[GOAL] Re: Reaching for the Reachable

Use the link to access the complete discussion thread from the Global Open Access List (GOAL). GOAL is “dedicated to the discussion of Open Access practice and policy-making by the worldwide research community (in no order: researchers, universities, research institutions, research funding agencies, governmental research policy-makers and commercial entities) with the aim of enabling concrete, practical steps to be taken to achieve Open Access. Chief among these goals are techniques for increasing the amount of Open Access, as well as metrics of research usage and impact.” The current thread, Reaching for the Reachable began with the following post from Peter Murray-Rust and response from Stevan Harnad: “Fairy Tale: The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days (obviously somewhere nice). They bring along a few techies (I'd go). They agree that they will create copies of all the papers their faculty have published. (this is trivial as they are already collecting them for REF, etc. And if they can't , then I can provide software). They reformat them to non-PDF. They put them up on their university website. They prepare to fight the challenge from the publishers and they win the law suit. Because it's inconceivable that a judge (except in Texas) will find for the publishers. Other universities will take the model and do it. Rather than asking universities, unrealistically, to risk a lawsuit, needlessly (even though I agree completely with PM-R that it would be lost), as in PM-R's [Peter Murray-Rust] ‘fairy tail,’ why not, realistically, do almost the same thing: The top 20 vice-chancellors (provosts, heads of institutions) in the world meet for 2 days. They agree that they will mandate that copies of all the papers their faculty are deposited in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. They adopt the optimal mandate: ID/OA, together with the email-eprint-request ‘Almost-OA’ Button for embargoed deposits. Other universities will take the model and do it. This is called Green Gratis OA self-archiving. No one is proposing to ‘forfeit’ either Gold OA or Libre OA (re-use rights), just to accord priority to the more important and urgent, and also easier and more reachable goal of mandating Green Gratis OA first, because it is within reach and already underway. The Libre OA and Gold OA will follow the universal mandating of Green Gratis OA as surely as the publishers' lawsuit would lose if PM-R's fairy tale came true. But next to nothing at all will happen if we keep on failing to reach first for the reachable, and keep insisting instead on the unreachable.”