#peter suber

[principleofplenitude]

[fuckyeahopenaccess]

From Peter Suber’s Open Access

[librarianrafia]

When libraries pay for subscriptions to digital journals, they don’t buy or own their own digital copies but merely rent or license them for a period of time. If they cancel a subscription, they could lose access to past issues. They could violate the publishers’ copyrights if they make or hold copies for long-term preservation without special permission or payment, shifting the task of preservation more and more to publishers who are not preservation experts and who tend to make preservation decisions with only future market potential in mind. Libraries can’t migrate older content, such as journal backfiles, to new media and formats to keep them readable as technology changes, at least not without special permission or risk of liability. Some publishers don’t allow libraries to share digital texts by interlibrary loan and instead require them to make printouts, scan the printouts, and lend the scans. Libraries must negotiate for prices and licensing terms, often under nondisclosure agreements, and retain and consult complex licensing agreements that differ from publisher to publisher and year to year. They must police or negotiate access for walk-in patrons, online users off campus, and visiting faculty. They must limit access and usage by password, internet-protocol (IP) address, usage hours, institutional affiliation, physical location, and caps on simultaneous users. They must implement authentication systems and administer proxy servers. They must make fair-use judgment calls, erring on the side of seeking permission or forgoing use. They must explain to patrons that cookies and registration make anonymous inquiry impossible and that some uses allowed by law are not allowed by the technology.

Open Access

By Peter Suber

[biochemistries]

The largest journal publishers earn higher profit margins than the largest oil companies. In 2010, Elsevier’s journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 % while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 %.

Open Access, Peter Suber (MIT Press, 2013) p. 32

Every scholarly journal is a natural mini-monopoly in the sense that no other journal publishes the same articles. There’s nothing improper about this natural mini-monopoly. It’s a side-effect of the desirable fact that journals don’t duplicate one another. But it means that toll-access journals compete for authors much more than they compete for subscribers. If you need an article published in a certain journal, then you need access to that journal. This is one reason why free and expensive journals can coexist in the same field, even at the same level of quality. The free journals don’t drive the expensive journals out of business or even drive down their prices. By weakening the competition for buyers, however, this natural monopoly weakens the market feedback that would otherwise punish declining quality, declining usage, and rising prices.

Laid on top of this natural monopoly are several layers of artificial monopoly. One kind of evidence is that large commercial publishers charge higher prices and raise their prices faster than small, nonprofit publishers. Yet, the scholarly consensus is that quality, impact, and prestige are generally higher at the nonprofit society journals.

(pp.39—40)

[biochemistries]

The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. Or it may be a wise adaptation that would eventually evolve in any culture with a serious research subculture. (The optimist in me wants to believe the latter, but the evolution of copyright law taunts that optimism.) This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge.

This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. It doesn’t even guarantee that scholars won’t sometimes play for the crowd and detour into fad thinking. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.

   — Open Access, Peter Suber (MIT Press, 2013) pp. 10–11

In his book (itself available OA, naturally) Suber mentions the

many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility.

A paper in PeerJ a fortnight ago quantified this increase for shared data at 9% more citations for papers compared to those with restricted data. The authors examined citations of 10,555 papers on gene expression published from 2000–2009.

They worked directly with the APIs of Scopus, Pubmed Central, Highwire Press and Google Scholar, then controlled their data for the many variables known to predict citation rate (multivariate regression), which had previously led to uncertain estimates of the “citation benefit”.

They stress however that despite the findings, "little is known about patterns in data reuse over time and across datasets". Piwowar and Vision investigated this data reuse, finding that

...authors published most papers using their own datasets within two years of their first publication on the dataset, whereas data reuse papers published by third-party investigators continued to accumulate for at least six years. To study patterns of data reuse directly, we compiled 9,724 instances of third party data reuse via mention of GEO or ArrayExpress [microarray database] accession numbers in the full text of papers. The level of third-party data use was high: for 100 datasets deposited in year 0, we estimated that 40 papers in PubMed reused a dataset by year 2, 100 by year 4, and more than 150 data reuse papers had been published by year 5. Data reuse was distributed across a broad base of datasets: a very conservative estimate found that 20% of the datasets deposited between 2003 and 2007 had been reused at least once by third parties.

※ The "custom Python code" data collection scripts are available at github.com/hpiwowar/georeuse and github.com/hpiwowar/pypub.

※ Heather Piwowar's website is at researchremix.org, with links to her Slideshare open presentations, Google+ profile, research blog etc. ...

[katiemariefunk-blog]

Also highly recommend Peter Suber's book-length overview of open access (which is of course available online via open access).

[librarianrafia]

NOW AVAILABLE IN MULTIPLE OPEN ACCESS FORMATS "The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers."

[openingscience-blog]

Elsevier distances itself from open-access article

The publisher Elsevier has disassociated itself from an article by a trade association it belongs to that condemns proposed open-access mandates in several US states.

See the comment by Mike Taylor beyond the article mentioned above and also see this blog post by Peter Suber, who will start as Harvard's director of the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) from July 1, 2013. 

Information Today reports on this topic as well, revealing the network behind it.