Open Access News

(PS: On the contrary, the purpose of the upfront funding model --confusingly called the 'author pays' model-- is to cover a journal's expenses in reviewing and publishing articles. So if we had been using it from the start, then all production costs would have been covered and all the articles would be OA, a much better outcome than we see today with the toll-access Elsevier corpus. OA publishers don't need huge profits to digitize their back runs; they are already digital. As for access to the Elsevier corpus through a 'laptop', no one denies that those who pay will have access. The point is to find a way to cover costs without creating access barriers.)

(PS: Haank sounds as if his plan is designed more to generate low uptake, and ground a rebuke to OA advocates, than to test the waters in good faith. However, as I argued in SOAN for 8/2/04, the Springer processing fee is so high, and the resulting access so restrictive compared to true OA, that "[i]f Springer gets very few takers, no one will not be able to conclude that authors don't desire free online access for their work, especially when publishers offering full OA at lower prices are thriving.")

Update. There is now a Slashdot discussion of this article. (Thanks to Carol Hutchins.)

Let me say again that Bloglet is unreliable and beyond my control. It's often down without explanation. When it's up, it often sends out corrupted emails that garble the text. When it's working as advertised, it still deletes the titles, bylines, and direct links to individual blog postings.

For the future, if it's not convenient to read the blog on the web, then I strongly recommend reading our RSS feed through a news aggregator. If you don't have a news aggregator, I can recommend Bloglines (free and web-based) or FeedDemon (affordable, desktop-based, and full-featured). Once you set up an aggregator, reading an RSS feed is as convenient as reading email. Moreover, you'll be in a position to subscribe to other feeds from other sources. And the quality is much better than Bloglet.

Update. BMC is now soliciting written submissions on these four topics for use at the meeting. The deadline is August 20.

(PS: There are two objections here: that there should be no federal mandate and that this mandate will force journals to adopt a specific business model. I respond to both in today's issue of my newsletter: "I've heard publishers complain...that this federal mandate will force publishers to adopt an open-access business model. But in every case, these publishers misunderstood the proposal. It proposes OA through archiving, not OA through journals. OA through archiving will have consequences for journals, but it will not require journals to convert to OA business models....Some publishers object that we should 'let the market work' and not turn to a federal mandate. One problem with this objection is that scientific research and its dissemination are permeated by government spending and government policies. Hence, this is not a market in any ordinary or classical sense at all. For example, in most countries (certainly in the U.S.) most funded scientific research is funded by governments, most scientists work at public institutions and are paid by governments, and most subscriptions to subscription-based journals are purchased by public institutions and paid for by governments.")

The first myth and its correction will give you an idea of the document's quality. The first myth is that "[traditional publishing], relative to open-access publishing, hinders the progress of science and medicine and reduces the benefits to the public." To show that this proposition from the PLoS web site is false, the document asserts that subscription-based journals add value, including date stamps and peer review (conceded, not at issue) and that they are more widely read than OA journals (conceded, not at issue). The answer simply misses the target, which is especially troubling since the authors got to pick the myth to which they wanted to respond. The claim in the PLoS quotation was that conventional journals hinder progress "relative to" OA journals, not that they hinder progress absolutely or offer nothing of value. Moreover, when the document points to the valuable features of conventional journals, it seems to forget that OA journals have all of them (date stamps, peer review, disseminating research, and archiving) with the possible exception of marketing.