Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, March 06, 2007

OA presentations at the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences

Donat Agosti has written a report on the meeting, Open Access: Vom Prinzip zur Umsetzung (Bern, March 1, 2007), sponsored by the Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences). Excerpt:

This meeting has been organized by the SAGW to explain their members “open access”, using mostly speakers from other academic fields in Switzerland....

[T]he very eloquent contribution by Yola de Lusenent...was a comment on recent initiatives and meeting at EU-level....

Alexander Borbély’s and Matthias Töwe’s thoughtful and comprehensive overview on open access pointed to the heavy bias in empiric studies and presentation of data, journals as main publication form rather then monographs, and race for fast (and first) publication of data in highly competitive fields as the reasons why open access is more advanced than in fields like the humanities....

At the end of their lecture the scene was set with

  • an overview of existing repositories in Switzerland
  • an explanation of the different roads to open access (green and gold)
  • different business models and its strength and weaknesses explained, such as how USD3,000 for open access by Elsevier can be justified with their huge profits
  • a statment that through Swiss institution about 43% of all the of the 24,000 journals world wide can be accessed...
  • a conclusion, that there is no single business model for open access emerging, but that open access could be seen as a discovery tool to find literature which would not be discovered otherwise and might lead to higher sale
  • open access leads to better citation indices
  • open access is not equal to dropping peer review and thus loss of quality control....

Bas Savenjie (Utrecht University)...made the point, that all the material before 1996 ought be made available, because before that time nobody would sign a copyright transfer agreement stating that the dissemination through electronic media is regulated. An in fact, the large publishers (e.g. Elsevier, Blackwell) are scanning and using increasingly the backlogs of their journals without asking the authors for copyright wavers, and thus similarly infringing the authors copyright....

Barbara Kalumenos (Elsevier) explained the publishers side, stressing that they are at the moment in a test phase. She introduced the notion of ‘sponsored article’, that is an article in a hybrid journal that the authors pays USD3,000 in the Elsevier case to make open access, as opposed to by subscription only – which, as Johannes Fournier (DFG) pointed out is USD3,000 profit. Kalumenos then went on to point out, that there seems to be no interest in the science community, since only for 0.1% of the articles this option has been chosen....

At the final open discussion the road towards open access in Swiss public funded research was outlined: first the repositories need be built up – Zora Zürich or Reso are advanced examples, and then a mandate ought to be implemented. Dieter Imboden (president of the “Forschungsrat” of the the Swiss Science Foundation) announced that a policy including a mandate is being adopted, but that control and installation of the repositories will not be part of SNF business; Funding will be available for paying towards oa related publishing costs. Any further moves are contingent upon the scientists to comply with the Green road (self-archiving) before the Gold road will be considered.