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Editorial on the Maryland faculty vote If you recall, last week the University of Maryland University Senate voted down a mixed green/gold OA policy. Here's an editorial from the UMaryland student paper in response: Free at last, free at last, Diamondback Online, April 27, 2009. Excerpt:
Comment. The editorial is right to criticize the Senate vote and point out that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles. (Antelman's study was not the first to show this effect, which has been confirmed by many other studies.) But the editorial makes one of the same mistakes as the Senate it criticizes: overlooking green OA (through repositories) in order to focus on gold OA (through journals). The Senate resolution would have encouraged both, but the editorial only mentions the gold OA provision. Most faculty opposition, likewise, seems to have focused on the gold OA provision. (See my comments on the vote.) In summarizing the Harvard policy, the editorial leaves the false impression that it too focuses more on gold OA than green OA ("The transition to publishing academic research in free online journals may not yet be a done deal, but the shift has begun....") But the reverse is true. The Harvard policy focuses on green OA more than gold OA. It's about depositing peer-reviewed journal articles in OA repositories even when they were not published in OA journals. I suspect there would have been less contention at the Maryland Senate meeting, and fewer negative votes, if the proposal had been closer to Harvard's green OA policy and if faculty had understood that it is entirely compatible with the freedom to submit work to the journals of one's choice. |