From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:16:56 +0200

The taxpayer argument always was one of the weaker arguments for OA,
and other financial arguments are, too. Unfortunately, financial
arguments are also the ones that most exercise people. In the course
of the last decade, the discussion about the desirability of OA has
become mostly one about cost reduction of scholarly publishing,
instead of about efficacy of scholarly communication in order to
advance science and knowledge discovery.

Certainly, cost reduction is a good thing to pursue, especially given
the relentless growth of the number of papers published each year. The
cost per paper in particular needs to come down to sustain the system.
The best way to do that is to rid it of subscriptions, and to regard
publishing and it's costs as integral to doing research itself. The
'gold' way to OA, redefining publishing as a service to authors and
their funders, is the most likely to introduce price competition (in
circles of The Scholarly Kitchen also known as "a race to the
bottom"), and the only qualm I have with the way the 'golden' route to
OA now works is that all the cost recovery is loaded on the published
articles, not on all the submitted ones (which could be remedied by a
submission fee instead of a publication fee). Criticisms like 'vanity
publishing' stem from this, and it is an unfair element in the system
left over from the subscription model, that also loads all it's cost
recovery on the published articles. This encourages submissions to a
journal level higher than justified for the paper in question, and
subsequent 'cascading' down to its appropriate level, causing it to be
peer reviewed more often than necessary and thus driving up the cost
of organising and administering that peer review. PeerJ is an attempt
at a remedy. I sincerely hope -- and expect -- they succeed.

Tax and other financial burdens in a 'gold' OA system are in line with
what a society spends on scholarly research, and the question then
becomes a very different, political, one.

Jan Velterop

Sent from my iPad

On 25 Jul 2012, at 19:40, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Ari Belenkiy <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 18:50:34 -0700
>
> Despite his valuable personal recollections, Steven Harnad  so far
> failed to answer  two my questions:
>
> 1. Why the EU research must be immediately open for the non-EU
> researchers (who are not, in particularly, EU-taxpayers)?
>
> 2. Why the EU taxpayers, who contribute different amounts in tax, must
> have equal opportunities to access the results of the EU research?
>
> [Of course, EU could be substituted here for Britain or the US or
> Russia or China or etc.]
>
> Ari Belenkiy
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 5:56 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 01:26:01 -0400
>>
>> I am flattered that Dr. Watkinson feels I had special influence on Ian
>> Gibson and his Select Committee. I wish I had had. But alas the truth
>> is as I have already written: I was not one of the 23 witnesses invited
>> to give oral evidence (several publishers were).  Ian's parliamentary
>> assistant Sarah Revell pencilled me in for a personal appointment on
>> Wednesday October 13 2004 if Ian's jury duty ended in time (it did) but
>> my recall of that breathless brief audience was that it was too
>> compressed for me to be able to stutter out much that made sense,
>> and I left it pretty pessimistic. And my over-zealous attempts to
>> compensate for it via email were very politely but firmly discouraged
>> by  the committee's very able clerk, Emily Commander. So my input
>> amounted  to being one of the 127 who submitted written evidence,
>> plus that tachylalic audience on the 13th. The rest of the influence
>> on the committee was from written reasons, not personal charisma.
>>
>> As to publishers, and learned-society publishers: they are pretty
>> much of a muchness in their fealty to their bottom lines. The only
>> learned societies that could testify with a disinterested voice (let
>> alone one that represented the interests of learned research
>> rather than earned revenues) were the learned societies that
>> that were not also publishers.
>>
>> Stevan Harnad
>>
>> On 2012-07-22, at 10:42 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>>
>>> From: ANTHONY WATKINSON <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:44:48 +0100
>>>
>>> Of course publishers are going to lobby against the green route to
>>> open access: the arguments from publishers are well known and in no
>>> way hidden and whether or not the lobbying is aggressive is a matter
>>> of one's own perceptions surely.
>>>
>>> Going back to 2003/2004 I was asked to be the expert adviser to the
>>> committee that we both referred to and had a pleasant conversation
>>> with Ian Gibson, the member of parliament who was the committee chair.
>>> It seemed to me in our conversation that Dr. Gibson had already been
>>> lobbied by Professor Harnad or his disciplines and that his mind was
>>> already made up. I cannot remember now whether or not Dr. Gibson said
>>> that he had met Professor Harnad but it was definitely the impression
>>> I had.
>>>
>>> Anyway I refused the opportunity of influence because I did not think
>>> I could be dispassionate. I did propose working with someone closer to
>>> Professor Harnad's views (whom I named) and recommended other people
>>> who were neutral and could do the job. In the end Dr. Gibson plumped
>>> for David Worlock, who was an excellent choice.
>>>
>>> I just do not believe on the basis of what others have told me - I
>>> have no direct knowledge and nor clearly has Professor Harnad - that
>>> the decisions of the Finch committee were pre-determined. Members of
>>> the committee I have spoken to do not confirm Professor Harnad's
>>> statements.
>>>
>>> I find this statement fascinating:
>>>
>>> "There were more -- Learned Societies are publishers too -- but three
>>> publishers would already be three too many in a committee on providing
>>> open access to publicly funded research".
>>>
>>> I am impressed by the suggestion that Professor Harnad actually thinks
>>> that learned societies, organisations that represent the academic
>>> communities, should not be involved in decisions which will have such
>>> an impact on the said academic communities!
>>>
>>> Anthony Watkinson