Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist.

[Stevan Harnad]

From: Quentin Burrell, Isle of Man International Business School
>
> The following is the referenced version of an article recently published in the Guardian newspaper.
> http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/the-lairds-of-learning/
> Some responses can be found at
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/31/real-cost-academic-publishing
>
> Although the article is written by a journalist for a general readership, some interesting and pertinent points are made. Would anyone on the list care to comment?

Ok, you asked!

George Monbiot, though he puts it a bit shrilly, is basically right:
In the online era, peer-reviewed journal subscriptions are blocking
the access to -- and hence the usage and impact of -- research that
researchers wish to give away to all potential users for free, seeking
no revenue from its sales, just the impact of its uptake and usage in
further research.

While subscriptions are still paying the bill, the solution is for all
researchers to self-archive all their final refereed drafts in their
institutional repositories, free for all, immediately upon acceptance
for publication. (This is called "Green Open Access".) This should be
mandated by all research institutions and funders to generate
universal OA.

If and when universal Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable as
the means of recovering the costs of peer-reviewed publication, the
print and online edition and their costs can be phased out, all
access-provision and archiving and their costs can be offloaded onto
the distributed worldwide network of Green OA Institutional
Repositories, and journals can convert to ("Gold") OA publishing,
recovering their sole remaining cost (peer review) via a small
per-submission fee to the author's institution -- easily covered out
of just a fraction of each institution's annual windfall subscription
cancelation savings. (Peers review for free too.)

And if that went by too fast, here it is longhand, many times over:

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged
Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the
Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S.,
Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Hajjem, C.,  & Hilf, E. (2004) The
Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An
Update. Serials Review 34: 36-40.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15852/ Shorter version: The green and
the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web
Focus.http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's
Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking
14(1): 51 - 68 and in Russian: //Nauch. i Tekhn. B-ki (Sci-Tech Lib).
- 2009. – N 10. – P. 61 – 72.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr,
L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access
Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5 (10)
e13636 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of
Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16
(7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton
Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher
Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. &
Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational
Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society, 13-22
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21003/

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to
Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos
21(3-4): 86-93 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/

Carr, L., Swan, A. and Harnad, S. (2011) Creating and Curating the
Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution. In: Curating the
European University http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21844/

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher
Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of
Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22401/

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012)
Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair
Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren
Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/