Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green

From: (wrong string) édon <jean.claude.guedon_at_umontreal.ca>
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 15:27:12 -0400

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Here is for another spin!

Le mardi 13 septembre 2005 à 18:05 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> > SH: (3) Research funders and institutions cannot mandate that
> > publishers become OA publishers (except for the small number of
> > journals that are subsidised by funders). Only about 1800/24,000
> > journals (8%) are OA to date.
>
> On Tuesday 13 September, Jean-Claude Guedon wrote:
>
> > JC-G: What is the evidence permitting to assert that the proportion...
> > of subsidized journals is small?
>
> The absence of any evidence that it is otherwise.

There is some evidence that it is otherwise, e.g. the more than 50% of
the scholarly journals published in Canada (total figure ranges from
2500 to 300).

I have stated this figure at least three times. How many times does it
take for SH to register a fact? Is it compulsive obsession with one
single idea, a mild case of autism or simply bad faith?
>
> > What is the relationship between the number of subsidized journals and
> > the number of OA journals: the juxtaposition of the two categories above
> > is not logical.
>
> 1800/24000 is the current OAJ/non-OAJ gap (92%). The only scope for
> closing that gap is publisher voluntarism (not forthcoming in a hurry)
> or, possibly, mandating that proportion of the 92% non-OA journals that
> are subsidised to convert to OA. I keep waiting for Jean-Claude to inform
> us of those proportions (and their rank in the quality hierarchy)...

This still does not answer my question about the relationship (suggested
by juxtaposition in SH's text) between subsidized journals and OA
journals.

The thread was about "mandating subsidized" journals to go OA: no
voluntarism here!

SH keeps waiting: the issue of mandating subsidized journals was raised
a few days ago, on the basis of figures that are admittedly anecdotal.
That is how science proceeds: it notices potentially interesting
phenomena based on incomplete data and then it proceeds to verify.
Meanwhile, the incomplete data stands as incomplete evidence. I assume a
scientist understands this. Please, keep waiting a little longer while
the data comes in.

As for quality hierarchy: why is this relevant to OA? Of course we would
like to see the most prestigious journals go OA, but the gold road talks
about peer-reviewed scholarly journals, not prestigious journals, and
certainly not exclusively prestigious journals.

Moreover, I have already raised issues about invoking "the hierarchy" in
a variety of fields, particularly in the humanities and parts of the
social sciences. Where is the hierarchy in the humanities? What is the
best philosophy journal in the world? The best history journal?
>
[snip]

Jean-Claude Guédon
>
> Stevan Harnad
-- 
Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon
Dept. of Comparative Literature
University of Montreal
PO Box 6128, Downtown Branch
Montreal, QC H3C 3J7
Canada
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Received on Tue Sep 13 2005 - 21:21:24 BST

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