Publishing Reform, University Self-Publishing and Open Access

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

         ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Here is a quick summary of points of agreement and disagreement 
with the University of California (UC) view of Open Access (OA) 
and Institutional Repositories (IRs) as described by Catherine 
Candee (CC in her interview by Richard Poynder (RP) in "Changing 
the paradigm": 
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/01/changing-paradigm.html

The full text with hyperlinks to the items cited is accessible in 
my Open Access Archivangelism Blog: 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/57-guid.html

1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal, OA merely a 
means: I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform 
merely a hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow 
from OA.

(2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts 
of published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs, I think 
they are the first priority.

(3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving 
because of the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC 
faculty, assuming it was because it was "too difficult." It is 
far more likely that the low uptake was because UC did not adopt 
an institutional self-archiving mandate. Those institutions that 
have done so have dramatically higher self-archiving rates.

(4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service 
that, being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of 
resources on following up rights problems for each published 
paper; the result so far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still 
not self-archiving more than the c. 15% worldwide self-archiving 
baseline for postprints.

(5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint 
archiving is because of its publishing reform goals, including 
university self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think 
monographs are (for the time being) a separate matter, and should 
be handled separately from journal article OA, and that peer 
review needs to be implemented by a neutral 3rd party, not the 
author or the author's institution. The immediate priority is 
postprint OA.

In summary, UC seems to be giving its own hypothetical 
conjectures on the future of scholarly publishing -- and its own 
aspirations for the hypothetical new publishing system -- 
priority over an immediate, pressing, and remediable practical 
problem: the needless, daily loss of 25% - 250% or more of the 
usage and impact of 85% of UC research output. Because 
researchers are relatively uninformed and uninvolved in all this, 
they do not have a clear sense of the implicit trade-off between 
(a) the actual daily, cumulative usage/impact loss for their own 
research output, with its tested and demonstrated remedy, and (b) 
the untested hypothetical possibilities with which the some in 
the UC library community (and elsewhere) seem to be preoccupied.

The full text with hyperlinks to the items cited is accessible in 
my Open Access Archivangelism Blog: 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/57-guid.html

Stevan Harnad