[Open-access] Infrastructure reform [was: Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy]

Tue Mar 25 12:41:37 UTC 2014

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 8:53:26 AM, you wrote:

> Open Access looks backward - it is not part of the
> Digital Enlightenment. It's authoritarian and debases the author.

> Bjoern - I am happy to be in the vanguard. 

I'm thinking out loud here.

As I see it, money solves our infrastructure crises: it pays for people to develop the infrastructure.

The money is currently tied down in subscriptions at about US$10b annually.

There are two processes that need to be replaced either consecutively or simultaneously: reading/access and writing.

For reading, we need to get as much of the current literature, i.e., from 1664 to about 12 months ago, into our control. Given international law, some clever way of picking the physical location of some servers, we should be able to make a huge fraction of the literature (probably approaching 100% for everything before 1985, less after that) available online free of charge, likely with liberal re-use rights. For the newer literature, we'd need to rely on mandates, green/gold OA and should get anywhere between 30-80% of the literature, with the fraction increasing the older the literature.
Getting uptake here should be very easy, as it would be the best and easiest place to get your literature.

For writing, we need to implement or copy/improve systems like SciELO or AJOL as an alternative to journals.
Uptake here is not so easy, because of journal rank, but we have the evidence against journal rank and will be able to provide much better, scientifically vetted metrics. Moreover, if we cancel subscriptions, fewer people will be able to access your paper, so which author wants that? This means, uptake hinges on replacing journal rank.

If both cannot be accomplished simultaneously, reading needs to come first, as it will make massive subscription cuts less noticeable. Once subscriptions are cut, we will quickly have millions to develop all the other capabilities we have been talking about in this thread.

This is the sequence of events that I see no way around, if we want something that makes our lives easier and brings us into the 21st century. How to make this sequence happen is a different question. Here I think the money from a few libraries with large enough subscription budgets to cut should be sufficient to get us quite far initially, given how relatively easy the task is technically.

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
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http://brembs.net
Neurogenetics
Universität Regensburg
Germany