Macquarie University opens up access to its academics' research papers (1 Viewer)

[AsyLum]

MACQUARIE University has joined the small club of Australian institutions that require academics to make their research papers freely available over the Internet.

"We think it's a blow for academic freedom and for universal access to scholarly work,'' said Steven Schwartz, Macquarie's vice chancellor.

Under a new policy, academics must send a copy of journal articles to Macquarie's open access repository.

The open access movement seeks to maximise the public benefit from research by disseminating it beyond subscription-based journals, which are costly.

The movement gained pace this year with institutions such as Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the British funding agency the Welcome Trust adopting policies that require, rather than simply encourage, researchers to use online repositories.

In 2004 the Queensland University of Technology became the first Australian institution to usher in a mandatory open access policy. Charles Sturt University followed suit last January.

Professor Schwartz said most journal publishers seemed relaxed about the rise of online repositories. "Some don't care, some have embargo periods, some want you to request permission,'' he said.

The Macquarie policy applies to referred articles accepted for publication.

Macquarie's repository: www.researchonline.mq.edu.au

More on open access in next Wednesday's Higher Education Supplement

Interesting move, could only be for the better I'd imagine.

 

[xeuyrawp]

Interesting move, could only be for the better I'd imagine.

Wooh, awesome.

I'm with you on that one, and I think everyone in my department would agree. Based on consideration of the following issues, of course:

1. Dissemination through traditional channels still existed,
2. some sort of lag between traditional publication and free online publication (at least a week, I'd say).

That being said, I can't find one decent article on there as of yet. If you're going to say "give it time" then I shall, but I wouldn't be surprised if academics simply got around the constraints; for example, published articles in their "own time" and under the title "independent scholar".

 

[AsyLum]

Give it a few months, I'll have my paper in there fo sho

 

[iambored]

So i couldn't focus enough on the message to work out whether it's free for all or free for uni students to access (even though we'd have access to most of the papers anyway) but if it's free for all and requires all mac lecturers to put all their papers up i think that's fantastic.

 

[Cyan_phoeniX]

And the Journal's don't care, eh? I would have thought they'd be super-pissed. I think it is a good idea nevertheless.

 

[xeuyrawp]

And the Journal's don't care, eh? I would have thought they'd be super-pissed. I think it is a good idea nevertheless.

You have to remember that most revenue of most journals is taken in by library and other institution subscriptions. From a financial point of view, this is not going to dent the journals, as they will all continued to be subscribed to.

Furthermore, it's been shown that even if things are freely available, people will still want to subscribe to/pay for them - eg newspapers and magazines which have content free online but still enjoy huge hard copy and subscription sales.

It's really interesting from a psychological point of view - mass media companies were really anxious about their sales with the advent of the internet, but people still do pay for hard-copy stuff.

 

[AsyLum]

I think that music and cinemas, more than any other mediums, had the most concern, primarily because of the methods of consumption.

Print, television (barring time-delay and international programs which is a completely different problem of temporal access), and radio control their information/content as well as the nature of delivery (newspapers/television sets/radio sets respectively).

Music/film however becomes more problematic because of the way technology has enabled more mobile consumption, which has really put their traditional holds on the medium under immense pressure.

(This however over-simplifies but I don't want to write another thesis...just yet)

 

[xeuyrawp]

Bah, I can't find anything relevant, yet. Why won't they work faster? *turns up the heat*

 

[gdt]

You have to remember that most revenue of most journals is taken in by library and other institution subscriptions. From a financial point of view, this is not going to dent the journals, as they will all continued to be subscribed to.

Furthermore, it's been shown that even if things are freely available, people will still want to subscribe to/pay for them - eg newspapers and magazines which have content free online but still enjoy huge hard copy and subscription sales.

It's really interesting from a psychological point of view - mass media companies were really anxious about their sales with the advent of the internet, but people still do pay for hard-copy stuff.

Academic libraries don't pay for hard copy journals much anymore. Hard copy takes space, and library space is expensive. Too expensive for a journal which may sit on a shelf for a decade before being borrowed.

Most academic libraries subscribe the to full text databases of the major journal publishers (paying maybe $20K pa per publisher). The academic libraries in Australia collaborate to ensure that there's one hard copy of particularly important journals available for inter-library loan, just in case the publisher goes broke.

For the past thirty years the academic journal publishers have been rorting universities. They get their inputs for free -- papers, peer review and editorial -- authors have to pay to get their papers published (the "author subsidy"), and publishers get to charge mightily for their outputs (eg: US$665pa for NEJM to an individual, US$50K for a large uni).

The rort to the taxpayer is even higher. They've paid for the research, they pay to publish it, and they have to pay again if they want to read the results.

The Open Access movement's objective is that publications are free, so that all people can read the results of research; that is, all people can participate in science and technology, which is such a key part of our society.

Archives such as Macquarie's are important to this end. Rather than pay squillions to a full text database, you can simply use Google to find the full text of the paper. Although let's not credit MQ too much, as they're rather at the tail end of the movement and were given Research Quality Framework funding to establish the archive.

Pioneers like QUT faced strong opposition, had to fund their archive themselves, and actually lost some government funding (because some high-status journals didn't allow any copies of the paper other than that in the journal, so QUT academics had to publish in lower-status journals, and the research funding formula punished them for publishing in those lower status journals).

Also important are new journals, based on the principles of Open Access. The Public Library of Science journals are notable. These are full peer-reviewed journals. But they are are published to a free-to-use web site rather than on paper.

Of course, if you buy into the "psychology of paper" argument, you can always print the paper from the website. In practice, printing from the website is more convenient than photocopying a paper journal, which used to be the way to get a private copy your could underline, write marginalia, and keep.

Finally, journals are becoming less important. It takes three years to get a paper published. In some fields that is a lifetime. Literally. The medical response to the HIV pandemic was compromised by the unwillingness of JAMA and NEJM to publish HIV-relevant papers within a timeframe where the papers could be useful to other researchers.

These days, science is increasingly done through "preprints" -- researchers submit their paper to a journal and simultaneously put it on their website. There are "journals of mention" rather than "journals of record", there are mailing lists, forums, blogs, and so on. Conferences have become a lot more important, especially as conference papers are peer reviewed. An annual conference will turn around a paper in about five months; that is, 20% of the time of a journal.

In short, the traditional journal is dead.

And yeah, the for-profit publishers of journals and full text databases are upset about their gravy train coming to an end.

 

[xeuyrawp]

Academic libraries don't pay for hard copy journals much anymore.

Meh, started responding to your post, but clearly you have an axe to grind. Somehow, I think you've never come at this from the perspective of social science journals - all of which seem to go against your model.

Then again, the natural science journals that I follow seem to go against your model as well...

To be honest, I cbf responding to anything past this:

Too expensive for a journal which may sit on a shelf for a decade before being borrowed.