Research -- The tipping point? Half of all research results available publicly a year after publication is paralysis, not progress

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-09-14

Summary:

"On 21 August, the European Commission announced that the battle to achieve open, public access to publicly funded research results was close to being won. Open access had reached a “tipping point”, it explained, as half of the research published worldwide in 2011 was now available for free. A tipping point, as users of seesaws will testify, is the point of no return, from which all remaining movement can only go one way. The Commission took its careless language from a report on the state of play in open access, commissioned from Montreal-based consultancy Science-Metrix. But the report does not explain why the 50 per cent marker is a tipping point; indeed, its data suggest it is anything but. The fight for open access, as we already knew, will be dirty and prolonged—and there is no sign whatsoever that it has been won. The report finds exponential growth (from a very low base) in gold open access—which some would call real open access—defined as publication in freely available journals such as PLOS Biology. But most of the 50 per cent comes from green open access, whereby the results appear in free repositories, usually after publication in subscription-only journals. This embargo system emerged in 2005 after it became clear that Congress in the United States wouldn’t let the world’s largest research agency, the US National Institutes of Health, face down private and academic publishers. It means that publicly funded results are graciously returned to the public domain after 12 months, when most of their value has expired. This enables the scientific publishing industry to operate just as before, frustrating both the general public and the researchers who pioneered the open-access movement. The growth of gold also needs to be qualified. The report identifies a 'citation disadvantage' to gold publication (except in physics and astronomy, the only fields in which open access has exerted a firm grip). That could spell trouble for gold journals—some of which are new and low in quality, and could be described as vanity publishing. Commercial scientific publishing continues to expand, meanwhile, aided by the Commission’s talk of a tipping point from which, presumably, publishers, government, researchers and public will march together, on to victory. This declare-victory-and-go-home approach is not unfamiliar to seasoned Commission-watchers; it echoes, for example, the plan to ‘complete’ the European Research Area in 2014. But it just won’t do ..."

Link:

http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?articleId=1338072&option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.comment oa.green oa.reports oa.funders oa.embargoes oa.citations oa.science-metrix oa.europe oa.repositories oa.journals

Date tagged:

09/14/2013, 07:59

Date published:

09/14/2013, 03:59