much gentler rebuttals, please see: Crawford PSP/AAP Rebuttal and Anderson ALPSP Rebuttal

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

My impressions of the Brussels EC Meeting:

(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.

Researcher and industrial support for OA and OA Self-Archiving Mandates will now be very vigorously consolidated.

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.