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

[Mark MacGillivray]

I propose a slight alternative to your plan, Bjoern:

It is true that money solves lots of problems, and probably this one. It is
also true that the technology is not that hard to build and run - I could
do it myself (although of course help would be appreciated, and probably
easy to find).

The complexity lies in being allowed to do it, and in people wanting to use
it.

So, if any of that $10bn can be appropriated, then virtually ALL of it
should be spent on lawyers and marketing.

e.g. I am suggesting minimal costs to cover running the thing (less than
£1m per year, perhaps more if it really becomes a worldwide service but
that would be a happy problem), filling it with ALL the literature, telling
everyone to use it and to put their new stuff there, and then defending the
right to do so when we get sued - being sued does not mean we are doing
something wrong, we just need to be able to afford to argue the case.


Mark





On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:41 PM, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://brembs.net
> Neurogenetics
> Universität Regensburg
> Germany
>
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