From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 10:00:30 -0600

But, Fred, you are assuming exactly what Allington calls into
question, viz., that it is the journal article that the public wants
and needs. You have not addressed Allington's claim about most journal
articles not being accessible to most members of the public at large.
OA advocates use the argument of the public's need to justify
government mandates. If they are simply asking to have TA journal
literature made more freely available to other qualified researchers,
that is a wholly different argument--and one that is surely much more
open to debate.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: "Friend, Fred" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 10:29:06 +0000
>
> What strikes me about Sandy's post is that it argues for a research
> communication system which may or may not be what is needed but which
> cannot be deduced from Allington's post! Allington comments (and they
> are comments, not the kind of argued case which would have been
> expected if this had been a peer-reviewed article) on a wide range of
> issues, some of which are UK-specific and some of which are more
> general. So if there is a case for the system Sandy outlines, let it
> be argued on its own merits, not on the fragile base of a blog post.
>
> My initial comment on the structure AAP have proposed it is that it
> cannot be efficient to add another layer to the research communication
> process. Writing a report in addition to the journal article must take
> the researcher some time, and may require a skill - to make the text
> public-friendly - which the researchers may not possess. The more the
> report departs from the text of the journal article, the more time
> will be required to write the report. Busy researchers would probably
> end up writing a report which was little more than an abstract.
>
> The proposal also distracts attention away from the fundamental issues
> in the toll-access research communication structure. The present
> structure is high on cost and low on access, and adding a report layer
> will not deal with those fundamental issues. We may disagree about how
> those issues should be addressed, whether it is through OA journals or
> through repositories for example, but the issues are not going to
> disappear and cannot be resolved by what appears to me to be a
> "sticking-plaster" solution.
>
> Fred Friend
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
> ________________________________________
>
> 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. What do you have to say about this
> argument, Fred?
>
> Sandy Thatcher