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Open Access Publication

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Nick Thompson

Open Access Publication

Dear Friammers,

I thought Stevan Harnad’s response might interest the Open Access Publication enthusiasts on this list. Perhaps we could talk about it on Friday: I am wondering what is meant by OA mandates.

From: Stevan Harnad <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: Research Gate?

Date: April 15, 2014 at 10:19:56 AM EDT

To: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>

Cc: CC suppressed by NST

On Apr 15, 2014, at 12:52 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Dr. Harnad,

I have been watching the development of Research Gate with bemusement. On the on hand it seems like another attempt make money off of academic vanity, but on the other hand it seems to be awfully good at pulling materials into the quasi=public domain.

I am betting you have strong opinions about them, and I am wondering what those are.

Nick Thompson (etc.)

Dear Professor Thompson,

Research Gate has managed to use some effective lures to get people to make their papers OA (mostly vanity indicators), but it does not scale. The same authors who do not make their papers OA in their IRs (unless it is made mandatory) don’t upload them to RG. And RG is vulnerable to take-down notices as a 3rd-party publisher.

What would be useful (and will probably happen, though too slowly) would be if universities used the automated lure/vanity techniques of RG (as well as those of the https://www.openaccessbutton.org they could even set up automatic google-scholar alerts ) for their own institutional authors as a carrot to back up their OA mandates.

But even that is useless without the mandates themselves...

Best wishes,

Stevan

Gary Schiltz-4

Re: Open Access Publication

Regarding OA mandates, which I assume stands for “Open Access” mandates, I believe some funding agencies require that papers that result from research funded by the agency (at least when the actual writing about the results is funded by the grant) be made open access. Just a vague memory, so take it with a grain of salt…

Gary

On Apr 16, 2014, at 3:36 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dear Friammers,
>
> I thought Stevan Harnad’s response might interest the Open Access Publication enthusiasts on this list. Perhaps we could talk about it on Friday: I am wondering what is meant by OA mandates.
>
> From: Stevan Harnad <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: Research Gate?
> Date: April 15, 2014 at 10:19:56 AM EDT
> To: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
> Cc: CC suppressed by NST
>
> On Apr 15, 2014, at 12:52 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Dr. Harnad,
>
> I have been watching the development of Research Gate with bemusement. On the on hand it seems like another attempt make money off of academic vanity, but on the other hand it seems to be awfully good at pulling materials into the quasi=public domain.
>
> I am betting you have strong opinions about them, and I am wondering what those are.
>
> Nick Thompson (etc.)
>
> Dear Professor Thompson,
>
> Research Gate has managed to use some effective lures to get people to make their papers OA (mostly vanity indicators), but it does not scale. The same authors who do not make their papers OA in their IRs (unless it is made mandatory) don’t upload them to RG. And RG is vulnerable to take-down notices as a 3rd-party publisher.
>
> What would be useful (and will probably happen, though too slowly) would be if universities used the automated lure/vanity techniques of RG (as well as those of the https://www.openaccessbutton.org they could even set up automatic google-scholar alerts ) for their own institutional authors as a carrot to back up their OA mandates.
>
> But even that is useless without the mandates themselves...
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Stevan
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Roger Critchlow-2

Re: Open Access Publication

And some which do require Open Access have just recently started to crack the whip,

http://www.nature.com/news/funders-punish-open-access-dodgers-1.15007

-- rec --

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Regarding OA mandates, which I assume stands for “Open Access” mandates, I believe some funding agencies require that papers that result from research funded by the agency (at least when the actual writing about the results is funded by the grant) be made open access. Just a vague memory, so take it with a grain of salt…

Gary

On Apr 16, 2014, at 3:36 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dear Friammers,
>
> I thought Stevan Harnad’s response might interest the Open Access Publication enthusiasts on this list. Perhaps we could talk about it on Friday: I am wondering what is meant by OA mandates.
>
> From: Stevan Harnad <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: Research Gate?
> Date: April 15, 2014 at 10:19:56 AM EDT
> To: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
> Cc: CC suppressed by NST
>
> On Apr 15, 2014, at 12:52 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Dr. Harnad,
>
> I have been watching the development of Research Gate with bemusement. On the on hand it seems like another attempt make money off of academic vanity, but on the other hand it seems to be awfully good at pulling materials into the quasi=public domain.
>
> I am betting you have strong opinions about them, and I am wondering what those are.
>
> Nick Thompson (etc.)
>
> Dear Professor Thompson,
>
> Research Gate has managed to use some effective lures to get people to make their papers OA (mostly vanity indicators), but it does not scale. The same authors who do not make their papers OA in their IRs (unless it is made mandatory) don’t upload them to RG. And RG is vulnerable to take-down notices as a 3rd-party publisher.
>
> What would be useful (and will probably happen, though too slowly) would be if universities used the automated lure/vanity techniques of RG (as well as those of the https://www.openaccessbutton.org they could even set up automatic google-scholar alerts ) for their own institutional authors as a carrot to back up their OA mandates.
>
> But even that is useless without the mandates themselves...
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Stevan
>

> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Russell Standish-2

Re: Open Access Publication

The question I have is what advantage is there in not having your
research work open access?

Given it is such a pain to download a non-open access paper, the open
access papers percolate to the top of my reading list.

The only answers I can think of

- publishing open access is more expensive (publishers often offer an
open access option for more dollars),

- prestigious journals prevent archiving of papers in arXiv or other
repositories,

- its a fag to upload your paper to arXiv or your institution archive

In my case, uploading my publications to arXiv and linked from my
website is my default option. I will usually amend any copyright
transfer agreement to allow this, if not already allowed. It's a right
PITA when the publisher doesn't accept my amendment, as I then need to
remember that that paper is a special exception :(

Cheers
--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au

Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
(http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Gary Schiltz-4

Re: Open Access Publication

Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will make such exceptional papers available via BitTorrent or on a Journalz site. Of course, I wouldn’t actually advocate that, just sayin’...

On Apr 16, 2014, at 6:53 PM, Russell Standish <[hidden email]> wrote:
> … I will usually amend any copyright
> transfer agreement to allow this, if not already allowed. It's a right
> PITA when the publisher doesn't accept my amendment, as I then need to
> remember that that paper is a special exception :(

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

David Eric Smith

Re: Open Access Publication

In reply to this post by Russell Standish-2

Hi Russell,

You know what would be a really useful datum, and which probably
exists though I haven't tried to look for such:

Some simple two-color plot or list of the impact factors of journals,
grouped according to whether their copyright agreements do or do not
permit open access. One could complement that by computing various
correlation coefficients of impact factor with a dummy variable for
open/not-open.

My suspicion, which one could start to try to test with such data, is
that this is not a question of what is the advantage in an overall
sense to having research open access, but rather is about the
mechanics of where entrenched power lies, and how that places
constraints on choices across the system.

There have already been several discussions on this list (with useful
pointers to data) about why impact factors can be meaningless, or non-
comparable, or can have meanings that are far removed from the naive
advertisement, but none of that would be to my question here. My
assumption is that, in the research institutional setting as I see it,
everything is driven toward a boundary of as near pure thoughtlessness
as the system can tolerate and still grind along, which means that
what is rewarded is what accountants can accumulate at high volume,
which means impact factors and things like them. If, even just for
purely historical reasons, a high fraction of high-impact-factor
journals are held by publishers who refuse OA, then those journals
have (for now) the power to force a trade-off by authors, between
compliance with a grant regulation, and support by their universities
for promotion/tenure, probably future grants where program managers or
reviewers look at impact factor ratings without taking into account
that they may be in direct conflict with the OA policy, for younger
researchers, hiring decisions in the first place, or start-up support,
teaching loads, etc.

If that is the main driver, then it should be purely a matter of the
combination of institutional design and getting coordination among
enough players in the system to provide power sufficient to push back
against the effectively rent-power (a power inherent in existing
position) of Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, or whomever.

Like so many other things that seem to fail, it just seems easier to
get coordination in some kinds of systems (firms, markets) than in
other kinds of systems (academic communities, civil society), and the
more-easily organized tend to accumulate power advantages, which can
sometimes become extreme.

But some data and analysis would probably say whether there is any
substance in the above guesses.

Eric

On Apr 16, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

> The question I have is what advantage is there in not having your
> research work open access?
>
> Given it is such a pain to download a non-open access paper, the open
> access papers percolate to the top of my reading list.
>
> The only answers I can think of
>
> - publishing open access is more expensive (publishers often offer an
> open access option for more dollars),
>
> - prestigious journals prevent archiving of papers in arXiv or other
> repositories,
>
> - its a fag to upload your paper to arXiv or your institution archive
>
>
> In my case, uploading my publications to arXiv and linked from my
> website is my default option. I will usually amend any copyright
> transfer agreement to allow this, if not already allowed. It's a right
> PITA when the publisher doesn't accept my amendment, as I then need to
> remember that that paper is a special exception :(
>
> Cheers
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders
> Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
> University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>
> Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
> (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Owen Densmore

Re: Open Access Publication

Administrator

I'd be tempted to forward this to Timothy Gowers

http://gowers.wordpress.com/

.. who's been very active in OA research, along with Terence Tao and others.

Their work goes beyond publication but into massive collaboration, "crowd mathematics" so to speak.

http://polymathprojects.org/

They're quite approachable, generally responding to email and blog post comments.

My concern with their success is that having establishing a successful reputation, they no longer need the help of a "power publisher" so to speak. A Fields medal certainly helps.

-- Owen

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Russell,

You know what would be a really useful datum, and which probably exists though I haven't tried to look for such:

Some simple two-color plot or list of the impact factors of journals, grouped according to whether their copyright agreements do or do not permit open access. One could complement that by computing various correlation coefficients of impact factor with a dummy variable for open/not-open.

My suspicion, which one could start to try to test with such data, is that this is not a question of what is the advantage in an overall sense to having research open access, but rather is about the mechanics of where entrenched power lies, and how that places constraints on choices across the system.

There have already been several discussions on this list (with useful pointers to data) about why impact factors can be meaningless, or non-comparable, or can have meanings that are far removed from the naive advertisement, but none of that would be to my question here. My assumption is that, in the research institutional setting as I see it, everything is driven toward a boundary of as near pure thoughtlessness as the system can tolerate and still grind along, which means that what is rewarded is what accountants can accumulate at high volume, which means impact factors and things like them. If, even just for purely historical reasons, a high fraction of high-impact-factor journals are held by publishers who refuse OA, then those journals have (for now) the power to force a trade-off by authors, between compliance with a grant regulation, and support by their universities for promotion/tenure, probably future grants where program managers or reviewers look at impact factor ratings without taking into account that they may be in direct conflict with the OA policy, for younger researchers, hiring decisions in the first place, or start-up support, teaching loads, etc.

If that is the main driver, then it should be purely a matter of the combination of institutional design and getting coordination among enough players in the system to provide power sufficient to push back against the effectively rent-power (a power inherent in existing position) of Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, or whomever.

Like so many other things that seem to fail, it just seems easier to get coordination in some kinds of systems (firms, markets) than in other kinds of systems (academic communities, civil society), and the more-easily organized tend to accumulate power advantages, which can sometimes become extreme.

But some data and analysis would probably say whether there is any substance in the above guesses.

Eric

On Apr 16, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

The question I have is what advantage is there in not having your
research work open access?

Given it is such a pain to download a non-open access paper, the open
access papers percolate to the top of my reading list.

The only answers I can think of

- publishing open access is more expensive (publishers often offer an
open access option for more dollars),

- prestigious journals prevent archiving of papers in arXiv or other
repositories,

- its a fag to upload your paper to arXiv or your institution archive

In my case, uploading my publications to arXiv and linked from my
website is my default option. I will usually amend any copyright
transfer agreement to allow this, if not already allowed. It's a right
PITA when the publisher doesn't accept my amendment, as I then need to
remember that that paper is a special exception :(

Cheers
--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au

Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
(http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Nick Thompson

Re: Open Access Publication

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Hi, Eric,

What if Professional Societies were to declare that nothing is "published"
until it has been made available to the public. I might permit a reasonable
handling fee, such as a nickel a page, making the downloading of a paper
roughly equivalent to the cost or Xeroxing it. And then Universities
follow suit by declaring that nothing goes in your personnel file that has
not been "published".

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:20 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Open Access Publication

Hi Russell,

You know what would be a really useful datum, and which probably exists
though I haven't tried to look for such:

Some simple two-color plot or list of the impact factors of journals,
grouped according to whether their copyright agreements do or do not permit
open access. One could complement that by computing various correlation
coefficients of impact factor with a dummy variable for open/not-open.

My suspicion, which one could start to try to test with such data, is that
this is not a question of what is the advantage in an overall sense to
having research open access, but rather is about the mechanics of where
entrenched power lies, and how that places constraints on choices across the
system.

There have already been several discussions on this list (with useful
pointers to data) about why impact factors can be meaningless, or non-
comparable, or can have meanings that are far removed from the naive
advertisement, but none of that would be to my question here. My assumption
is that, in the research institutional setting as I see it, everything is
driven toward a boundary of as near pure thoughtlessness as the system can
tolerate and still grind along, which means that what is rewarded is what
accountants can accumulate at high volume, which means impact factors and
things like them. If, even just for purely historical reasons, a high
fraction of high-impact-factor journals are held by publishers who refuse
OA, then those journals have (for now) the power to force a trade-off by
authors, between compliance with a grant regulation, and support by their
universities for promotion/tenure, probably future grants where program
managers or reviewers look at impact factor ratings without taking into
account that they may be in direct conflict with the OA policy, for younger
researchers, hiring decisions in the first place, or start-up support,
teaching loads, etc.

If that is the main driver, then it should be purely a matter of the
combination of institutional design and getting coordination among enough
players in the system to provide power sufficient to push back against the
effectively rent-power (a power inherent in existing
position) of Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, or whomever.

Like so many other things that seem to fail, it just seems easier to get
coordination in some kinds of systems (firms, markets) than in other kinds
of systems (academic communities, civil society), and the more-easily
organized tend to accumulate power advantages, which can sometimes become
extreme.

But some data and analysis would probably say whether there is any substance
in the above guesses.

Eric

On Apr 16, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders
> Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
> University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>
> Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
> (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Nick Thompson

Re: Open Access Publication

In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4

Gary,

You are correct. You must not get your mail in HTML, because there was a
link in my message to the Wikipedia entry on Open Access Mandate. Google
it.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 2:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Open Access Publication

Regarding OA mandates, which I assume stands for "Open Access" mandates, I
believe some funding agencies require that papers that result from research
funded by the agency (at least when the actual writing about the results is
funded by the grant) be made open access. Just a vague memory, so take it
with a grain of salt.

Gary

On Apr 16, 2014, at 3:36 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
wrote:

> Dear Friammers,
>
> I thought Stevan Harnad's response might interest the Open Access
Publication enthusiasts on this list. Perhaps we could talk about it on
Friday: I am wondering what is meant by OA mandates.
>
> From: Stevan Harnad <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: Research Gate?
> Date: April 15, 2014 at 10:19:56 AM EDT
> To: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
> Cc: CC suppressed by NST
>
> On Apr 15, 2014, at 12:52 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
wrote:
>
>
> Dear Dr. Harnad,
>
> I have been watching the development of Research Gate with bemusement. On
the on hand it seems like another attempt make money off of academic vanity,
but on the other hand it seems to be awfully good at pulling materials into
the quasi=public domain.
>
> I am betting you have strong opinions about them, and I am wondering what
those are.
>
> Nick Thompson (etc.)
>
> Dear Professor Thompson,
>
> Research Gate has managed to use some effective lures to get people to
make their papers OA (mostly vanity indicators), but it does not scale. The
same authors who do not make their papers OA in their IRs (unless it is
made mandatory) don't upload them to RG. And RG is vulnerable to take-down
notices as a 3rd-party publisher.
>
> What would be useful (and will probably happen, though too slowly) would
be if universities used the automated lure/vanity techniques of RG (as well
as those of the https://www.openaccessbutton.org they could even set up
automatic google-scholar alerts ) for their own institutional authors as a
carrot to back up their OA mandates.

>
> But even that is useless without the mandates themselves...
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Stevan
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

David Eric Smith

Re: Open Access Publication

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Hi Nick,

Yes, I like ideas of this kind, and there are many that I think are
eligible and good.

To me, though, it is a chess game.

For every visible and consequential change, such as a rule change or a
shift in orientation by a department or school, a lot of little
foundation-building has to be done behind the scenes to address all
the constraints and problems that have caused these changes _not_ to
be adopted in the past. An adequate pawn structure has to bet set up
before moves by the rooks or the queen are advantageous or even
feasible. That low-level stuff often is not visible, but unless it is
done to undermine the current pressures, the higher-level changes
never become available or desirable to those who need to make the
decisions.

I imagine a need to coordinate a kind of parallel assault, in which
libraries refuse subscriptions to high-cost journals so they can
allocate the funds to open-access fees (discussed earlier on this
list; but that too requires foundation-building because how do we make
articles available that currently live in those journals, and which
researchers depend on); in which academics are willing to take a
temporary hit to band behind Gowers and forego high-reward journals;
in which government agencies such as NIH (with its mammoth size) hire
computer programmers to do accounting on how much of the impact factor
in the CVs of proposers comes from journals that are specifically in
conflict with the agency's OA policy, and then require the program
managers to make a big noise to their panels (their "study sections")
to "ignore" high impact that conflicts with the agency's policy, and
so forth. (This is like telling a jury to "ignore" inadmissible
comments; of course they can't un-hear them, but by putting them on
notice maybe it is a step in the right direction.)

These institutions are interlocking like railroad ballast, and I think
understanding how to be _systematic_ about the problem of unlocking
them is where much of the complexity lies that we don't understand
well. But that makes it deserving of consideration as a science
problem as well as a social goal.

All best,

Eric

On Apr 17, 2014, at 1:02 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Hi, Eric,
>
> What if Professional Societies were to declare that nothing is
> "published"
> until it has been made available to the public. I might permit a
> reasonable
> handling fee, such as a nickel a page, making the downloading of a
> paper
> roughly equivalent to the cost or Xeroxing it. And then Universities
> follow suit by declaring that nothing goes in your personnel file
> that has
> not been "published".
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:20 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Open Access Publication
>
> Hi Russell,
>
> You know what would be a really useful datum, and which probably
> exists
> though I haven't tried to look for such:
>
> Some simple two-color plot or list of the impact factors of journals,
> grouped according to whether their copyright agreements do or do not
> permit
> open access. One could complement that by computing various
> correlation
> coefficients of impact factor with a dummy variable for open/not-open.
>
> My suspicion, which one could start to try to test with such data,
> is that
> this is not a question of what is the advantage in an overall sense to
> having research open access, but rather is about the mechanics of
> where
> entrenched power lies, and how that places constraints on choices
> across the
> system.
>
> There have already been several discussions on this list (with useful
> pointers to data) about why impact factors can be meaningless, or non-
> comparable, or can have meanings that are far removed from the naive
> advertisement, but none of that would be to my question here. My
> assumption
> is that, in the research institutional setting as I see it,
> everything is
> driven toward a boundary of as near pure thoughtlessness as the
> system can
> tolerate and still grind along, which means that what is rewarded is
> what
> accountants can accumulate at high volume, which means impact
> factors and
> things like them. If, even just for purely historical reasons, a high
> fraction of high-impact-factor journals are held by publishers who
> refuse
> OA, then those journals have (for now) the power to force a trade-
> off by
> authors, between compliance with a grant regulation, and support by
> their
> universities for promotion/tenure, probably future grants where
> program
> managers or reviewers look at impact factor ratings without taking
> into
> account that they may be in direct conflict with the OA policy, for
> younger
> researchers, hiring decisions in the first place, or start-up support,
> teaching loads, etc.
>
> If that is the main driver, then it should be purely a matter of the
> combination of institutional design and getting coordination among
> enough
> players in the system to provide power sufficient to push back
> against the
> effectively rent-power (a power inherent in existing
> position) of Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, or whomever.
>
> Like so many other things that seem to fail, it just seems easier to
> get
> coordination in some kinds of systems (firms, markets) than in other
> kinds
> of systems (academic communities, civil society), and the more-easily
> organized tend to accumulate power advantages, which can sometimes
> become
> extreme.
>
> But some data and analysis would probably say whether there is any
> substance
> in the above guesses.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Apr 16, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
>
>> The question I have is what advantage is there in not having your
>> research work open access?
>>
>> Given it is such a pain to download a non-open access paper, the open
>> access papers percolate to the top of my reading list.
>>
>> The only answers I can think of
>>
>> - publishing open access is more expensive (publishers often offer an
>> open access option for more dollars),
>>
>> - prestigious journals prevent archiving of papers in arXiv or other
>> repositories,
>>
>> - its a fag to upload your paper to arXiv or your institution archive
>>
>>
>> In my case, uploading my publications to arXiv and linked from my
>> website is my default option. I will usually amend any copyright
>> transfer agreement to allow this, if not already allowed. It's a
>> right
>> PITA when the publisher doesn't accept my amendment, as I then need
>> to
>> remember that that paper is a special exception :(
>>
>> Cheers
>> --
>>
>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
>> Principal, High Performance Coders
>> Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
>> University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>>
>> Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret
>> (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ------
>>
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>
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