[LINK] more about open info access - MIT takes the pledge

Anthony Hornby anthony.w.hornby at gmail.com
Tue Mar 31 13:02:27 AEDT 2009


A welcome move, and a prestigious one, but one of many not the only
thing happening in this space. There are 72 "mandates" of various
degrees now. ROARMAP keeps stats on mandates
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. Up from 53 in
November last year & growing all the time.

In Australia, I really want the ARC and NHMRC and other major research
funding bodies in Australia to move from "encourage" to "must" deposit
research findings in an open access repository for research they fund
(as the first step to having data sets available as well). Governments
and major funding bodies can really accelerate this process if they
can show a little fortitude and willpower.

If this happened I think much of the campus politics would go away
("don't do it = no more money" is a powerful motivator) and all
universities in Australia will mandate deposit far more quickly. Note
mandatory deposit doesn't necessarily equal Open Access to the full
text / data as there are legitimate reasons why an author might need
to restrict access from the general public (cultural reasons, patient
confidentiality, national security, commercial in confidence material
etc). It also doesn't mean an anti-commercial publication stance,
these can co-exist quite happily with the right licenses.

And on the point of publisher licenses, universities need to help
researchers negotiate agreeable publication rights that don't involve
a blanket handover of their copyright in the work. Author addendum's
are a good simple way to achieve this - tack an addendum onto the end
of the publishers contract stating they get an exclusive commercial
publishing deal with specific rights for a defined period of time, the
university gets deposit in the repository and the right to make it
available Open Access online as long as it is not embargoed by the
author for some legitimate reason, and the author keeps their
copyright + statements that say that wherever the addendum and the
contract clash, the addendum wins.

If we don't move to directly assist researchers then we are placing
additional administrative burden on them (that they largely don't care
about - researchers just want to do research) with little pay off in
their eyes. We change what used to be a five minute task from them
requiring little effort (essentially sign anything the publisher puts
in front of them) to a task requiring analysis and negotiation. At
least until the culture and dynamics change universities need to
provide direct support for researchers to successfully undertake this
activity (that is what I am recommending at my institution). Over time
the burden will reduce as we track the "friendly" publishers and
recommend university researchers target those journals + we keep
chipping away at the "unfriendly" ones.

Another thing to mention is that there are more Open Access friendly
publishers than you might think. Sherpa/Romeo
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ and OAK List
http://www.oaklist.qut.edu.au/ keep track of publisher policies.

Regards Anthony

2009/3/30 Jan Whitaker <jwhit at janwhitaker.com>:
> Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If there
> were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a
> power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should
> put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require
> that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over
> to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers
> funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to
> freely distribute their works one year after publication (several
> foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers
> started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are
> reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly
> redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to
> make any publications they produce open access."
>
> http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/26/1530226&from=rss
>
>
>
> Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
> jwhit at janwhitaker.com
> blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
> business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
>
> Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or
> sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
> ~Madeline L'Engle, writer
>
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