[LINK] Open Access Publishing in Asia and the Pacific

[Tom Worthington]

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Mr 
Peter Booth Wiley, Chairman of the Board, John Wiley & Sons, is speaking 
on "Open-access and scholarly publishing in the 21st century": 
http://publicpolicy.anu.edu.au/events/content/more.php?id=7401

This is to mark the launch of the new open access publication "Asia and 
the Pacific Policy Studies" by Wiley and the ANU, during the conference 
"Positioning policy research in Asia and the Pacific Asia and the 
Pacific Policy Society's Inaugural Conference": 
http://asiaandthepacificpolicystudies.crawford.anu.edu.au/conference/

Mr Wiley provided a definition of open access, as befits a scholarly 
talk. He challenged Stewart Brand (publisher of the Whole Earth 
Catalogue and merry prankster) assertion that information wants to be 
free. He emphasized that no research written work is "free", in that 
someone has to pay for it to be researched. Where this research is 
undertaken at public expense, there is the impetus for this work to be 
made available to the public.

Mr Wiley described his role as an author, researcher and publisher, 
concerned the stewardship of the information needing to be maintained. 
He is concerned that ill-considered approaches to open access may be 
harmful to the public. He gave the example of a doctor or engineer 
reviewing research literature and the danger of that information being 
incorrect. However, I would differ with Mr Wiley on this point as first 
of all, it is not clear if publishers make scholarly information more 
accurate and even volunteer written material, such as Wikipedia has been 
shown to be more accurate than commercially published material (such as 
commercial encyclopedias).

Mr Wiley raised the issue of the cost of content for libraries. He also 
mentioned Open Education Resources (OER), which is the educational 
equivalent of open access publishing. Also he mentioned Open Access 
Certification (OAC) of professional skills, a term I was not previously 
familiar with.

Mr Wiley then criticized PDF as a publishing format, singling out the US 
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) for criticism for publishing 
in this format. He did acknowledge the great efforts made to get 
documents from paper to the on-line world, but went on to describe the 
dynamic content now possible.

While I agree PDF is limited, the difficulties of standardized dynamic 
content are large. Before PDF and HTML, publishers produced e-books in 
proprietary formats which depended on specific versions of operating 
systems. These e-book became unreadable within a few years of 
publication. Current experiments with e-books run the same risk. Also 
the dynamic content can cost an order of magnitude more to create than a 
conventional text based book. Mr Wiley described the production of 
dynamic e-books as being like making a film. This is a good analogy, 
with film making being much more expensive than typesetting a book. In 
addition readers still need a conventional linear, static, book-like 
path through the dynamic work, as a default option.

Mr Wiley said that the "gold road" would change the funding model from 
the library paying the publisher to the author paying the publisher 
(with research article publishing cost being covered by research 
grants). A green road would have the government mandating that 
government funded research resultants be published open access (I signed 
a submission to the Australian Research Council, to this effect). A 
hybrid model would combine elements of the gold and green models. An 
approach which Mr Wiley did not mention, was advertising supported 
publishing.

Mr Wiley asked how to manage commercialization in an open access 
environment. He cautioned that Australia might provide publican openly 
and China would not reciprocate. This did not seem to me to be a risk, 
as there would be sufficient befits to Australia for open access, even 
without reciprocation.

What Mr Wiley did not address in his speech is what commercial 
publishers offer to on-line scholarly publishing. Academics write the 
papers and now typeset them themselves. Other academics review the 
papers and then approve their publication using free open source 
software. University librarians handle the dissemination of the papers. 
It is not clear what commercial publishers offer in this process.

More at: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/09/open-access-publishing-in-asia-and.html

-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/