Sowing Discord -- or the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest? - Open Access Archivangelism

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-02-22

Summary:

"Richard Poynder has written yet another excellent, timely, comprehensive overview of current developments in OA: 'Open Access: A Tale of Two Tables' Three comments: ... [1]  I for one would not say the the US has been the leader of the worldwide OA movement (though it is certainly naturally placed to do so): The historic leader to date has been the UK. The world's first Green OA repository software was created in the UK (2000); the world's first Green OA mandate was adopted in the UK (2003); the UK parliamentary Select Committee was the first in the world to recommend that all institutions and funders mandate Green OA (2004); all of the UK's research funding councils (RCUK) have mandated OA (2006-2011) and the UK today has more funder (16) and institutional (25) Green OA mandates than any other country in the world (see ROARMAP)... It is only now, with its flawed BIS/Finch/RCUK Gold-Preferential policy that the UK has lost its worldwide lead: In fact, as shown by the SPARC Europe Table, all other countries are now following the path that the UK pioneered in 2003-2004: the only country not following the UK's historic lead now is the UK itself!  But the good news is that the UK's lead can easily be regained, if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice ... [2] It is not true that Green OA means delayed/embargoed OA. At the moment, over 60% of subscription journals, including almost all the top journals in most fields, endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving by their authors. (See the SHERPA/Romeo registry.  Fewer than 40% of journals try to impose a Green OA embargo, and even for those, there is a compromise solution that is 'Almost-OA':   All papers (100%) need to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, but access to the deposit can be set as 'Closed Access' instead of Open Access during the embargo period. During the embargo, the repositories have an email-eprint-request Button that allows individual users to request, and authors to provide, with one click each, a single eprint for research use. This means that an effective Green OA immediate-deposit mandate can immediately provide at least 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA ... [3] The Wellcome policy allows either Green or Gold.  But, without announcing it explicitly, and without placing any pressure on authors, Wellcome too prefers Gold (and most of the OA that is generated by its policy is Gold OA). This is no coincidence, for the new UK policy was strongly influenced by, and to a great extent modelled upon, the Wellcome policy.  Wellcome gets the historic credit for having been the first funder in the world to mandate OA. (They did it before NIH.) But the Wellcome policy is deeply flawed and was for several years ineffective because compliance was in no way monitored and there were no consequences for noncompliance.   Now, both NIH and Wellcome monitor compliance: funding may not be provided or renewed if fundees fail to comply. But NIH still only mandates Green, whereas Wellcome, a private charity, has adopted the (simplistic) maxim that 'Publication costs are part of research costs (1.5%) and a research funder should be prepared to pay them.'  That is Wellcome's rationale for (implicitly) preferring Gold: 'We fund the research: we're ready to pay its publication costs too.'  The trouble is that most research publication is still subscription based ..."

Link:

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/980-Sowing-Discord-or-the-Green-Seeds-for-a-Golden-Harvest.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.government oa.mandates oa.usa oa.nih oa.green oa.ir oa.uk oa.sparc oa.hybrid oa.funders oa.fees oa.wellcome oa.embargoes oa.rcuk oa.recommendations oa.compliance oa.debates oa.sherpa.romeo oa.roarmap oa.fich_report oa.repositories oa.policies

Date tagged:

02/22/2013, 18:58

Date published:

02/22/2013, 13:58