[LINK] more about open info access ...

[Roger Clarke]

At 10:22 +0930 1/4/09, Anthony Hornby wrote:
>>>... OA, ePrints and repositories movements has not, or at least not
>>>yet, resulted in success in practice. This is because only a small
>>>proportion of papers are actually
>>>self-deposited ...
>
>This is the case where deposit is not mandated. My understanding is
>that where deposit is mandated eg NIH and other examples there are
>high levels of deposit. The problem is not enough mandates from
>funding bodies / governments and research institutions.

The relevant parts of the paper are here:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OAJC-0904.html#MP-V

I haven't seen any studies of the proportion of articles 
self-deposited - or submitted by journals - where a mandate is in 
place.  It's to be expected it will be better than the 12-15% 
achieved without mandates;  but I'm not convinced it will achieve 
"high levels".  (Until and unless, as you point out later, submission 
comes to be built into the workflows).


>  ... Still the message here is a lot of
>researchers are not strongly motivated to publish Open Access - this
>is changing through mandates etc but the current regime largely
>rewards those that stay within the current system (though this varies
>to some extent by discipline).

Yes, Danny's PhD research found that (and put flesh on the skeleton).


>  ... It is also the case that most
>publishers couldn't care less about consistent interfaces for
>harvesting data/metadata to their published research platforms (they
>want you to buy it and lock you in via their interfaces / branding /
>advertising). Without a powerful motivator for the existing players to
>change (or a way to make them irrelevant) how will we ever get to a
>situation where all the research outputs (and just as importantly
>research datasets) are made available via open and well understood
>mechanisms and able to harvested, analysed and brought to researchers
>automatically via smart web tools.

Yep, that's consistent with Danny's findings, and the draft in the 
latest paper I've just finished with her.


>I don't think the majority of librarians could care less about the
>actual platform as long as the majority of research outputs and data
>sets out there able to be found, mined, interconnected and analysed
>and get out of the flawed model we are currently locked into.

Agreed - librarians aren't inherently socialists or anti-profit; 
their motivation is accessibility - free as in air, not necessarily 
beer.  (Though some of them must be seriously cheesed off by 
super-profits).


>No argument there, but this is not the case for the vast majority of
>research publishing right now, and what is the motivator for that
>status quo to change. We are dealing with a guild mentality in most
>research publishing and there needs to be a fundamental shift to get
>us out of this mess.   ...

Actually, I'm an arguer for the merits of guilds.  It's no longer all 
that painful to run a journal on the smell of an oil-rag, and a great 
many specialist journals have been launched as eJournals, or 
converted from print-only, maybe via print-and-electronic, to cheaper 
e-only.

(No, I don't think Science, Nature or the New England J. of Med. are 
about to revert from their corporatised structure back to guilds).

(And the paper draws attention to the risk that guilds sometimes run 
out of steam, and for-profits may get to vaccum lots of them up at a 
later stage).


>  ... Research is very big
>business with entrenched interests that mostly don't want a richly
>connected corpus of research out there for all (unless they own it all
>and you are buying it from them).  ...

Very much agreed, *but* a small-but-significant refinement to your 
expression:  '**Publication of** research is very big business ...".

The research isn't done by business or the fat-cat academies, and 
neither is the substantive QA / reviewing.  They do the 
presentation-QA (pretty-printing), and the marketing, and the 
increasingly easy and cheap publishing, and take the profits.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
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mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW