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Keep up the emphasis, Stevan, as appropriate. I totally agree that the double-payment argument is absurd, as I wrote. And yes there is added value in published books, including but not limited to preservation. I did not need the spray.
As a result of the OA movement (including your and my efforts) all Australian universities have 100% of their articles self-archived. Yes all and 100%, for audit purposes. That’s been the case for many years now.
Unfortunately they are not all open access immediately, but they are available within the institution on one server, and the academics all comply. Their departmental standing and funding would otherwise suffer.
It is a small victory, to be sure, but the inability of people to think outside the box of their scholarly training is a huge problem. It helps that we have a few people at the decision levels in Australia who are ICT-savvy and more flexible. I think the same is true of Canada.
Best wishes
Arthur Sale
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]
org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Wednesday, 11 January 2017 06:05 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: [log in to unmask]; jisc-repositories
Subject: Re: [GOAL] OA Overview January 2017
Not to put too fine a point on it (and this reminds me why I've tired of the fray):
If double-payment for subscriptions (first pay for the research, then pay again to buy it "back") had been a valid argument against having to pay for subscriptions, it would have applied to books too, just as to journals: "Why should institutions pay the cost of researching and writing their books, only to have to buy them "back"? Answer: because books, unlike journal articles, are not author give-aways, written solely for usage,
uptake and impact. Books are also written for (potential) royalties (and there might possibly still be some added value in producing and purchasing a hard copy).
If the double-payment argument is not valid for books, then it's not valid for peer-reviewed journal articles either. (And this is true no matter what perspective one takes on the "double-payment": the institution, the funder, the funder's funder (the tax-payer) or the whole planet.)
The valid argument is that peer-reviewed journal articles are give-away research: No one should have to pay for access to it, neither its author nor its users. The only thing still worth paying for in the OA era is the peer review (Fair-Gold OA).
(Preservation is a red herring in this context. So is "journal impact factor.")
No lengthy "re-education" program for scholars is needed to enlighten them that they should self-archive all their papers. The message is too simple (and over 20 years seems more than enough for any scholarly "re-education" progamme!) If the diagnosis of laziness, timidity or stupidity does not explain why they don't self-archive, find another descriptor. It's happening, but it's happening far too slowly. And institutional (and funder) self-archiving (Green OA) mandates still look like the only means of accelerating it (and forcing publishers journals to downsize and convert to Fair Gold). (Paying instead pre-emptively for Fool's Gold is unaffordable, unsustainable and unnecessary -- and that's the real double-payment.)
Stevan Harnad
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Arthur Sale <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
This is angels dancing on the point of a pin!.
Universities subscribe to journals or buy books to either (a) get other people’s research outputs, or (b) to acquire a canonic authorized version of their own research in print. Yes, it sounds silly, but librarians value preservation.
If a subscription gives you back some of what you’ve already got, well who cares? Not the author, nor the institution, nor the publisher. I often get freebies that I don’t need, but that does not invalidate my original purchase, nor reduce its value to me.
Arthur Sale
Also tilling other fields, but not asleep either. Think functionally!
------------------------------
------------------------------ ------ Arthur Sale PhD
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
School of Engineering and ICT | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology
University of Tasmania
Private Bag 65
HOBART TASMANIA 7001
M +61 4 1947 1331
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-
7261-8035
CRICOS 00586B
From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-REPOSITORIES@
JISCMAIL.AC.UK ] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Monday, 9 January 2017 23:14 PM
To: [log in to unmask]UK
Subject: Re: OA Overview January 2017
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 5:30 AM, David Prosser <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
SH: (2) No, the institution that pays for the research output is not paying a second time to buy it back. Institutional journal subscriptions are not for buying back their own research output. They already have their own research output. They are buying in the research output of other institutions, and of other countries, with their journal subscriptions. So no double-payment there, even if you reckon it at the funder- or the tax-payer-level instead of the level of the institution that pays for the subscription.
DP: So, when UCL (say) purchases access to Elsevier articles through ScienceDIrect (say) Elsevier removes all of the UCL articles from the bundle and prices accordingly? Of course not. The institution is purchasing articles by researchers across the world’s, including its own.
To repeat: UCL (and everyone) has their own article output. Getting access to their own article output is not why researchers publish, nor why institutions subscribe to journals. It is to get access to the articles of others.
So that version of the simplistic double-payment plaint is, and remains, invalid. (And it, and its (il)logic predates OA by at least a decade.
DP: SBut I agree with (12)
But (12) is about OA, not the old double-payment argument against subscriptions (which, by the way, if it had been valid would also have applied to royalty-based output, including the institutional purchase of books by its own authors!). The essence of the case for OA is and has always been that (refereed) research is an author giveaway, written only for researcher uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty revenue. We keep forgetting this, with this misleading notion of "double-payment" (for subscription access).
There is certainly double-payment in the case of OA (subscription plus Fool's Gold publication fees) as well as double-dipping (in the case of hybrid Fool's Gold). But that is not at all the kind of double-payment that the old argument against subscriptions was (and is) about.
Stevan Harnad (tilling other fields, but not asleep)
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