Tom Roper's Weblog

Open access in ancient studies

Ober J, Scheidel, W, Shaw B, Sanclemente D
Towards Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics
Hesperia 2007 76(1): 229-242
if your institution doesn't subscribe, there's a copy in Princeton's repository

Reed Elsevier and the arms trade

A footnote to my comments on multinational publisher Reed Elsevier's involvement in organising arms trade exhibitions: on Saturday I received a copy of their annual report. Apart from the ugly and sometimes meaningless language in which it is written (example: "leverage our leadership brands and authoritative proprietary content to deliver innovative solutions orientated products that become embedded in customers’ workflows and enable Reed Elsevier to move up the value chain"), there is a section on corporate responsibility, which they define as a "commitment to operate profitably, ethically and openly". They mention a Socially Responsible Supplier network, which "tracks the social and environmental performance of key suppliers", but do not say whether involvement in the arms trade is one of the criteria by which suppliers are assessed.
In the open access debate apologists for publishers often argue that they  have an important part to play in scientific communication. But this document does not even try to mount a defence of that position.  They say starkly, "our objectives are to deliver good revenue growth,
continuous margin improvement, strong cash generation and growing returns on capital".

To declare an interest, my late mother's estate owns Reed Elsevier shares. I have not yet decided whether to dispose of them.

Bad Science, open access and the arms trade

This week's Bad Science column in the Guardian, whose author, Ben Goldacre, will be speaking at the Brighton Science Festival, discussed open access, in particular the news that some publishers, he doesn't say which, have hired Eric Dezenhall, the "pitbull of PR". I had not heard of Mr Dezenhall before I read the article. I look forward to Dezenhall's interventions in the open access debate. Neither did I know that Reed Elsevier include among their money making activities organising the DSEI arms fair.
I don't endorse the view that arms-dealing is abnormal. From a capitalist point of view, it is as reasonable to profit from of the labour of workers who make tanks and armoured cars as from those who create scientific research. But it does sit ill with publisher's rhetorical claims to be impartial and altruistic handmaidens of scientific communication.
Ben's blog is well worth a visit, not least for the sixteen (at the time of writing) posts tagged with the word "onanism".

Technorati Tags: reedelsevier

J D Bernal and scientific communication: "to improve the knowledge of naturall things*"

The germ of an idea: J D Bernal, the physicist, had a great deal to say about scientific communication at the 1948 Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information. According to Bernal, "it was evident that the communication system of science was entirely inefficient and wasteful, and it was only kept going by means of devices that actually made it worse, such as the founding of new journals, the introduction and circulation of reports and letters, and, finally, the mere interchange of private letters....The realisation must come, and the sooner the better, that scientists today must be prepared, to their own advantage, to spend some of their time in the service of arranging and disseminating information, and they must be enabled to do so by a financial support which might be up to 20 per cent of the cost of the research'. He described the conference as "a serious attempt to provide world science with a comprehensive and up-to-date information service". How much progress we have made towards Bernal's aim?
When the founder members of the Royal Society established their journal in 1665, Philosophical Transactions (there's free access to the archive but only until the end of December), they did so at the same time as capitalism consolidated itself in the wake of revolution and restoration. Capitalist publishing now acts as a brake on scientific communication, hence the publishers' antagonism towards open access and institutional repositories so evident at the recent RIN workshop.

*From Hooke's draft of the preamble to the statutes of the Royal Society, "to improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practices, Engynes and Inventions by Experiment – (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetorick or Logicks)"

Technorati Tags: jdbernal, royalsociety

RIN Workshop: presentations now available

Links to the presentations given at the 14 November workshop on the RIN/DTI/RCUK Evidence-based Analysis of Data on Scholarly Journal Publishing are now at the bottom of the workshop page, along with a crisper and more concise summary of the proceedings than mine (follow these links for parts one, two and three) and the action points. The latter are worth quoting:
" * There is a case for updating the baseline report periodically, so as to chart the development of the evidence base.
* Although there is some knowledge about journal usage, there is much less evidence about usage at the article level – further research would be particularly useful. In this respect, there could be value in analysing how researchers cite material, i.e. whether they read full articles, abstracts, second hand reports or other material as a basis for making citations. This could be interesting in the light of moves towards metrics-based approaches to research evaluation.
* The study pointed to evidence about the difficulties that many researchers experience in accessing material. Therefore there is a case for a detailed analysis about the why researchers experience such difficulties – and as a possible corollary, an examination about whether/how researchers alter their behaviour because of access problems.
* There may be much merit in such further research, but it is important to set up an approach to define an agenda and prioritise the work that is most usefully required. Inevitably, this implies a dialogue and a collaborative approach between all stakeholders. Open sharing of data is also important. Such an approach could be extended to cover the whole of the scholarly communications system, with publishing in the context of this.
* In this respect, identifying the views of researchers themselves poses a big challenge. Who speaks for them? To what extent are they developing new publishing models of their own? And are they interested in the sort of issues raised by the study? Learned societies are likely to have a role in such debates, and the RIN itself can act as a vehicle for highlighting the needs and concerns of the research community."

Technorati Tags: openaccess

RIN workshop: the fuller account part 3: Paul Ayris, Astrid Wissenburg, Sally Morris and Richard Woodward, and general debate

After some tea, Paul Ayris, Astrid Wissenburg, Sally Morris and Richard Woodward gave four short presentations.

Technorati Tags: openaccess

RIN workshop: the fuller account part two: Jeffrey Aronson

Jeffrey Aronson, reader in clinical pharmacology at Oxford, said it was for the audience, not him, to answer questions. There are, he said, only two types of committee: those that need expert chairs, those that don’t. The British Pharmacological Society which runs two academic journals, the British Journal of Pharmacology published by Nature Publishing Group and the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, published by Blackwell Science [that would be Wiley now-TR]; apart from their intrinsic value to the discipline, the income from these journals supports the society's educational activities. Since the advent of the web we are all working much harder, but there are concomitant problems of overload and trash. He gave, in his own words, a diatribe against the term open access which he found unhelpful. The issue, he said, is who pays, author reader. At the moment there is an 85/15% split between the two models. Open access can cover a multitude of models.

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RIN workshop: the fuller account part one: Richard Charkin and Michael Jubb

The main points of the workshop seem to me to be these:
We do not know a great deal about scholarly publishing, even at basic quantitative levels, nor about researchers behaviour. Specifically, the true cost of publishing a paper remains unknown
I wonder if anyone could manage to hold a discussion on open access without using the word model? It smacks of the argot of prostitution to me.
For the report itself see: http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-scholarly-journals; for comment on it try this Technorati search

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Workshop on the RIN/DTI/RCUK Evidence-based Analysis of Data on Scholarly Journal Publishing

Yesterday I went to the Research Information Network's Workshop on the RIN/DTI/RCUK Evidence-based Analysis of Data on Scholarly Journal Publishing, published last month. There's a full account in the offing, as soon as I make sense of my notes. I can sum it up though with the much-used phrase, "more research needed".
The full report may be seen here: http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-scholarly-journals. Stevan Harnad published a critique, feeling that the report reflected the interests of publishers more than those of researchers : http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/142-guid.html.

Technorati Tags: institutionalrepositories, openaccess

Sussex Research Online in beta

A blog about the development of a beta version of the University of Sussex's Institutional Repository has gone online. it may be found at: http://researchonline.lib.sussex.ac.uk/. The repository itself, in beta, is at: http://eprints.lib.sussex.ac.uk/

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