On 5-Oct-09, at 4:49 AM, Talat Chaudhri wrote:
> This attitude is also reported quite widely in Britain, certainly in
> my experience as an ex repository manager. I believe that Stevan
> Harnad in particular considers this to be wrong-headed, from his
> earlier posts on this subject, but we may wish to bear in mind that
> repositories are a service for academics and need to take account of
> their views.
Academics' views can only be taken into account if their views are
known. If one asks them a question without providing the realistic
contingencies, one is not addressing their practical views or needs
but just their hypothetical fantasies.
The status quo is that academics want access to peer-reviewed articles
to which they lack subscription access, and most publishers do not
allow authors to provide free online access to the publisher's PDF --
only to the author's own final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft.
Hence hypothetical preferences for PDF are irrelevant. The question
that needs to be asked of academics today is whether they would rather
have (and provide) access to peer-reviewed final drafts or no access
at all (in the absence of subscription access to the PDF).
> Nonetheless, there seem to be two main counter arguments:
>
> 1) having the content free to access, even if not in the publisher's
> format, is better than not having it (especially for the many that
> cannot afford journal subscriptions, notably but increasingly not
> limited to the developing world)
That is correct.
> 2) the insistence on the canonical publisher's PDF is created out of
> a culture in which publishers possess a kind of magic wand that
> gives the aura of academic acceptablity, when in fact that
> acceptability should properly derive from peer review, not from the
> page setting and other publisher services.
This is a red herring. It is the author's final *peer-reviewed* draft
that we are talking about.
> Thus, we idealists can happily point out (as I suspect Stevan would)
> that there is always a means to cite by section, paragraph etc
This changes the topic from the fundamental OA problem of access-
denial itself, to the far more minor problem of how to cite page-spans
when quoting from an author's postprint that lacks the published PDF's
page numbers. (As noted, there is a simple solution, even there.)
> and that the academic herself/himself could, if they were so minded,
> contribute to a culture where they themselves set what is the
> canonical version. Perhaps we may feel that this ideal is something
> worth pursuing. We may remember that the earliest academics had full
> control over the dissemination of their papers, and publishers
> originally came to exist as a service to make that task easier.
> That, of course, was in a world where there were very few academics,
> so our view of this ideal must be tempered by the knowledge that
> contemporary systems must always scale up to a world in which there
> are many times more academics.
This is all worthy, but pie-in-the-sky, again. We were talking about
what academics need and want (and lack) today, and what can be done,
practically, to remedy that immediate need today. The only culture-
change required for that is Green OA self-archiving mandates. The rest
of the cultural change, far less urgent, can be allowed to take its
own natural course once the immediate, urgent problem -- the
fundamental problem that OA was conceived in order to solve -- is
solved.
> In reality, it seems that academics are like most other people in
> wanting, for the most part, to work within the methods usually
> practised within their profession, rather than to radically change
> them.
The real practical issue at hand is not about radical changes, but
just about a few keystrokes by authors to deposit their final drafts
in their IRs.
It is the bigger cultural scenarios that are talking about "radical"
changes -- worthy and welcome, no doubt, but not within immediate
reach, as the self-archiving of author postprints is. Yet it is the
latter that will solve academics immediate access/impact problems --
and hence the OA problem, today. The rest is superfluous notional over-
reaching at the expense of the immediately reachable, practical goal.
> If they feel that other academics will not take the non-publisher
> PDF seriously (and they are in a good position to judge this),
If they have been given to feel that the question is whether academics
will "take non-publisher PDF seriously" then not only have they been
asked the wrong question, but the objective evidence on which the
correct reply to even that irrelevant question depends is already
known, and academics who do not know that objective evidence are
indeed in no position to answer: Authors' final refereed drafts are
being deposited, downloaded, accessed and used all over the web, for
years now, in all disciplines. (What is cited, once it has appeared,
is of course always the canonical publication itself; the
bibliographic information is freely accessible to all; it is only the
content itself that needs to have the parallel access route -- n.b.
not a "parallel journal" -- for all access-denied nonsubscribers.)
(The fact that the proportion of scholarship's total annual article
output of 2.5 million articles that is thus being made OA is still
only 15% today is the reason OA needs to be accelerated by mandates --
and not retarded by PDF tomfoolery. It is certainly not evidence that
"academics will not take the non-publisher PDF seriously." The
relevant academic to keep in mind there is the access-denied
nonsubscriber, not the author or user fantasizing about the ideal
formats for journal articles accessible to all.)
> then we must employ advocacy but expect that it may well take a
> while to alter the views of the majority. After all, their primary
> interest is naturally in furthering their research, not necessarily
> in solving the world's ills. What is perhaps most frustrating is
> that the fear that others will judge a non-publisher's PDF less
> favourably is ultimately self-fulfilling, which may be the reason
> that it is difficult to break the circle and convince academics that
> it need not necessarily be so.
You are quite right that advocacy is needed. But the needed advocacy
is for Green OA self-archiving mandates, not image-management for non-
PDF!
There are many groundless reasons (at least 34 on last count http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32-worries
) why not enough authors are depositing yet -- and not enough
institutions/funders are mandating deposit of -- OA's target content
(refereed research). "Version control" -- http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#23.Version
-- is one of the least of them. Once that's the sole obstacle left,
we will already have long reached 100% OA...
> I accept the point made in the previous post that the situation may
> vary between different countries, although in this case he describes
> attitudes that are familiar to me. In practice, the demands of
> offering a service probably mean we have to balance these opposing
> views and seek to hold whatever content upon the basis of which we
> can offer a useful service to the academics whom systems like
> repositories are supposed to serve, however idealistic or otherwise
> a view we may take as individual commentators.
There is no variation -- by country or by discipline -- in the
fundamental fact that in order to use peer-reviewed scholarly and
scientific research findings, scholars and scientists need to access
them. OA is about ensuring, at long last, that those peer-reviewed
findings are accessible to all users and not just to those whose
institutions can afford to subscribe to the publisher's PDF.
Put the contingencies clearly to any scholar or scientist, in any
country or discipline, and you will get the same answer: If it's a
question of non-PDF access vs. access-denial, give me non-PDF access
any day (preferably today!)...
Stevan Harnad
> Talat
>
> Kuil, van der Annemiek wrote:
>> Apparantly there are differences between countries (although
>> acadamia goes beyond borders) and therefore it is difficult to
>> generalise and say that ....
>> (4) The difference between the publisher's PDF and the author's
>> self-archived final refereed, revised draft are completely trivial.
>> This is not something a researcher would worry about. Researchers
>> are worried about access denial, not PDF.
>> ... this is certainly not the case in the Netherlands. What I hear
>> from people in the field (and among them are important
>> decsionmakers) is that a large group of researchers does not want
>> to bother with different versions. There is only one version they
>> are concerned with, and that is the publisher's PDF.
>> Met vriendelijke groet,
>> Annemiek
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]
>> ] *On Behalf Of *leo waaijers
>> *Sent:* vrijdag 2 oktober 2009 19:24
>> *To:* [log in to unmask]
>> *Subject:* Re: Parallel journals
>>
>> Sorry that I did have an idea of my own.
>>
>> Stevan Harnad wrote:
>>> (1) We don't need "parallel journals": we just need parallel
>>> ACCESS to the articles in the journals that already exist.
>>>
>>> (2) That's what green OA self-archiving of the author's final
>>> refereed, revised draft provides.
>>>
>>> (3) Green OA does not provide "parallel articles" either. It just
>>> provides parallel access to the same journals.
>>>
>>> (4) The difference between the publisher's PDF and the author's
>>> self-archived final refereed, revised draft are completely
>>> trivial. This is not something a researcher would worry about.
>>> Researchers are worried about access denial, not PDF.
>>>
>>> (5) A journal issue is just a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated
>>> articles; no need to "reconstruct" that; open access to all the
>>> articles plus good boolean search power is all that's needed.
>>>
>>> (6) The PostGutenberg journal is just a peer-review service
>>> provider, for quality assurance, plus a tag (the journal name)
>>> certifying the outcome as having met the quality standards for
>>> which the journal has an established track record.
>>>
>>> (7) The rest is just the journal-tagged, peer-reviewed file,
>>> sitting safely in the author's institutional repository (suitably
>>> backed up, mirrored, preserved, etc.), plus central harvesters
>>> providing powerful search capability across the entire distributed
>>> corpus.
>>>
>>> (8) Gutenberg print editions, and even para-Gutenberg publisher-
>>> PDFs will only last as long as there is still a user demand for
>>> them; with 100% Green OA, I promise you that that demand will not
>>> be coming from researchers, nor from students...
>>>
>>> Stevan Harnad
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2-Oct-09, at 12:50 PM, J.W.T.Smith wrote:
>>>
>>>> Leo,
>>>> You can approximate this by using Google Scholar Advanced Search.
>>>> Search for a specific journal title and limit to a time period.
>>>>
>>>> The result of a search for articles in “Journal of biological
>>>> chemistry” for 2008 looks like this:
>>>>
>>>> http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=&as_publication=%22Journal+of+biological+chemistry%22&as_ylo=2008&as_yhi=2008&btnG=Search
>>>> <http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=&as_publication=%22Journal+of+biological+chemistry%22&as_ylo=2008&as_yhi=2008&btnG=Search
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>> Of course the results are not clustered by issue but ranked by
>>>> number of citations. However I am sure there are people reading
>>>> this list who could write some code to reorder this results list
>>>> and cluster by issue or page number range. A little more coding
>>>> and maybe we could cluster by issue and then by page number
>>>> within each issue thus giving exact copies of contents pages.
>>>>
>>>> What could we call this new form of journal, ah yes, it would be
>>>> a ‘Reconstructed Journal’ :-) .
>>>>
>>>> John.
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> *From:* Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]
>>>> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>] *On Behalf Of *leo
>>>> waaijers
>>>> *Sent:* 02 October 2009 14:39
>>>> *To:* [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]
>>>> >
>>>> *Subject:* Parallel journals
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Today, thinking hard again about the (dis)advantages of Green OA
>>>> the following idea flashed through my mind. Green OA leads to
>>>> ‘parallel articles’, i.e. the post prints of the pdf’s in
>>>> official journals. Why not having ‘parallel journals’ as well?
>>>> It’s not so difficult I think. Someone has to generate a list of
>>>> journal titles and issues with empty article records. And then
>>>> every repository can complete these records with the metadata of
>>>> the post prints that they hold. Just like we created union
>>>> catalogs in the old days.
>>>> As I see it, the main advantage is that we can integrate the
>>>> worlds of Gold and Green OA at journal level. Wouldn’t that be a
>>>> relief to readers, funders and authors?
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Leo.
>>>>
>>>
>
> --
> Dr Talat Chaudhri
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Research Officer
> UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, Great Britain
> Telephone: +44 (0)1225 385105 Fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
> E-mail: [log in to unmask] Skype: talat.chaudhri
> Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.chaudhri/
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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