On 23/05/07, Phil Davis <pmd8 cornell.edu> wrote:
> The economic analysis of subscription versus
author-pays model
> was first calculated for the Cornell University
Library, and
> then generalized for 113 Association of Research
Libraries.
> The second link provides a spreadsheet where basic
assumptions
> for the calculations can be modified. There was
considerable
> debate on liblicense when these reports came out. To
avoid
> redundancy on this list, readers are directed to view
those
> posts.
>
> http://hdl.handle.net/
1813/193 [Cornell Library Report, p.26]
>
> http://hdl.handle.net/
1813/236 [ARL calculation spreadsheet]
Clearly there are two aspects here: one is funding and
another is
the author's self-interest in promoting his/her research
i.e.
through citation impact. I support open access because of
its
broad goals of providing toll-free access to a large number
of
audience very righteously. But my points of contention are
not
the goal, but the ways of achieving it. The way open access
model
is designed and being practiced is not very convincing for
me.
For instance, I have gone through report Phil Davis cited on
open
access implementation in Cornell and various other research
findings. The author's motivation for submitting preprint in
IR
is very little - one can not at least at the initial stage
predict and hope for the possible citation impact. Or, for
that
matter, authors in most cases, would give citation impact of
the
journal article a low priority, the greater priority is to
disseminate research findings to fellow colleagues who are
doing
similar research in home or abroad. But in many cases, this
is
being done through informal communities of practice and
close-group research scientists often share internally their
research articles - preprint, post-print, all versions. IR
and
open archive may not be very helpful or unhelpful in that
practice.
The question is - are the open archive and IRs best ways to
promoting access to the research findings. Researchers and
librarians find particular research articles using a wide
variety
of tools, most important among those are indexes and
abstracts,
not the google. Now, a typical open access or closed-access
journal will have multiple authors and those authors will
publish
their preprints (and in some cases post-prints) in a wide
variety
of IRs and open archives, located and indexed in their own
institutional repositories.
The problem obviously does not arise in the case purely open
access journals, wherein all the articles are kept in the OA
journals site itself and there is no need for the users to
locate
the pre-print version of the journal articles.
But in the case of journal with open access mandate that
allow
authors to submit their preprints or post-prints in their
IRs, we
can not guarantee that the article will be submitted in IRs.
This
proposition is not hypothetical either - consider these
optional
open access journals being published by Oxford Journals -
http://www
.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/. I am wondering if
anybody of us could locate the pre/post-print versions of
the
articles published here in the IRs of the authors. I could
not do
this.
That means, from a purely methodological point of view, it
is not
the appropriate way for the institutions to maintain their
IRs
and mandating the authors to deposit their pre/post-print
copies.
This may or may not happen. But we are here talking about a
notion of guaranteed access to the most important articles
by a
researcher on the web. If there is no guarantee that a
researcher
would not be able to access at least a pre-print copy of the
research article, then the very purpose of the OA is
defeated.
The researchers then obviously has to rely on the
subscription
based databases, which in the midst of urgent need can
supply the
required article.
This does not do justice to
1. business model (be it author-payee or subscription
based)
2. access and citation impact.
For the purpose of taking advantages of both these
objectives,
there are two options - either a journal would be fully open
access, meaning all costs and processes would be managed by
the
journal publisher or it has to be closed access. The
apparent
solution to find the relevant article might be to give the
link
to the IRs from the open access mandated journal articles,
but if
publishers agree to do that, there is no point in making it
a
subscription-based model. And if journal publishers are
agreed to
give the links to IR deposits, there is no need to maintain
a
separate IRs by the institutions themselves, as publishers
will
not see any business in making the final version available
for
sale.
-- Atanu Garai Globethics.net
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