China Syndrome: Paying For Gold OA Before Mandating Green OA Wastes Money and Delays OA
Stevan Harnad
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/677-guid.html
Re: "Chinese Academy of Sciences embraces open access"
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/presscenter/pressreleases?pr=20091209
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has joined a costly prepaid
"membership" deal with one Gold OA journal-fleet publisher while
continuing to neglect to mandate cost-free Green OA for all the rest
of its research output.
This is brilliant marketing by the publisher but a myopic waste of
money (and especially time) for China.
The misapprehension that this token gesture somehow represents a
substantive leap forward for Chinese OA will now likely delay for
several years more China's doing the real, substantive thing that it
could so easily do to make its entire research output OA: mandate
Green OA self-archiving rather than just squandering scarce funds to
pay needlessly for a small amount of Gold OA in one publisher's
journal-fleet.
If anyone could easily mandate Green OA nationally, it is China. (This
is not necessarily a virtue!)
But instead China too -- like the Netherlands (and U California, U.
Goettingen, Max-Planck Institutes, the COPE members, and indeed
SCOAP3) -- has got caught up in global gold fever (which all amounts
to much ado about very little OA at high cost in both money and lost
time -- and it does not scale).
The CAS "membership" cannot be paying for an annual quota of articles
that successfully pass peer review. (How can that be decided in
advance?) So "membership" is just a preferential discount -- 50% off
the list price -- on one publisher's standard Gold OA publication fee,
should any article happen to be accepted for publication in any one of
its fleet of journals.
This is certainly a marketing triumph for the publisher, but the
client benefits are far less clear; for CAS authors could instead
submit to (and if accepted, publish in) any (subscription) journal in
the world (and most OA journals), at no cost, and still have OA for
their published articles -- by just self-archiving them. And China
could afford incomparably more OA that (cost-free) way...
Or have wires unwittingly got crossed here, notionally -- in a country
that's rightly eager to enhance its publishing footprint worldwide --
between paying to get Open Access and paying to get published?
Stevan Harnad
Iryna Kuchma
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has a coherent Green OA strategy. In 2004, Dr. LU Yongxiang, President of CAS and Dr. CHEN Yiyu, Director of National Natural Science Foundation of China signed Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. National Science Library (NSL) is an institution promoting OA in CAS (e.g. via the Chinese Open Access Portal: http://www.open-access.net.cn/). In February 2009 NSL launched a Knowledge repository (http://ir.las.ac.cn/) and mandated the NSL members to deposit all their articles 1 month after the publication. The deposited articles will be the indicators of research performance during the annual performance evaluation, which impacts salaries, tenure and promotion. NSL also provides organisational and technological framework for a CAS wide IR infrastructure helping every institute to set up an IR, implementing a harvester-based cross-repository search and browse service to enhance exposure of the CAS’s research outputs and building blocks for national or international wide repository infrastructure. 39 CAS institutes participate in the project and 29 of them have already deployed IRs (these figures are from October 2009). NSL provides a policy mechanisms and technology support to them. So we can expect more mandates in CAS in the coming year when China will be hosting the 8th Berlin Open Access Conference.
References:
1. Open Access Practice in National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science, written by LI Lin, LIU Xiwen and ZHANG Xiaolin, NSL, CAS, presented at the 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly: Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage, 23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy: http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/142-lin-en.pdf
2. Introduction to the Cooperation between CAS and DRIVER by Jianxia Ma, Xiaolin Zhang and Zhongming Zhu presented at DRIVER Confederation Summit, October 20, 2009, Ghent University Library: http://www.driver-repository.eu/PublicDocs/DNET-implementations-CAS.ppt
3. China and OA: Welcoming and Contributing by Zhang Xiaoling presented at the 7th Berlin Open Access Conference, Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, 2-4 December 2009: http://www.berlin7.org/IMG/ppt/B8-China.ppt
With best wishes,
Iryna Kuchma
eIFL Open Access program manager
eIFL.net
2009/12/20 Stevan Harnad <amsci...@gmail.com>