#openaccess TOWIG (The Only Way Is Greold) -- or are there others? Some Suggestions

“... A recent post (http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-access/2012-July/000766.html ) to the OKFN open-access list [0] by Katie Foxall of ecancer.org. Katie runs a discipline/community-based journal which is toll-free and APC-free (in simple language anyone can read it for free and authors don’t have to pay charges). She writes: ‘I haven’t posted before but have been following the discussions [on OKFN open-access] with much interest... I run an open access cancer journal http://ecancer.org/ecms which has no author fees – we are currently mainly supported by charity funding but the journal has been growing at a great rate this year so I’m looking into accessing any funding that might be out there to support open access publishing. The reality is that we will have to start charging author fees at some point if we can’t get more funding and we really don’t want to do that as providing a free service for the oncology community is very important to us. So does anyone know whether there is anything like SCOAP3... in the field of medical publishing?’ To many of us this sounds entirely natural and desirable ... a community-to-community process rather than the anonymous capitalist scholarly presses. So for me, part of the issue is whether #openaccess can solve Katie’s problem. If we go to the traditional approaches ‘Green and Gold’) there are many words and some – but limited – progress. The publication of the Finch report and the RCUK policy on Open Access have engendered a huge amount of ‘debate’ in the open access fora (such as the GOAL open access list http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-July/thread.html ) and more recently and possibly more digestibly on Google+ http://t.co/h6p1Lb6F. Unfortunately much of this is politico-religious and revolves round ‘The Only Way Is Green’ and oh-no-it-isn’t ‘The Only Way is Gold’... So my starting point is that Green and Gold ... have serious flaws and are not a solution to Katie’s problem. Why do I say that? ... The problem is that they are C19/20 solutions in the C21. They glorify the ‘article’. They are based on a very university-centric – and often arrogant – approach. They have very little scope for C21 (‘Web 2/3.0’). There is no feeling of community if you publish a Gold article. There is no feeling of community in self-archiving a Green article. It’s a chore. They are often predicated more on glory-for-the-authors than communicating to the electronic world. The end result is an “impact factor” not a community of practice. Contrast this with Open Street Map. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ . This creates top-quality up-to-date maps for the whole world – in many cases better than the existing commercial products. And for many years (and maybe still true) it didn’t even have a bank account. It has 250,000+ supporters who love doing it. The simple message – if you create a world community (not just an ivory-tower one) you can change the world. Wikipedia has also done that. For that reason many academics hate and denounce it... So can this translate to community journals without Gre-old? I think we can and I think we should try. To start I highly recommend reading http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ – which gives a factual, readable, account of how a journal can be run with virtually no cash. So to Katie my suggestions would be: [1] Resist rushing into conventional solutions. You sell your soul if you involve a commercial publisher (look at all the “Society” publishers who are now controlled by for-profit publishers). [2] Look to collaborate with others. There is no reason why JMLR and ecancer shouldn’t share infrastructure development, for example. [3] Be open (as you have been) and ask for help and advice... So reader, if you have a bright idea for how new methods in #scholpub can be developed bring them forward...”