interesting angles here.

I agree it's very hard on people who want to gain access to online
journals and who aren't members of universities etc. Also, many
universities can't afford to subscribe to e-journals (as they couldn't
to paper ones) so academics too can lose out. I'm not sure if there's
an answer to this - some sort of comprehensive pay-per-download
service?? Is this problem generally recognised at all?

Bruce gave a full review of some arguments, but the major one, accepted
by a Commons Select Cttee and insisted on by the Wellcome Trust, a
major grant provider, is that the research that provides the papers is
done at public expense for public benefit - why should publishers
charge the research communities to use it and hence make large profits?
(I attended an excessively slow University of London meeting where to
my surprise the publisher representative was not in fact very negative)

Papers would continue to be peer reviewed (if useful!) - what is
envisaged is that research grants would include the cost of publishing
the output in a repository run by universities. A London consortium:
http://www.sherpa-leap.ac.uk/ .

  But to return to the starting point, publishers seem to be finding
these disruptive technologies an advantage as far as one can see.

all best
suzanne

On 3 Feb 2006, at 12:32, Bruce Royan wrote:

> On Thursday 2 February, Suzanne Keene said:
>
> "I am delighted with the way that the academic research 'industry' has
> been
> disrupted - nearly all journals online now. The next interesting step
> is for
> universities to publish academic articles online, bypassing expensive
> publishers, which is already on the way."
>
> Hmm... not quite, Suzanne, and indeed it's that sort of shorthand
> that's
> giving the publishing lobby ammunition to try to stop the Open Access
> movement. Among researchers, only a few crackpots really believe that
> the
> new paradigm for scholarly communication will be to "publish academic
> articles online, bypassing expensive publishers": articles
> self-published on
> the web without peer review are potentially, to paraphrase Sam
> Goldwyn, "not
> worth the paper they're written on".
>
> What is "already on the way", is that more and more universities and
> research institutions (1) are archiving copies of their researchers'
> peer-reviewed, published articles onto online Institutional
> Repositories, so
> that they can be accessed for free. This is done with the agreement of
> an
> increasing number of publishers (2), who are beginning to realise that
> it
> won't harm their journal sales, and is inevitable anyway if the
> Research
> Councils hold their nerve and make it a condition of funding (3).
>
> I've rehearsed the arguments a few times before in different fora, but
> for
> those MCG folk interested, it goes like this:
>
> - Publicly funded researchers in the UK, publish their
> findings so
> that other reseachers, anywhere in the world, can access them,
> challenge
> them and use them as the basis of further research. This process of
> "scholarly communication" reduces duplicated effort, ensures quality,
> and
> increases the productivity of research and development.
>
> - Traditionally, research is published in peer-reviewed
> journals.
> About 2,500,000 articles per year, in some 24,000 journals.
>
> - The authors of these articles don't expect royalties or fees
> for
> them:
> their reward is in recognition of their research ("visibility" or
> "impact").
>
> - Traditionally, publishers of these journals have covered the
> peer-review and other production costs by charging subscriptions for
> the
> paper journal issues. Universities and research institutions bought
> subscriptions (often with public money) so that their own researchers
> could
> access and use the peer-reviewed research output of others. This
> approach
> has come to be described as "toll-access".
>
> -But even the richest institution has only ever been able to
> afford
> a fraction of the 24,000 journals published, and this is rapidly
> reducing as
> the price of journals continues to outstrip inflation. The majority of
> potential users of any research article are denied access, and much of
> its
> research impact is lost.
>
> -The rise of Web technology, by radically reducing the basic
> technical costs of access to information, has highlighted the prospect
> of a
> new paradigm in scholarly communication, where access to research
> results
> would be made freely available to any interested researcher. This would
> maximise the impact of any piece of research, and thus the
> productivity of
> the whole research process. This approach is known as "open-access".
>
> -A new type of publication has arisen which uses this approach.
> Open-access journals are freely available to users, as they recover
> their
> peer-review and other production costs from the institutions whose
> researchers contribute the research articles themselves. This approach
> is
> strongly to be encouraged, but currently accounts for only about 8% of
> total
> research output (4).
>
> -The remaining 92% continues to be published in "toll-access"
> journals.
> However, an increasing number of research organisations worldwide are
> setting up "open-access" websites on which their researchers can
> "self-archive" full copies of the articles that have been contributed
> to
> "toll-access" journals, so that their research results can be widely
> available and achieve the greatest possible impact.
>
> -There are issues to be resolved by the community as to how to
> ensure that the archived article is identical to the journal article,
> and
> which of them should be treated as the "article of record" if there are
> differences between them. Furthermore, there may well be future
> "primacy"
> disputes between rival scientists as to who should be credited with
> publishing a finding first, when one article is in print, and the other
> online. But these potential difficulties should not obscure the clear
> impact
> advantages of author self-archiving of journal articles.
>
> -93% percent of journals already officially support this author
> self-archiving (2). Many of the remaining 7% will agree if asked. For
> the
> rest, authors will have to continue the age-old practice of sending out
> reprints on request.
>
> -Although a substantial proportion of the publishing community
> may
> be expected to lobby in favour of the status quo insofar as their
> cost-recovery model is concerned, there is little evidence that
> "open-access" archiving damages sales of "toll-access" journals: it
> simply
> increases the readership of research, far beyond the institutions that
> can
> afford to buy subscriptions. Extension to all research institutions
> and the
> contents of all journals would lead to more efficient use of public
> money in
> both research grants and university library budgets, and incidentally
> do a
> great deal to bridge the divide between the information-rich countries
> and
> the developing world.
>
> -Open access could also help bridge the divide between the
> scientific community and the general public in the UK. The interested
> lay
> person has until now been inhibited in following the latest research
> developments, by lack of access to the primary research literature.
> The web
> has revolutionised the way information can be accessed: 64% of British
> adults are already internet users (5), and the People's Network has
> made
> internet access and advice on the retrieval and evaluation of online
> information available to every citizen from their local public
> library. Yet
> unless and until that citizen can access the full text of the
> definitive,
> peer-reviewed, published research findings, they are in danger of
> having to
> rely on secondary internet sources which may be inaccurate or
> misleading or
> even deliberately designed to undermine the scientific communication
> process.
>
> 1
> http://archives.eprints.org/?
> action=home&country=uk&version=&type=&order=nam
> e&submit=Filter
> 2 http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
> 3 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp
> 4 http://www.doaj.org/articles/060113
> 5
> http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?
> ID=8&Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=374
>
> ******************************************
> Prof Bruce Royan www.concurrentcomputing.co.uk
> 41 Greenhill Gardens, Edinburgh, EH10 4BL, UK
> +44 131 4473151 +44 77 1374 4731
> ******************************************
>
>
> **************************************************
> For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit
> the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk
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>

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