"Are Chemical Journals Too Expensive and Inaccessible?"

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 05:41:50 +0100

There will be a Workshop organized by the Chemical Sciences Roundtable
National Research Council on Monday and Tuesday October 25th & 26th 2004
at the National Academies 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, DC.

The theme will be:

    Are Chemical Journals Too Expensive and Inaccessible?
    http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bcst/

There will be 10 speakers. My own talk will be entitled:

    "The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: Don't Confuse Them!"

    ABSTRACT: There are two roads to Open Access (OA): The "golden" road
    is for the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals to convert from
    the user-institution cost-recovery model to the author-institution
    cost-recovery model (OA Journal Publishing), as about 5% of them have
    done [http://www.doaj.org] . There is still some risk and uncertainty
    associated with this untested gold-journal cost-recovery model,
    however, so most journals (92%) [http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php]
    have instead taken the "green" road, giving their authors the green
    light to provide OA for their own individual articles if they wish,
    by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA Eprint Archives
    [http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse]. There is
    still much confusion about these two very different roads to OA,
    with some mistakenly thinking that OA = OA Publishing (gold). Some
    also think OA is only or mainly to solve the libraries' serials crisis
    (the journal pricing/affordability problem), whereas the real problem
    OA is intended to solve is the researchers' access/impact problem. The
    proposed US, UK, Australian and Canadian mandates to self-archive
    all funded research are also widely misunderstood as mandating gold,
    pressuring publishers toward adopting the OA Journal cost-recovery
    model, whereas they are in fact mandating green, pressuring fundees
    to provide OA for their findings by self-archiving them.

Stevan Harnad

---------------------------------------------------------------------
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
        http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at:
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
        To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
        Post discussion to:
    american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Received on Sun Sep 05 2004 - 05:41:50 BST

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