Open Access (or, why I love the internet) | hls

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-10-14

Summary:

" ... An important thing to understand about OA is what it is not. OA is only used the world of academia where authors typically aren’t paid for their writing. Musical compositions, visual artwork, films, book-length writings, and any other works that would normally generate direct income and/or royalties for their creators are excluded. That said, OA is NOT copyright free. Authors still get credit, and plagiarizing an OA work is still plagiarizing, full stop. Creative Commons licenses are popular on the green side of OA, and gold authors are often covered by whoever is publishing them. OA is also distinct from the concept of open data, which refers to public access to the datasets connected to scholarly works. OA advocates have also been careful to note that open access is not the same thing as universal access; you can only take advantage of OA information if you have access to a working computer with a decent internet connection. The biggest benefit to OA that proponents normally bring up is that it circumvents the often significant costs associated with traditional scholarly publishing. Annual subscriptions to journals and databases have increased wildly over the last few years, so wildly that the Faculty Advisory Council at Harvard threatened to cancel several subscriptions in 2012 when their fees went up too much. Most OA advocates aren’t trying to bankrupt the journal publishers, (although there are notable exceptions to this, more later) but they do hope to bring prices down to a more manageable level. OA is also lauded as a way to democratize the scholarly world by allowing researchers in poor and developing countries with limited funds for database subscriptions to access their peers’ research. Finally OA champions often argue that Gold OA allows younger researchers a better chance to get their work published; online journals don’t have the same space restrictions, so they can accept a lot more submissions. This was part of the reason that Science started their OA journal, Science Advances; too many high-quality papers were being turned away for lack of space.  OA does have it’s critics though, primarily on the gold side. For starters, most gold OA publishers cover costs by having authors pay a fee to be published. There are some exceptions to this, like the Journal of Machine Learning Research,  but publication fees are the norm.  This leads to the accusation that only wealthy authors can be published, but the truth is most authors’ sponsoring institutions cover their publication fees, and authors who don’t have this luxury can generally work with the publishers to get the fee waived. The other big complaint against gold OA is that the pay-to-publish model leads to predatory journals that will publish any gibberish you can come up with if you’re willing to pay. There is some basis to this argument. Science made headlines about a year ago when it sent versions of a made-up, nonsense paper to over 304 gold OA journals, and over half accepted it. Gold OA got another black eye earlier this year when Springer and IEEE had to remove over 120 articles from their databases after a researcher discovered they were complete nonsense. This isn’t the whole picture of gold OA though; most gold OA journals are very well respected and often run by larger subscription-based journals or responsible institutions, like the NIH’s PubMed. Gold OA is also mandated in a lot of cases. Some private funding institutions, like the Wellcome Trust in the UK, require OA publishing for any work they fund, and any research funded by the NIH has to be deposited in PubMed for public consumption. Research Councils UK also mandates OA publishing, and goes a step farther by requiring that datasets be OA published as well. This trend will only increase if Congress ever gets around to the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), which would mandate OA journal publishing of all non-classified research funded by federal departments and agencies with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more. Green OA is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Like I said before, this can include pretty much any method of internet publishing other than a journal, as long as it doesn’t carry an access charge or a paywall for your reader. One argument for green over gold is that it cuts out the publishers entirely. Stevan Harnad, an OA advocate and researcher with the  Université du Québec à Montréal and the University of Southampton has argued that supporting gold OA ultimately hobbles the movement  by using up precious funding on publishing fees rather than to support research. He also sees green OA as more beneficial to academia because quality can be more tightly controlled, and because funding institutions can mandate OA participation. Green OA also comes with a lot less complications. You can throw your stuff up on your own website, submit it to your university’s repository, use a blog (like Hack Library School!), whatever. It still needs to be scholarly and it must be peer reviewed, just like gold OA, but unlike gold OA jou

Link:

http://hacklibraryschool.com/2014/10/13/open-access/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.gold oa.ir oa.green oa.repositories oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/14/2014, 07:55

Date published:

10/14/2014, 03:55