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Saturday, January 05, 2008

Journals should make it easier to learn their access policies

Peter Murray-Rust, Why getting information from publishers is soul-destroying, A Scientist and the Web, January 5, 2008.  Peter starts from Bill Hooker's post on the AAP/PSP (blogged here just below), and then expands upon a more general problem:

...I know exactly what Bill has gone through because I’ve done a lot of this myself. It might seem simple to find information from publishers. It’s not. My generalisations below extend a little into Open Access publishers, but it’s mainly aimed at Closed Access publishers.

A little while ago I thought it would be useful to see what degree of compliance Open Access publishers of chemistry had with the BBB declarations.  Should be easy - there’s only about 60 titles listed. So I mailed the Blue Obelisk and the Open Knowledge Foundation and suggested that if we divided the work - each took a few publishers - we could do this in a relatively short time. And maybe publish it.

Oh dear. The publisher websites were awful. It’s practically impossible to find out anything from most publishers (of any ROMEO/HARNAD colour). It’s spread over several pages, perhaps for authors, perhaps general blurb, wherever (and this is true for all publishers). We created a spreadsheet of what we wanted to record but found that the practice was so variable that we couldn’t systematize it.

So we gave up. The effort of finding out policies, even for Open Access publishers was too great. (But, closed access publishers, do not feel this is a defeat - we shall return).

The thing that really upsets me about closed access publishers is how profoundly unhelpful they are. They don’t want to communicate with the general authorship and readership. Each thinks it’s the centre of the world. Despite their acclaimed publisher organisations (AAP, ALPSP, STM, etc.) it is one of the technically worst industries I have encountered. There are no standards. No attempt to adjust to the modern world (I shall revist this later). Here are some examples:

  • Many don’t reply to courteous requests for information. I admit that this blog is sometimes a bit brusque, but it’s come that way because of the unhelpfulness of publishers. Every publisher should have a page on which it lists its policies. And there should be open forums for discussion on these policies. Some repository managers spend large amounts of time trying to work out whether articles can be put in  a repository - and I guess the publisher gets asked frequently. Wouldn’t it be easy to add a label to each journal saying whether manuscripts can be put in a repository. I suppose not, it would require agreement across the industry.
  • They work on Jurassic timescales. In the modern age people expect replies by return. It’s taken months to get answers for my latest manuscript  - and I’m an author. The ACS is taking a minimum of FIVE MONTHS to respond to Antony Williams’ courteous request as to the copyright position of our abstracting of factual data.
  • Requests, discussion, etc are all fragmented. I suspect the  same questions get asked again and again. If these were listed  on a policy FAQ as they were asked and answered it would save everybody’s time....
  • The technical business model is slow to adjust to changing demands. So when publishers adopted their “hybrid” policy (a different one for each publisher of course) they generally failed to tell the technical department that they needed to adjust their labelling and their policies and permissions for individual articles. With the result that I spent a number of gloomy days on this blog pointing out to publishers how little effort they had put into this....

But the really sad thing is that publishing (unlike making toothpaste, or bicycles) is based on communication....

Comment.  Hear, hear.  Three years ago I wrote an article entitled, Journals:  please post your access policies.  Here's a snippet:

Journals should post the details of their current access policies on their web sites.  Today some do and some don't.  Some are thorough and some are skimpy.  Some are current and some are way out of date.  Because policies differ from journal to journal, and sometimes from issue to issue of the same journal, potential readers, authors, and subscribers are more confused than they --we-- have to be.  We shouldn't have to undertake a research project, make phone calls, send off emails, or conduct listserv colloquies (themselves confusing and inconclusive) just to learn these basic facts of life in the digital age....

Most journals do a very good job spelling out the details of their submission policies online.  Self-interest requires it.  The time has come to do the same with their access policies.  If assisting potential readers, authors, and subscribers counts as self-interest, then self-interest requires this step as well....

Nearly all [the] benefits would be even greater if journals would post their policy details to a central database, or post them on their own web sites with standardized terminology or tags.  Detail-harvesting, searching, and comparison could then be automated.  But for now this is too much to ask.  At least journals should put their policies on their own sites in their own words and keep them up to date....