Archives des mots-clés : stevan harnad

The rent’s too high: Self-archive for fair online publication costs

Posté le par

Authors : Robert T. Thibault, Amanda MacPherson, Stevan Harnad, Amir Raz

The main contributors of scientific knowledge, researchers, generally aim to disseminate their findings far and wide. And yet, publishing companies have largely kept these findings behind a paywall.

With digital publication technology markedly reducing cost, this enduring wall seems disproportionate and unjustified; moreover, it has sparked a topical exchange concerning how to modernize academic publishing.

This discussion, however, seems to focus on how to compensate major publishers for providing open access through a “pay to publish” model, in turn transferring financial burdens from libraries to authors and their funders.

Large publishing companies, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, PLoS, and Frontiers, continue to earn exorbitant revenues each year, hundreds of millions of dollars of which now come from processing charges for open-access articles.

A less expensive and equally accessible alternative exists: widespread self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles. All we need is awareness of this alternative and the will to employ it.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06130

Performance of Mandated Institutional Repositories

Statut

“More and more Institutional Repositories are developed to promote the Green Open Access of research output (especially peer-reviewed journal articles). Since 2001, some institutions became adopting mandate policies aiming to mandate self-archiving by authors affiliated to these institutions This study was conducted in April, 2014 based on institutional mandates indexed by ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Repositories’ Mandatory Archiving Policies). A robot was developed to harvest IRs and check the status of articles (Open Access, Restricted Access or Metadata Only) and to extract the deposit date of article full-texts in IR. This study aims to analyse the performance of mandated institutional repositories from all over the world, especially in terms of deposit rates and deposit latency (difference between date of deposit and date of publication).”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/38075

Open Access to Research Changing Researcher Behavior Through…

Posté le par

Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates :

“The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of “eDemocracy” one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno’s Paradox). The solution is for the world’s research institutions and funders to (1) extend their existing “publish or perish” mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) depositing their final drafts in their Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22401/

No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price …

Posté le par

No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed :
Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing (“Gold OA”) are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors’ final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) (“Green OA”). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a “no-fault basis,” with the author’s institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.
URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/