[OAI-eprints] Publishing Reform, University Self-Publishing and Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

        ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Here is a quick summary of points of agreement and disagreement with
the University of California (UC) view of Open Access (OA) and
Institutional Repositories (IRs) as described by Catherine Candee (CC in
her interview by Richard Poynder (RP) in "Changing the paradigm":
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/01/changing-paradigm.html

The full text with hyperlinks to the items cited is
accessible in my Open Access Archivangelism Blog:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/57-guid.html
    
1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal, OA merely a means:
I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform merely a
hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow from OA.

(2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts of
published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs, I think they are
the first priority.

(3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving because of
the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC faculty, assuming
it was because it was "too difficult." It is far more likely that the
low uptake was because UC did not adopt an institutional self-archiving
mandate. Those institutions that have done so have dramatically higher
self-archiving rates.

(4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service that,
being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of resources on
following up rights problems for each published paper; the result so
far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still not self-archiving more than
the c. 15% worldwide self-archiving baseline for
postprints.

(5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint archiving
is because of its publishing reform goals, including university
self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think monographs are
(for the time being) a separate matter, and should be handled separately
from journal article OA, and that peer review needs to be implemented
by a neutral 3rd party, not the author or the author's institution.
The immediate priority is postprint OA.

In summary, UC seems to be giving its own hypothetical conjectures
on the future of scholarly publishing -- and its own aspirations for
the hypothetical new publishing system -- priority over an immediate,
pressing, and remediable practical problem: the needless, daily loss
of 25% - 250% or more of the usage and impact of 85% of UC research
output. Because researchers are relatively uninformed and uninvolved
in all this, they do not have a clear sense of the implicit trade-off
between (a) the actual daily, cumulative usage/impact loss for their
own research output, with its tested and demonstrated remedy, and (b)
the untested hypothetical possibilities with which the some in the UC
library community (and elsewhere) seem to be preoccupied.

The full text with hyperlinks to the items cited is
accessible in my Open Access Archivangelism Blog:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/57-guid.html

Stevan Harnad