Tenure Online

Gary Shapiro, Tenure Online, New York Sun, November 3, 2006. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt by Peter Suber (Moving online and OA, OA News):

[M]ore scholars — particularly younger ones — are posting their research online before publishing it in refereed print journals, said [Sylvain Cappell, professor of mathematics at New York University]. "It's an opportunity to get response and reaction from other frontline researchers."

The Internet, which has made the cost of distributing information virtually vanish, Mr. Cappell said, has also exacerbated the overlapping tensions of online versus print, open access versus paid, and refereed versus non-refereed. Formerly, editorial boards controlled the distribution of research results. Now, he said, "Electronics is bringing disintermediation to the world of research as much as to the world of travel agents."

In the old days, scholars might mimeograph and circulate copies of their work to a handful of colleagues before it appeared in a refereed print journal. Now scholars can post research in an open-access archive and then publish it in an online or print journal, Mr. Cappell said....

The senior director of open-access and journal publishing at Springer, which publishes about 1,300 scientific journals, Jan Velterop, said that peer-reviewed e-journals and print journals were not essentially different. The electronic format is just "the post office," he said, describing how that content is delivered....

Societies and publishers have also begun to wade into open-access publishing. Two of the APS journals are available only in open-access electronic format. Mr. Blume said APS retains copyright in its journals, but gives authors of an article the right to "do what they want with it, as long as a fee isn't charged. If a fee is charged, they need our permission." ...

Many articles submitted to open-access repositories like arxiv.org, which are not peer reviewed, are ultimately published in peer-reviewed journals such as those of the APS, Mr. Blume said. The physics community sees such prior preprint publication as an extension of the tradition of widespread distribution made possible by the Xerox revolution, Mr. Blume said. But he said there are other science journals that will not accept articles that have been previously posted on open-access archives.

Still, "one could speculate that over time, the shift from print to electronic distribution of research results will shift the emphasis from refereeing to reviewing," Mr. Cappell said. In an electronic age of instantaneous delivery, he said, "there may be less an issue of control and more an issue of reception and reaction."...

Educating Authors to Streamline Open Access Archiving

Dorothea Salo, Feedback, Caveat Lector, November 8, 2006. Excerpt by Peter Suber:

Clearing rights on this pile of papers [to deposit in the institutional repository] is no joke. What should I do with a 20-year-old article in a journal that no longer exists from a publisher that’s been sold two or three times? ...

I’m erring on the side of inclusion and access, with an immediate-withdraw-on-controversy policy (which has saved my bacon before, though not in any copyright disputes) to back me up....

Sure, they’re just-as-illegally up in plain sight on the author’s own piece of the university web, but publishers who tread lightly around their authors won’t hesitate to come down like a ton of bricks on me. Just ask your local e-reserves librarian.

I intend to treat this as a teachable moment, and I strongly recommend that other repository managers do likewise. I’m keeping track of items I can’t use and why I can’t use them. The list will go back to the author when I’m finally done with this pile....

I shall also mention that some of the items I have to reject because they are publisher PDFs can be archived in final-draft form. SHERPA/ROMEO will figure in this statement. And of course I shall offer to look at future publishing agreements with or for him, to keep this problem from occurring in future. We’ll see what happens.

Most faculty do not understand how scholarly publishing works, nor do they realize how what they sign affects what they and others can legally do with their work....Triply do they not realize the control they have over the situation. Those few faculty who do understand all this are mostly scholarly-society brass who tell their colleagues to sign the nice agreement, no, you don’t need to read it!

Despite the extra paperwork and faculty ire involved, repository managers need to acquaint faculty with how much of their work is disappearing into the toll-access abyss, and what they can do about it....Moreover, any repository whose policy on copyright violations does not include mediating between publisher and author is missing a trick. Don’t just “disappear” material that shouldn’t have been posted. Make sure the author knows what happened and why. We have to educate. And we have to educate at pain-points, or nothing will change.