Comments on the interim Royal Historical Society response to Plan S | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-01-17

Summary:

:The Royal Historical Society has published an interim/draft report feeding back on Plan S. Although not a historian but as someone with a keen interest in open access in the humanities disciplines – and in the spirit of open exchange, since this document has understandably caused some alarm among humanities scholars – I wanted to write up my criticisms (and one ringing endorsement where I agree with them) in public.

This report starts out well but also contains a substantial number of inaccuracies, contestable aspects, or selective interpretations of the information available about Plan S. Here are the parts where I disagreed or had comment: ...

Throughout the report there are two conflations made that are very problematic. The first is that gold open access is an author-pays model of Article and Book Processing Charges (APCs/BPCs). This is not even the definition of gold open access, which merely stipulates that the publisher make it openly available. Other models are available that do not require authors to pay but that still return revenue to a publisher. These are not explored anywhere in this document.

The second problem throughout is that while early on in the report, zero-embargo green open-access is mentioned in a footnote, this actually then disappears from the rest of the report. ...

[I]n this document, open access to published research is presented as a problem for systemically disadvantaged groups, rather than as something that might help them. ..."

Link:

https://eve.gd/2019/01/17/comments-on-the-interim-royal-historical-society-response-to-plan-s/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.societies oa.plan_s oa.objections oa.debates oa.misunderstandings oa.green oa.gold oa.fees oa.humanities oa.repositories oa.ssh oa.journals

Date tagged:

01/17/2019, 11:26

Date published:

01/17/2019, 06:26