Open access puts publishing jobs at risk (From Oxford Mail)

Sounds a bit strange. If the taxpayer is funding research, we should be able to view the results/data free of charge?

No comments from politicians or councillors?

Only the other week there was a story with a councillor expressing "fear" over 3000 new jobs in Headington due to potential "congestion".

Can we expect "joy" over loss of up to 10,000 jobs and the resultant potential reduction in congestion?

Thought not.

It's funny how the opposite of a negative isn't always a positive.

GOOD DEAL FOR UK PUBLISHERS: BAD DEAL FOR UK RESEARCH

1. Most UK copy-editing is for books, not journals. Neither the Finch Report nor the RCUK Open Access (OA) policy nor OA itself is about books: it is about journal articles.

2. Journals and their expenses will continue to be paid for by institutional subscriptions (most of them from institutions outside the UK).

3. Finch and RCUK are proposing to pay journals not less but more: Gold OA fees, for each individual UK article that the journal makes OA, paid over an above worldwide subscription revenues.

This is a good deal for UK publishers and its employees but a very bad deal for UK research and the UK tax-payers whose money is funding the research.

STEVAN HARNAD

correction: "over and above", not "over an above"

Concerns about 10,000 jobs in Oxford’s academic publishing industry, if publicly-funded research becomes freely available on the internet (Oxford Times, 3 August 2012), are wider than job losses in Oxfordshire alone. The impact is already being felt by the global academic and publishing communities. Long-established peer-review and quality assurance processes are under threat.

Digital preservation, validation, equitable pricing and the quality of published research itself present critical ethical dilemmas which cannot be ignored by commercial or emergent digital publishers. These risks and wider ethical concerns are the focus of an international Workshop, part of a series, organized by GreyNet International and InfoEthics UK in Oxford on 6 September.

We are all – traditional and emerging publishers, librarians and knowledge brokers, users and researchers - information professionals in the process of knowledge transfer. As government policy in open access evolves, this surely is the right moment for us to come together to address these concerns.

Overlooking the ethical dimensions in scholarly publishing is too risky and failing to address the challenges to all our roles is too important to ignore.

Come along and contribute to the debate.


Sylvia Simmons
InfoEthics UK
www.infoethics.org.u
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Oxford September 11: http://t.co/6geqSM6c


HOW AND WHY RCUK OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO BE REVISED

Digital Research Keynote Address 2012

The Web is destined to become humankind's Cognitive Commons, where digital knowledge is jointly created and freely shared. The UK has been a leader in the global movement toward Open Access (OA) to research but very recently its leadership has been derailed by the joint influence of the publishing industry lobby from without and well-intentioned but premature and counterproductive over-reaching from within the OA movement itself.

The result has been the extremely counter-productive Finch Committee Report followed by a new draft of the RCUK OA policy, downgrading the role of cost-free OA self-archiving of research publications ("Green OA") in favour of paying subscription publishers extra money, over and above subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, in exchange for making single articles OA ("hybrid Gold OA"). The motivation is to reform publication and to gain certain re-use rights, but the likely effect will be researcher resistance, very little OA, a waste of scarce research funds and the loss of the UK's global leadership in the OA movement. There is still time to fix the RCUK policy. I will try to describe how and why.