CHORUS is a Trojan Horse

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 8:57 AM, David Wojick <dwojick at craigellachie.us>
wrote:


> The embargo periods will be set by the Feds.
>

The embargo periods are set by the *publishers*. The Feds only set what is
the longest embargo period they will allow.


> It is better to send users to the publisher's website than to a federal
> repository of accepted manuscripts, also cheaper.


It's neither better nor cheaper.

But it's best to send users where they already go: the indexes, harvesters
and search engines. Those in turn are best to harvest from *the
researchers' own institutional repositories*, which happen to be the
providers of all the research output, and are in the best position to
monitor and ensure that all OA mandates -- institutional mandates and
funder mandates -- are complied with for their own output.

And distributed institutional repositories are much cheaper than central
ones (which would in turm be much cheaper if they simply harvested the
metadata from the institutional repositories).

Generally speaking one does not lobby Executive branch agencies.


No; but lobbyists can *consult* for them...


> The publishers have had a few polite meetings with OSTP and the agency
> group but that is about it. We are all just waiting to see what the Feds
> are going to do. Also, scholarly publishing is far too small to have
> "lobbying power." It is a tiny industry, almost beneath notice.
>

I think past and ongoing anti-OA lobbying attempts by the "tiny" publishing
industry have been quite large-scale, and are a matter of public record:
PRISM
<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active&gws_rd=ssl#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=prism+blogurl:http:%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbm=blg>,
EU
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/263-Publisher-anti-OA-Lobby-Triumphs-in-European-Commission.html>,
RWA <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act>, Finch
<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active&gws_rd=ssl#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=Finch+blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbas=0&tbm=blg>,
etc. etc.

 *Stevan Harnad*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmetrics/attachments/20140712/ad5be6ef/attachment.html>