Australians weigh in on Open Access publication proposal in UK « FrogHeart

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-25

Summary:

“Misguided is the word used in the June 20, 2012 editorial for The Conversation by Jason Norrie to describe the UK proposal to adopt ‘open access’ publishing ... ‘The cost of doing so would range from £50 to £60 million a year, according to an independent study commissioned by the government. Professor Dame Janet Finch, who led the study, said that ‘in the longer term, the future lies with open access publishing.’ Her report says that ‘the principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.’ Norrie’s June 20,2012  editorial can also be found on The Conversation website where he includes responses from academics to the proposal,‘Emeritus Professor Colin Steele, former librarian of the Australian National University, said that although report was supportive of the principles of open access, it proposed a strategy that was unnecessarily costly and could not be duplicated in Australia. ‘The way they’ve gone about it almost totally focuses, presumably due to publisher pressure, on the gold model of open access,’ he said. ‘As a result of that, the amount of money needed to carry out the transition – the money needed for article processing charges – is very large. It’s not surprising that the publishers have come out in favour of the report, because it will guarantee they retain their profits. It certainly wouldn’t work in Australia because there simply isn’t that amount of research council funding available...’ ‘Stevan Harnad, a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal, said the report had scrubbed the green model from the UK policy agenda and replaced it with a “vague, slow evolution toward gold open access publishing, at the publishers’ pace and price. The result would be very little open access, very slowly, and at a high price … taken out of already scarce UK research funds, instead of the rapid and cost-free open access growth vouchsafed by green open access mandates from funders and universities.’ While money is one of the most discussed issues surrounding the ‘open access publication’ discussion, I am beginning to wonder why there isn’t more mention of the individual career-building, institution science reputation-building and national science reputation-building that the current publication model helps make possible...”

Link:

http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=7115

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.policies oa.comment oa.government oa.green oa.libraries oa.australia oa.uk oa.impact oa.costs oa.prestige oa.librarians oa.fees oa.recommendations oa.canada oa.finch_report oa.repositories oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/25/2012, 15:26

Date published:

06/25/2012, 16:02