I have been off-net for some time but yesterday read Mike Taylor’s interview (poynder.blogspot.fi/2013/07/open-access-where-are-we-what-still.html ) with Richard Poynder on #openaccess. I agree with everything Mike says and it summarises (part of) my position almost exactly. It needs augmenting/annotating and I shall do that in a few days. Read Mike’s post – here I will just extract a few key thoughts (emphasized):
Those publishers are not our partners, they’re our exploiters. We don’t need to negotiate with them; we don’t even need to fight them. We just need to walk away.
PMR: the last 2-3 years have shown this absolutely. Those with political or spending power must abandon legacy publishers.
The term “open access” was given a perfectly good definition by the Budapest Open Access Initiative back when it was first coined: “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose“. Immeasurable confusion has resulted from people proposing alternatives – either through ignorance or malice. Let’s stick with the original and best meaning of the term.
PMR: Exactly so. The problem has been that many “OA advocates” have failed to follow these. We now need a simple set of actions consequent from these principles. It’s amazing that this has not been done.
Open is so much more important than Green or Gold. [But when we come the current RCUK policy on Open Access, the specific conception of Green OA that it requires is badly degraded, to the point where it’s not really open access at all. Green articles in the RCUK sense can be encumbered by non-commercial clauses, stripping them of much of their value to the taxpayer, and can be delayed by embargoes of up to two years – a truly disgraceful state of affairs given that the old RCUK policy only allowed six months.]
PMR: Exactly. From “Open” (as in the Open Definition) everything follows. Green and Gold are effectively a meaningless hodgepodge of terms and ideas.
So, no, I am not a fan of hybrid!
PMR: Nor am I.
I think it’s only gradually dawned on me just how many different ways the traditional academic publication game was broken – not just by publishers, but by administrators consistently rewarding the wrong things, and by researchers in every field and at every career stage finding special-pleading reasons why they can’t be expected to be the ones who break free of the system.
PMR: Exactly. It’s incredible that almost no head of University has made a useful contribution to this field.
Still, there’s no question that we’re much further forward than even a short time ago, and we have a lot of momentum in mostly the right direction. …
PMR: I agree the momentum. But we are effectively leaderless and policy-less. Without those there will be little planned progress. Disjointed initiatives (the current approach) will lead to more mess before it gets better.
The best numbers I have suggest that OA is going to cost us about 9% of what we’re currently paying in subscriptions.
PMR: Yes. It is still amazing that Universities stiil adopt the policy of asking the publishers how much they want paying and then trying to chip a few present off. It’s OUR money they are pouring into publishers.
OA is cheaper, but that’s not why it matters. What counts is not that it has lower cost, but that it has higher value. The real cost in all this is the opportunity cost of not having universal open access.
PMR: The opportunity cost of the current mess probably runs into hundreds of billions. That’s the value that Universities have failed to deliver to the world.
PMR: Quite simply, Mike is the best and most coherent advocate for Open Scholarship that we have.
PMR: We now need a plan. I’ll be throwing out some thoughts in a few days