Call for open-access journals
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Five major research US universities say they want to see open-access journals made avalable.
Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley have all signed up for the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals, says Wired Campus.
People usually have to pay subscription fees to access articles in conventional journals, whereas open-access publications make their material free to the public, “thus aiding libraries forced to cut back during difficult financial times, officials at the universities believe,” says the story.
But there may be a hitch between what’s desirable and hard reality.
“We just don’t know if it’s going to be too expensive,” John M. Saylor, associate university librarian for scholarly resources and special collections at Cornell, is quoted as saying.
Adds the story:
“According to Robert B. Townsend, an assistant director at the American Historical Association, one of the problems with a commitment to open-access journals is that it does not ‘acknowledge the stark differences between journals in the sciences and other fields,’ as far as the cost of operating the journals is concerned. He says he is ’suspicious of the one-size-fits-all logic that seems implicit in this compact’.”
Wired Campus – 5 Major Research Universities Endorse Open-Access Journals, September 9, 2009
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September 16th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
PLEASE COMMIT TO PROVIDING GREEN OA BEFORE COMMITTING TO PAY FOR GOLD OA
Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/627-guid.html
Regardless of the size of the asking price (”reasonable” or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of Open Access Journal Publishing fees (Gold OA) until and unless the university or funder has first mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of its own published journal article output (regardless of whether published in OA or non-OA journals).
There are so far five signatories to the “Compact for Open-Access Equity.” Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive SCOAP3 consortium.
If Harvard’s and MIT’s example is followed, and Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold OA commitments, then there’s no harm done.
But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in the foot insofar as universal OA — so long within its reach, yet still not grasped — is concerned.
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