Archive for Open Access

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Open Access Repositories should be based on Subject, not Institution

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on September 18, 2013 by telescoper

Just when we thought that the powers that be might be starting to see the light on Open Access, round comes another circular from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) that shows that policymakers have an unlimited ability to get things wrong at the most basic level.

The document concerned opens a “Consultation on open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework” by putting forward a number of proposals.

Now it’s depressing enough that the entire document is predicated on the assumption that there will be another Research Excellence Framework, perhaps in 2020. The current REF is such a disaster that one might have hoped somebody up there would have decided that enough is enough. But then we thought that about Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. Even the most pessimistic of us hope that the REF would have a “lighter touch” than the RAE, but as it has turned out it’s many times worse both in the time it has taken to prepare submissions and the ridiculous game-playing and dodgy employment practices that it has encouraged among participation institutions.

I hope there’s still time to drive a stake through the heart of the runaway bureaucracy that keeps imposing this idiocies on us. After all, a new Chief Executive about to take over at HEFCE. Perhaps a new broom will be wielded? I hope against hope.

However, setting all that to one side, I had a look at the proposals for Open Access after 2014 contained in the document. Here is the summary of the proposals:

HEFCE

Aarrgh!

Why on Earth should the proposals favour national institutional repositories over international subject-based ones? A shining example of the latter is the arXiv which has, for Physics and Astronomy, become the basic resource for researchers around the world; it’s a one-stop shop at which one can access research from all around the world. By contrast, having work in the same field stored over a plethora of institutional repositories will serve no useful purpose at all, because UK research will not  treated in the same way as work from other countries and in any case individual repositoes will lead to an absurd level of duplication of infrastructure and other resources. This requirement is particularly indefensible in Physics and Astronomy, as it would require us to duplicate in (probably inferior) institutional repositories what we already do with the arXiv.

The UK Funding Councils need realize that the solution to many of the challenges of Open Access has already been found. In fact, the European Research Council seems to have acknowledged this and is now directly funding the arXiv. The UK Research Councils should be required to construct similar archives for their disciplines. That shouldn’t be difficult, because all the hard work has already been done. There is a working model.

I’ll be responding to the consultation document in no uncertain terms. The Royal Astronomical Society is also collating responses for a collective submission. We have to resist these, and other proposals such as another REF, which are being foisted on us by people who have no idea what they’re doing and no idea what damage they’re causing.

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Seeing Sense on Open Access

Posted in Open Access, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , on September 10, 2013 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post to pass on the news that the Parliamentary Select Committee on Open Access has published its report. A PDF file of the whole thing is available here. I was eagerly anticipating this publication for many reasons, including the fact that this blog (inadvertently) provided evidence to it:

A senior academic wrote on his blog that “the publisher was deliberately and disgracefully misleading the author about the RCUK policy on open access in order to take money from them”. I could go on, but can you convince us otherwise, because if that is the case, this is one of the less helpful pieces of the work that the Government has decided to do?

Anyway, the good news is that the Select Committee has seen sense and produced a report that is very critical of the government’s rush to Gold Open Access. Here are the main conclusions:

92. The Government’s committed and pro-active stance to increasing access to published research findings is admirable, as is its desire to achieve full open access. Gold open access, at scale, is a desirable ultimate goal, and we acknowledge that the recommendations of the Finch Report, and the Government and RCUK’s open access policies were formulated with this end in mind.

93. However, almost without exception, our evidence has pointed to gaps in both the qualitative and quantitative evidence underpinning the Finch Report’s conclusions and recommendations, most significantly a failure to examine the UK’s Green mandates and their efficacy. This has been replicated in the formulation of the Government and RCUK’s open access policies and their mistaken focus on the Gold solution as the primary route to achieving open access at scale in the UK. The major mechanism of transition must be Green open access, specifically through strong immediate self-archiving mandates set by funders and institutions, either as a funding condition or tied to research assessment as appropriate.

94. Given the emphasis the Government has placed on the benefits of open access, the Government should seek a derogation in relation to VAT on e-journals as a matter of urgency.

95. The Minister for Universities and Science and members of the Finch working group are due to meet in September 2013 to assess impact and progress of open access policy. RCUK has said it intends to review its policy in 2014, to assess how developments compare to their expectations, and to meet annually after that. As part of those reviews, both Government and RCUK must fully consider and address the conclusions and recommendations set out in this Report.

Item 93 is pretty strong stuff and I agree with every word of it! I have long believed that the Finch Report, which precipitated the Government’s present policy, was hijacked by vested interests in the academic publishing industry, greatly to the detriment of the academic community. The government needs to reverse its policy, and fast, before more money that should be spent on research and scholarship is wasted on subsidies for greedy publishers. It remains to be seen whether the government has the courage to change course.

UPDATE: See here for a more detailed and considered report by Stephen Curry

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The Open Journal for Astrophysics – Update and Request

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on August 22, 2013 by telescoper

I’ve been getting quite a few questions about my modest proposal The Open Journal for Astrophysics. I don’t want to give too much away before the site is revealed, but I can say that after a very positive meeting in London last week the project is right on track and will go live pretty soon for beta testing. We have an Editorial Board (names to be revealed in due course), a very nice website, a web team, and an excellent interface for editors and reviewers which, in my opinion, is far better than any offered by a “professional” journal. When the site does go live I’ll explain in more detail how it works and introduce all the people whose contributions enabled this project to get off the ground.

We are going to test everything extensively before the OJFA goes public, however, so please be patient. We will be testing the site initially using papers in a relatively restricted area of astrophysics (largely extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology), but hope to expand by the addition of other members to the Editorial Board. In anticipation of this future expansion, volunteers in areas of astrophysics outside this specialism are welcome!

That’s the update. Now time for the request. Although not essential for the initial testing phase of the project, we do think that it would benefit from a distinctive layout for the papers, which would be easily achieved by having our own Latex style. This came up in discussion some time ago when I first floated the idea of this project and somebody emailed me offering to design an appropriate Latex package. Unfortunately, however, in transit from Cardiff to here I appear to have lost the email and can’t remember who sent it. I’m therefore going to enlist the help of the blogosphere to remedy this act of incompetence. Is there anybody out there among the interwebs who is sufficiently keen and has the necessary expertise to construct a latex style for our new journal? If so please contact me, either through the comments or via email. I can’t do it myself because I have never had any sense of style…

Please pass this on via Twitter, etc.

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Open Journal of Astrophysics Revived

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on July 8, 2013 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Bonkers) may recall that  while ago  I posted an item in which I suggested setting up The Open Journal of Astrophysics. The motivation behind this was to demonstrate that it is possible to run an academic journal which is freely available to anyone who wants to read it, as well as at minimal cost to authors. Basically, I want to show that it is possible to “cut out the middle man” in the process of publishing scientific research and that by doing it ourselves we can actually do it better. As people interested in this project will be aware, progress on this has been slower than I’d anticipated, largely because I changed job recently and have had so many administrative responsibilities that I haven’t had time to get too involved with it. The other folk who offered help have also been similarly preoccupied and some technical issues remain to be solved. However, the project has not been abandoned. Far from it. In fact, I’ve just received an update that strongly suggests we can get this idea off the ground over the course of the summer, so that it is in place in time for the new academic year.

We have a (good) website design with ample space and other resources to run it, and a significant number of persons of suitable eminence have agreed to serve on the Editorial Board. It will basically be a front-end for the Arxiv, but will have a number of interesting additional features which make it a lot  more than that.  I’d prefer to save further details to the official launch, which is now planned to take place in January (as it would probably get buried in the pre-Xmas rush if we tried to launch before then). I can also confirm that the service we will provide will be free at the start, although if the volume of submissions grows we may have to charge a small fee for refereeing. And when I say “small” I mean small, not the hundreds or thousands of pounds charged by the rip-off merchants.

There are, however, a couple of things I’d like to ask of my readers.

The first concerns the Editorial Board. I plan to contact those who offered help with this, but I’m still open to more volunteers. So, would anyone interested in getting involved – or at least thinking about getting involved please contact me via email. Also if you previously agreed please feel free to email to confirm your continued interest or, if you’ve changed your mind please let me know too.

The other thing  I would still like some ideas about is the name. I have asked about this before, but still haven’t settled on a compelling selection so I’m repeating the request here.

My working title for this project is The Open Journal of Astrophysics, which I think is OK but what I’d really like to do is break away from the old language of academic publishing as much as possible. I did think of the People’s Revolutionary Journal of Astrophysics, but feared that it might then split into Trotskyite and Marxist-Leninist factions. In any case the very name “journal” suggests something published periodically, whereas my idea is to have something that is updated continuously whenever papers are accepted. I’m therefore having second thoughts about having the word “Journal” in the title at all. Open Astrophysics might suffice, but I’m sure someone out there can come up with a better name. I know that Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I think a good title might make the difference between success and failure for this initiative…

That gives me the idea of enlisting the help of the denizens of the internet for some help in coming up with a better title; given the nature of the project, this seems an entirely appropriate way of proceeding. So please engage in collective or individual brainstorming sessions and let me have your suggestions through the comments box!

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Desperate Publishers

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on April 28, 2013 by telescoper

I’m on campus to get some work done but before that I thought I do a quick postette as I eat my lunch. A good topic for a short contribution is a story I heard last week from one of my colleagues in the Department of Physics & Astronomy here at the University of Sussex. It seems he gave a talk at a conference a while ago.  As is far from unusual in such circumstances he was asked to write up his contribution for a special edition of a journal.

Before I go on I’ll just digress a bit to mention a less well-known aspect of the Academic Publishing Racket, the Conference Proceedings Volume. For a long time you couldn’t attend a conference in astrophysics without having to contribute an article to one of these books. Although usually produced on the cheap, using camera-ready copy, and with minimal editorial oversight, these were sold to participants and (more lucratively) to university libraries at enormously inflated prices, often over £100 a go. It wasn’t unusual for funding agencies to insist that a conference talk be followed up with a publication, so this racket flourished for a while. I’ve actually got a shelf full of such volumes accumulated over the years, although I don’t really know why I kept them as it is in their nature that they date very quickly.

Anyway, as time passed, and the internet expanded and improved, most conference organizers began to realize that it was much better just to keep their own record of the conference: putting summaries, and even full presentations, on the web for interested persons to download gratis. No doubt it is still de rigueur in some subjects to produce books of this type, but  most in astrophysics don’t bother any more.  Quite rightly, in my opinion. I think they’re a waste of time, money and shelf space.

The original thread of this post, however, isn’t about standalone books of conference proceedings but special editions of a regular academic journal; for an example of one such see here. Note the unsubtle and entirely gratuitous  link to one of my own papers! I’ve always thought this format was just as bad as putting them in a book, with the additional disadvantage that people might misinterpret the journal reference as meaning that the paper had been refereed. The paper I linked to above was not refereed, for instance. In any case they’re a bit of a chore to write, and are just as likely to be of ephemeral interest, but if one is invited to give a talk one generally feels obliged to play ball and deliver the article requested.

Which all brings me back to my colleague here at Sussex. He did his talk and wrote up the obligatory article for the special journal edition of the conference proceedings. But times have changed. When he tried to submit his article via the web upload facility he was directed to a screen asking whether his work was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. When he answered “yes” he was told he was obliged to pay $3000 for the privilege of publishing his paper in Gold Open Access mode….

When he asked me if the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences would pay the $3000 I nearly had a seizure. It’s bad enough getting landed with a hefty bill for writing an article as a favour to the conference organizers, but it’s even worse than that. The publisher was deliberately and disgracefully misleading the author about the RCUK policy on open access in order to take money from them. There is no requirement for researchers to pay for Gold OA in such a case. Sharp practice is too polite a phrase to describe the actions of this publisher. And of course nobody mentioned the $3000 fee when he signed up to give a talk at the conference.

Unfortunately, I think this sort of questionable business practice is bound to proliferate as publishers seek to maximize their revenue from Gold Open Access before the academic community rumbles the scam and cuts them out all together. So let this post be a warning. Do not trust academic publishers who try to charge you up front. Check the rules very carefully before committing yourself or, preferably, declining to publish with them. There are sharks out there and they’re after your funding.

Oh, and the name of the publisher involved in the scam I just described? I’m sure you can guess it before clicking this link to check.

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Open Access Update

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on April 9, 2013 by telescoper

Very busy today with meetings. It’s a pleasant job introducing myself to all the new staff we’ve been appointing, but it does take quite a bit of time!

Anyway, I’ve just got a few moments  for a quick post while I eat a sandwich – sorry for the crumbs – in order to pass on some news about Open Access. The main thing is that, after a brief consultation last month, RCUK has (yet again) revised its policy on Open Acsess. The new guidance can be found here and there’s a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) supplement here. There’s even an explanatory blog post here.

Here’s an excerpt from the latter:

One of the most high profile additions to the guidance that we were asked for was, through Stephen Curry’s blog and subsequent letter, clarification that journal impact factors are not taken in to account when the Research Councils make funding decisions.

It’s good to see a science blogger making a real difference to policy! One can only dream.  Incidentally, I did post a little commentary on his post on here too and I’m very glad to see this clarified. Impact Factors are, frankly, bollocks. Perhaps that’s why so many publishers are obsessed with them?

I won’t copy the whole policy document here, but it is perhaps worth including the “Key Points to Note”:

  • This policy applies only to the publication of peer‐reviewed research articles (including review articles not commissioned by publishers) and conference proceeding sthat acknowledge funding from the UK’ s Research Councils.
  •  The Research CouncilsUK (RCUK) policy supports both ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’ routes to Open Access, though RCUK has a preference forimmediateOpen Access with the maximum opportunity for re‐use;
  •  Funding for Open Access arising from Research Council‐supported research will be available through a block grant awarded directly to research organisations;
  •  RCUK recognises that the journey to full Open Access is a process and not a single event and therefore it expects compliance to grow over a transition period anticipated to be five years; RCUK will undertake a comprehensive, evidence‐based review of the effectiveness and impact of its Open Access policy in 2014 and periodically thereafter(probably in 2016 and 2018);
  • When assessing proposals for research funding RCUK considers that it is the quality of the research proposed, and not where an author has or is intending to publish, that is of paramount importance;
  • RCUK is mindful that the impact ofits policy on different disciplinary areas is likely to be varied and has therefore made allowance for a different pace of adjustment by permitting different embargo periods across the discipline supported by the Research Councils. We will also be mindful of these differences between disciplines when monitoring the impact of the policy and, in future processes, when looking at compliance.

This is all very much more encouraging than the original guidance, but it remains to be seen whether it will evolve further.

P.S. A new Open-Access-O-Meter is available here. Just type in the Research Council funding your research, the journal you wish to publish in, and hey presto!

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Open Confusion

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on March 18, 2013 by telescoper

Catching up yesterday evening with the Times Higher, I found yet another article about the confusion generated by RCUK‘s plans for Open Access publishing. Apparently pressured by the powerful Publishers Association, RCUK has adopted the following “decision tree” to explain how its proposal will work.
RCUK%20decision%20tree

As you can see, this basically says that if you have any money from RCUK  for Open Access you have to spend it on the Gold Open Access which means you have to hand it all over to a publisher. Only when you’re skint can you go Green, and even then you have to tolerate a lengthy embargo.  This is as transparent a scam as you could ever hope to find. The Academic Publishing Industry is clearly out to fleece us for as much as it can get away with, bleeding our block grants dry before allowing us to do the right thing and publish our research the only sensible way, i.e. via Green OA repositories such as the arXiv.

There’s more:

An RCUK spokeswoman confirmed that even when funding for gold is still available via universities’ RCUK-provided block grants, researchers could still choose the green option with its shorter embargo periods.

But this reading of the decision tree was disputed by a spokeswoman for the Publishers Association. She insisted that if funds and gold options were available, researchers should choose gold.

It is obvious from this exchange that the agenda is not being generated by researchers or the research councils, but by the Publishers Association, who have hijacked the entire Open Access debate for their own ends.  Clearly the Academic Publishing Industry doesn’t live in the austere economy the rest of us inhabit – their profits are protected by generous dollops of cash from the taxpayer via RCUK.

And the government seems happy to go along with this hefty backdoor subsidy. I wonder why?

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Updated Guidelines for Open Access from RCUK

Posted in Open Access with tags , on March 6, 2013 by telescoper

I’m about to head off on a short trip, so only have time for the briefest of brief blog posts today. However, at least I have a timely topic. In yesterday’s post about the RCUK Open Access Policy, I mentioned that they were revising their guidelines. Well, today the new guidelines have been published. That qualifies as timely in my book!

You can find the new policy here (PDF file).

I haven’t had time to read them carefully yet, so please feel free to do so on my behalf. Then someone can tell me through the comments box if the suggestion I made yesterday – to donate all the RCUK open access funding to the arXiv instead of handing it out to profiteering publishers – would be allowed under the new guidelines…

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What to do with Open Access funding in Physics and Astronomy

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on March 5, 2013 by telescoper

I’ve been too busy to keep up with the ongoing activity relating to Open Access recently, and I don’t really have time today to do anything other than a brief post on the topic because I’m in the middle of yet another recruitment process and am exhausted by the day’s interviewing.

I do have time to say just a couple of things. One is that it appears that RCUK may be about to back-pedal on its poorly thought out guidelines on Open Access. I hope the new guidance is a significant improvement on the old policy.

Open Access reared its head during a meeting I attended yesterday. RCUK, which is the umbrella organisation for the United Kingdom’s seven research councils, last year announced that it will set aside £17 million next year, and £20 million the year after that, to pay for Gold Open Access publication of the research it sponsors. These funds will be made available to universities in the form of block grants to enable researchers to pay the infamous APCs  (“Article Processing Charges”). The average cost of an APC has been taken from the Finch report (estimated as £1727 plus VAT). Yesterday I was informed of the allocation of funds for Open Access to the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex arising from these block grants. The cash sum involved is too small to pay for Gold Open Access for more than a handful of papers produced within the School, so difficult decisions would have to be made about who is allowed to pay the Author Processing Charges if this pot of money is used in the way RCUK envisages.

Of course, what RCUK should have done was given universities and other research institutions funds to set up and maintain their own Green Open Access databases or international repositories like the arXiv. Throwing money at  Gold Open Access is disastrous way of proceeding. It’s not only ruinously expensive but also unsustainable. In a few years’ time it is inevitable that the traditional academic publishing industry will be bypassed by researchers doing it for themselves. All the money spent propping up the fat cats in the meantime will have been wasted.

Instead of  splashing money around for Gold Open Access,  I think RCUK should mandate that all its research be published in Green Open Access mode. As I’ve mentioned before this would cause considerable fallout not only for the academic publishing industry but also for the learned societies, which largely survive on the income generated subscriptions to their range of overpriced journals.

Nevertheless, we have the RCUK funds and, as Head of School, I’m supposed to decide how to spend them. Even if I could force myself to grit my teeth and agree to fork out out the money in APCs to the Academic Publishing Racketeers, I can’t think of any sensible basis for deciding which papers should be published this way and which shouldn’t. In any case, at least in particle physics and astronomy, most papers are compliant with the RCUK policy anyway because they are placed on the arXiv. I therefore propose not to pay out a single penny of the RCUK OA funds for Gold Open Access, but simply to donate the entire sum as a contribution to the running costs of the arXiv.

I urge Heads of Physics and Astronomy departments elsewhere to do the same with their allocations.

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Open Access and Closed Telescopes

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 22, 2013 by telescoper

Interesting to note that 2012 was a bumper year for productivity at the UK Infra-Red Telescope (UKIRT), as demonstrated by the following nice graphic.

UKIRT-pubs-2012

Some of my colleagues have expressed a measure of consternation at the fact that unless some individual or organization steps in and offers to take over the running costs, this facility will be closed down at the end of this year (2013). Why shut down a telescope that is generating so many publications?

The answer is of course that, under the UK Government’s new plans for  Gold Open Access, astronomers will be forced to pay Article Processing Charges, possibly exceeding £1000 per paper, in order to disseminate the fruits of their research. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which administers the budget for the UK’s astronomy research,  simply can’t afford the level of expenditure required to cover the costs associated with the number of articles being generated by the wanton exploitation of this facility. Indeed, in future, STFC will only be able to operate facilities that produce very few results worthy of publication.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

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