Open Access News

The author of last week’s open-access citation-advantage article has been getting strong pushback from Stevan Harnad. His latest response is well worth reading (except for one small quotation that is fortunately easily skipped)....[I]n the main, I agree with Eysenbach. It’s a complicated world. There is no one clear definition of open access (and what is with this pregnancy metaphor, anyway?). There is no easy road to it; both green and gold roads have serious bumps to contend with....I do, however, want to quibble with one section near the end of Eysenbach’s statement:

As to Harnad’s statement that the advantage gold-over-green will wash out as self-archiving repositories become more interoperable, I would also dispute this notion. If the advantage of gold-OA is delivered through community building (building networks of peer-reviewers, networks of users, and promoting the content to the right users) and promoting the journal site and its content (by press releases, participation in conferences to build relations with readers and authors etc.), then this advantage cannot be simply washed out by a vast interdisciplinary repository of articles where no such efforts are undertaken (surely, you could have people doing the same for subject areas in a repository, but then these people can be called editors, and you are reinventing OA journals).

A few unexamined assumptions underlie this: that community-building and promotion are unique to the journal model of information dissemination, that post-publication selection measures are functionally equivalent to pre-publication selection measures such as editing, and that green-OA cannot come up with other attractions. I’m not happy with any of those assumptions....

I’m not convinced, first, that journals are the community-building tool they once were, or even that communities form around journals at all these days, be they promoted howsoever expertly....I suspect that a growth area for scholarly societies intimidated by all this open-access business is, indeed, community --a gated section of the Internet on which to talk turkey. Do I think scholars will pay membership fees for that? I surely do, given a few hotshots to seed it with. Do I think that article citations will circulate in this viral fashion, largely irrespective of the article’s publication venue? Of course I do...

[G]reen OA can exert some countervailing pressures. Interdisciplinarity is a major one; it’s easier for scholars to find related other-field materials via the big OAI-enabled interdisciplinary soup than to try to trace them through still-siloed journals and article databases. As journals themselves start interoperating better, this advantage may decrease, but I do think it exists and I do think it matters.

Thirdly, I do not agree at all that filtering and selection post-”publication” are equivalent to acquisitions editing; someone who combs repositories for discipline-specific materials worthy of recommendation is not a “journal editor.” (She’s a lot closer to a library collection developer.) There’s quite a chasm between “this is worth saying” (which is the journal editor’s credo) and “this is worth reading” (which is the collection developer’s)....

Finally, I believe green OA carries certain advantages that gold OA could conceivably match but probably won’t, mired as it is in the journal model....It’s much easier for green OA to make a stab at capturing the rest of the data than it is for gold....

In short, green and gold open access should not really be considered competitors; they are complements....