High Time To Start Getting Serious About Open Access

[David Wojick]

Stevan, the well established fact that you do not like the US Public Access program and CHORUS is somewhat beside the point. I am tracking what is actually happening in the US, not what you wish would happen. There are about 20 federal agencies preparing to implement Public Access, representing perhaps $100 billion/year in funding (we really do no know how much leads to journal articles). To my knowledge none of them is going to do it your way.

There are however some big bibliometric issues here. Linking articles to funding should provide for new forms of bibliometric assessment of agency and research program performance. At this point we do not even know which research funding programs are leading to journal articles, much less their impact. It is a whole new world to explore.

But getting accurate article funding data is turning out to be difficult, in part due to the incredible complexity of the Federal funding system. In the CHORUS pilot they found a high incidence of cases where the FundRef funder data did not match the article acknowledgement funder statements. Solving this funder data problem is now a major effort, one I am tracking closely.

In fact to me the bibliometric issues are far more interesting than the OA issues. The bibliometric community should be more heavily involved in the US Public Access program. The agency offices that are designing the various agency programs know very little about bibliometrics, because the have never dealt with journal articles before. They mostly process final research reports. Thus they are not thinking about how the funder data will be used for performance evaluation; rather their focus is on providing access, getting the articles in and out the door, as it were.

I think performance evaluation is going to be a very big deal, because of the huge sums involved in Federal R&D.

David

>> David Wojick, Ph.D.
>> Inside Public Access
>> http://insidepublicaccess.com/


On May 28, 2014, at 3:52 PM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html 
> On May 28, 2014, at 11:00 AM, David Wojick <dwojick at CRAIGELLACHIE.US> wrote:
> 
>> Actually it is just $10 per issue, Stevan (500 divided by 50), so pretty cheap.
> 
> That’s not what the site says:
> 
> http://insidepublicaccess.com/issues.html#list%20of%20issues:
> 
> Purchase single issue from list above -- $20.00  
>  <pixel.gif>
> 
>> And while I am indeed just one individual, I pioneered the design of Federal regulatory
>> programs like the US Public Access program.
> 
> That the US has a Public Access program at all is a very good thing (and due mostly to the 
> pioneering efforts of Heather Joseph, Peter Suber and Harold Varmus).
> 
> But the design of tje US Public Access program so far is terrible, on every substantive point:
> 
> Means of deposit
> Locus of deposit
> Timing of Deposit
> Embargo Policy
> Implementation
> Monitoring
> 
>> See http://davidwojick.blogspot.com/2014/03/engineer-tackles-regulatory-confusion.html .
>> I even have a diagnostic system of 126 kinds of confusion in such programs, which is freely
>> available at http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/02/05/a-taxonomy-of-confusions/ .
>> For that matter I have 30 Scholarly Kitchen articles, most of which are about the US Public
>> Access program, freely available at http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/dwojick/,
>> if people want to sample my expertise. But the research costs money so I have to use a
>> subscription model. As the saying goes, somebody has to pay for the work.
> 
> There is a good deal of open access research on Open Access and Open Access policies, 
> by different researchers (Bjork/Laakso, Bollen, Gargouri, Giles, Houghton, Solomon, Swan, 
> Thelwall), all of them doing it for research purposes and for open access, and not charging 
> a penny. Much  of it appears in peer-reviewed journals (rather than the Scholarly Kitchen, 
> and much of the research is based on empirical studies rather than “expert opinion.”
> 
>> Public Access is going to be a massive and complex program.
> 
> It need not be. All funders and institutions need to do is to both adopt a convergent immediate-deposit
> mandate requiring immediate deposit of the refereed final draft in the researcher’s own institutional 
> repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication (with the repository’s Request-Copy Button 
> implemented for embargoed deposits) as a precondition for research funding, renewal, research 
> assessment, and institutional performance review.
> 
> Institutions will then monitor and ensure timely compliance, the Button will tide over research
> user needs during any allowable OA embargo period, and deposit metadata and links can be 
> harvested by any central repository.
> 
> That is neither massive nor complex: it’s local and tractable — and it’s already being successfully 
> implemented in Europe, for example, in the UK and Belgium.
> 
> HEFCE/REF Adopts Optimal Complement to RCUK OA Mandate
> 
>> One can get the flavor of the emerging complexity from the new CHORUS Implementation Guide.
>> See http://chorusaccess.org/chorus-publisher-implementation-guide/. In fact I will analyze this Guide
>> for confusions in this week's issue of Inside Public Access.
> 
> Chorus is all by and for publishers. It is best ignored completely by researchers, their institutions and 
> their funders. OA and OA policy are not about publishers. It is, blessedly, out of publisher hands, even 
> if some publisher consultants would like to keep them there…
> 
> "CHORUS": Yet Another Trojan Horse from the Publishing Industry
> 
> Potential CHORUS catastrophe for OA: How to fend it off
> 
> Revealing Dialogue on "CHORUS" with David Wojick, OSTI Consultant
> 
> First Things First
> 
> 
> Stevan Harnad
> 
>> David Wojick, Ph.D.
>> Inside Public Access
>> http://insidepublicaccess.com/
>> 
>> At 11:20 AM 5/28/2014, you wrote:
>>> 
>>> On May 28, 2014, at 6:33 AM, David Wojick <dwojick at CRAIGELLACHIE.US > wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I have been getting serious about open access. Specifically I have started a weekly
>>>> subscription newsletter called "Inside Public Access" (see http://insidepublicaccess.com/).
>>>> We are tracking the emerging US Public Access program, which should be a major influence
>>>> on worldwide open access policies. In any case it is a massive and complex program in
>>>> it's own right. Our rates are quite reasonable as these things go. We just published our eighth
>>>> weekly issue and our backlist is included with new subscriptions. Individual issues are also available.
>>>> 
>>>> Interesting times,
>>>> David Wojick, Ph.D.
>>>> Inside Public Access
>>>> http://insidepublicaccess.com/
>>> 
>>> Wow, is that ever the opposite of what I said, and meant, which was about getting serious, 
>>> not getting rich! 
>>> 
>>> $500 per year or $20 per issue to read what one individual has to say about open access...
>>> 
>>> Let’s hope that the emerging US Public Access program will be “tracked” — and its policy shaped — by 
>>> knowledgeable representatives of the research community, motivated to facilitate and accelerate OA growth, 
>>> rather than by “ policy consultants” motivated to constrain and retard it.
>>> 
>>> Caveat Emptor
>>> 
>>>> On May 28, 2014, at 1:40 AM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Video interview of Stevan Harnad by Maciej Chojnowski (CeON) prior to Invited
>>>>> Keynote on "How to Formulate Effective Policies to Open Access to Research
>>>>> Worldwide". Conference on Opening Science to Meet Future Challenges. Centre
>>>>> for Open Science, part of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and
>>>>> Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw, 11 March 2014
>> 
> 
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