Springer has work to do to keep its open-access leadership « Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-04

Summary:

“I just sent this letter to Matthew Cockerill, the co-founder of the open-access publisher BioMed Central, which was acquired by Springer a few years ago. It arose from a mistake on Springer’s part that was discussed on Twitter initially. As I wrote this I didn’t particularly intend it to be an open letter. But having written and sent it ... [From the letter]  ‘I just wanted to take this opportunity to say a few words about strategy to you and your Springer colleagues.  I’m sure it’s apparent to everyone involved in academic publishing that we stand at an important tipping point right now. The exponential growth of PLoS, the proliferation of other publishing experiments such as F1000 Research and PeerJ, the crushing defeat of the RWA, the progress of the FRPAA, the Cost of Knowledge boycott, the White House petition that is currently 95% of the way to its goal and the very broad coverage of these issues in mainstream media as well as the blogs of scholars and librarians, all add up to a time of massive change. Some publishers will emerge from this stronger, and some much weaker — if they emerge at all... Springer has so far done an excellent job of positioning itself as the Good Guys, at least among the Big Four... Crucial here has been the adoption of the CC BY licence for Open Choice articles — a true open access option that stands in stark contrast to Elsevier’s abjectly ill-defined and restrictive “Sponsored Article”. And it helps having a visible presence like Springer Open on Twitter: even though it doesn’t have many direct followers, those followers include a lot of influential people.  BUT Springer’s emerging good-guy status is fragile. The way I read developing opinions, there’s no set-in-stone notion that there has to be a Goodie and a Baddie among the big four. If Springer screw things up, it could very easily flip to a situation where all of the big four are seen as net losses, and the goal becomes to abandon all of them. There are good reasons for not wanting that to happen. And to avoid it, you’re going to need to get all of Springer — not just BMC — serious about open access. Not treating it just as a marketing word, a term that by throwing around liberally you hope to appease those irritating academics; but engaging wholeheartedly with what it means.  I’m not saying that the whole of Springer needs to convert to open access overnight — I am not a sufficiently foolish idealist to suggest that! What I’m saying is that whenever Springer says it’s doing something open access, it needs to be damned sure that it really is. I don’t know whether oversights like claiming copyright on others’ work, or republishing CC BY work as CC BY-NC, seem like little things to Springer; but I have to warn you they are not. There is a substantial and influential group out there that cares deeply and passionately about such things...put resources into ensuring that similar things don’t happen. Make sure that all of Springer carefully tracks who owns copyright to what — nothing irritates a scholar more than hearing someone else claim credit for his work — and be clear and correct about what licence covers various materials. (The sim

Link:

http://svpow.com/2012/06/02/springer-has-work-to-do-to-keep-its-open-access-leadership/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.mandates oa.usa oa.frpaa oa.legislation oa.rwa oa.nih oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.plos oa.cc oa.twitter oa.bmc oa.springer oa.peerj oa.f1000research oa.access2research oa.libre oa.policies

Date tagged:

06/04/2012, 07:45

Date published:

06/04/2012, 03:45