From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 10:10:02 -0600

Now this is a much more direct and honest answer. But I take it to be
an admission that OA advocates have used the "availability to the
general public" argument because it is politically helpful, not
because it truly expresses the goal that they want to reach, which is
cheaper, easier, and fuller access to all published scholarship.

But cannot this same argument be made about the scholarship that is
published in monographs? So, why do OA advocates not make the same
claim about the public needing free access to the literature found in
books? Stevan has in the past distinguished these partly because some
authors receive royalty payments. But the amount of income here is so
negligible in most cases as to be trivial, not significant enough to
warrant making the sharp distinction between journal and book
literature that now exists. University administrators are happy to
endorse OA for journal articles, but I have yet to see one endorse it
for monographs, let alone lobby for it in Congress.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 08:08:04 -0500
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 13:21:45 -0600
>
> What strikes me about Allington's post is that it argues for just what
> the AAP has been arguing for in the U.S. for a long time, viz., that
> the most efficient and logical way to make the results of
> government-funded research available to the public is to  make better
> use of the system that already exists whereby government agencies
> require reports on research to be submitted (and, in the UK's case,
> written in language the public can understand), which then can be
> posted immediately to the web with no embargo period involved at all.
> His point about the OA system relying on articles written for journals
> instead underlines this recommendation because, in his view (which I
> share), most of the technical literature is written in a way that
> makes it NOT accessible to the general public and devotes space to
> discussions of theories, literature reviews, and the like that most of
> the public could care less about, since it is the results themselves
> that they want to be told about.
>
> *******
>
> Stevan Harnad replies:
>
> The notion that instead of making their peer-reviewed
> journal articles OA, researchers should summarize their research in
> publcly complrehensible terms and post it online, is a wolf in sheep's
> clothing.
>
> The slogan "public access to publicly funded research" has proved
> to be a support- and vote-getter for OA, but it is not the core rationale for
> OA, which is "research access for all its would-be users." These
> consist mainly of the scientists and scholars for whom the
> "discussions of theories,
> literature reviews, and the like that most of the public could care less about"
> -- and the often technical content -- are written for. The status quo is that
> this research is accessible only to those whose institutions can afford
> subscriptions access to the journals in which they were published. OA is
> meant to remedy that.
>
> Mistaking public access to be the core rationale for OA (and swapping
> publicly accessible summaries for it) disserves the public who fund the
> research, whose main benefit comes from having that research used,
> applied and built upon by its primary intended users -- all researchers 00
> rather than just subscribers, as now.
>
> Of course public access too comes with the OA territory, and is a welcome bonus.
>
> Publicly accessible summaries would likewise be welcome -- but
> they would certainly not be a substitute for researcher access to the articles
> themselves -- and they have nothing to do with OA.
>
> Stevan Harnad