Thursday, May 03, 2012

Draft of a Proposal for a UC #OpenAccess policy - comments wanted

Just got sent this email
Dear Colleagues, 
On behalf of the Academic Senate Library Committee (ASLC), I am asking for your comments on the attached proposed Open Access Publishing Policy for the University of California.. All faculty, including Academic Federation members are invited to post their comments on the Academic Senate web-forum site at http://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/Forums/index.cfm?Forum_ID=67. Please go to this site to submit your feedback. 
Briefly, the issue is this: the faculty of the University of California, in conjunction with the University Committee on Libraries and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), is proposing a new OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING POLICY that will apply to the dissemination of all scholarly work. UCOLASC is seeking feedback from all campuses on this issue in order to inform a final version of the policy which will be presented to the Universitywide Academic Senate sometime this calendar year. 
The ASLC would appreciate your comments by Wednesday, May 9, 2012. Your ideas will then be shared with UCOLASC in time for its May 25th meeting. The web-forum will remain open substantially past May 9, and we will endeavor to include as many comments up to May 25 as possible. 
Sincerely, 
Brian H. Kolner 
Academic Senate Library Committee

The relate to a draft of a proposal for a new Open Access Publishing Policy being circulated at the University of California. The draft of the proposal can be found here.

UC Davis (and I presume other UCs) are now soliciting comments on the proposal. I would love to here / read comments from anyone. Personally, I think the policy is way to weak as it allows exceptions to be granted ...

6 comments:

  1. This is a really awesome project!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jonathan,
    So are you against the exceptions on principal or because you think that journals would actually force people to bow out?

    Graham

    ReplyDelete
  3. It seems completely lame Graham. Why introduce a policy and then describe how easily it can be circumvented?

    To quote

    "The University of California will waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by a Faculty member."

    And then they describe the meaning of this (to them):

    (The option to opt out of this policy is absolute and rests with the faculty member. Faculty members may either waive the open access requirement completely for a particular article, or delay it for a specified time. This opt-out requirement is simple to implement and in order to allow faculty to ultimately determine which materials should be widely available. It is possible that publishers could abuse this option, by refusing to publish unless the faculty opts out. But many publishers already allow open access deposits (so-called “green OA”), and we hope that the policy encourages others to do so as well. Note also that this waiver is intended to apply to the open access requirement and not to the deposit requirement (see below); as such it may make sense to list the deposit requirement first, and then the open access requirement second so as to avoid confusion on this point.)

    So - we have an open access policy unless someone doesn't want to follow it. No teeth. Weak.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As weak as this?

    http://bbsrc.ac.uk/news/policy/2012/120430-n-open-access-publishing-update.aspx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "as long as the journal allows this" ... f$&*# ... WTF? ... why are the journals in charge?

      Delete
  5. Its this simple, NIH and the NSF are spending somewhere around 20 billion dollars a year in publishing. If this cos were even reduced by 1/2 (which it could be through purely online publication processes, and internalization of publications by Universities), over 4 years that would allow for 50,000 new 1 million dollar RO1's to be awarded. If those kinds of numbers and savings don't turn people's heads.....

    ReplyDelete

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