Consultation on Open Access

  • 08 Mar 2013 18:56
    Message # 1237921

    The LAGB intends to submit a response to the current consultation co-ordinated by HEFCE on behalf of the UK higher education funding bodies on Open Access and submissions to the REF post-2014. The consultation is based on a statement of the developing intentions of the four UK higher education funding bodies available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/openaccess/.

    In essence, the funding bodies are proposing to limit submissions to future REFs to items that have been made available via gold or green open access as soon as possible after publication. In initial discussions, the following points have been raised: 
    • given the funding made available for article processing charges, realtively few outputs in linguistics will be via gold open access
    • researchers without an academic position (including PhD students seeking to build a career and retired staff) will have no access to gold open access
    • choice of journal may become limited by open access options making it more important that place of publication is not interpreted as evidence of quality
    • some linguistics journals will never be compliant with open access (particularly small specialist ones and those produced by small publishers in countries with no tradition of open access)
    • there is concern about adoption of the Creative Commons CC–BY licence, which permits reproduction of publications and derivative works with only general acknowledgement of the source
    • on the other hand, too restrictive a licence may prevent development of linguistic infrastructure (corpora etc.)
    • there is currently no business model for open access monographs, and introduction of compulsory green open access for monographs depends on one emerging almost immediately
    • given long lead-in times for publications in linguistics (where 2 years from submission to publication of a journal article is normal), any requirements should not apply retrospectively to items submitted before new rules come into place
    • the longer-term goal of open data raises a number of issues in linguistics involving third-party copyright on textual material and data gathered from interviews with human informants
    Discussion on the LAGB forum (http://www.lagb.org.uk/forum) is welcomed on these or additional points relating to the consultation. The deadline is tight, so please make comments on the forum in the next week or so, by 18 March, so that the committee can collate a response.
    Last modified: 11 Mar 2013 09:33 | Deleted user
  • 14 Mar 2013 10:35
    Reply # 1242411 on 1237921
    Deleted user
    Can anyone explain briefly how the proposal would monitor/increase/have anything to do with assessing the quality of the publications and researcher, which I understand to be the REF's goal?
  • 14 Mar 2013 13:43
    Reply # 1242488 on 1237921
    It's natural for there to be teething problems with a proposal like this. The big question, still largely unanswered, remains: who is going to pay the APCs?

    However, I don't think issues of implementation should prevent the UK from going forward with a scheme that removes the tremendous inequalities that are present in the current system. Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible to the taxpayer, and access to knowledge should not be restricted to those who are either a) affiliated to a university or b) rich. That is the common-sense motive behind open access, and it's worth bearing in mind as we consider the practicalities.

    I'd like to add a few factual points to clear up potential misunderstandings:
    • 'Gold' OA does not necessarily mean that APCs will be charged. That use of the term is specific to the Finch Report, which wrongly assumes (for the most part) that APCs are the only way to fund OA. Gold OA simply means that articles are immediately made available to all, regardless of business model.
    • APCs are not the only business model available. Another possibility is for learned societies and/or institutions to fund the costs of running a journal. This is the case, for instance, with the journals running under the eLanguage programme, including the very successful Semantics & Pragmatics, and my own Journal of Historical Syntax. These operate a no-fees gold OA policy.

    If the above factual points are accepted, the first three bullet points from the original post lose their force, as they all depend upon the assumption that APCs are the only realistic business model for Gold OA journals. Also, the continuing existence of journals like the Journal of Historical Syntax demonstrates that it is possible for small specialist journals to be OA-compliant.

    On a less factual note: for no-fees gold OA to work, a rethink of the costs involved with journal publication is necessary. For a modern e-journal, these are vanishingly low: virtually the only costs involved are web hosting (which costs peanuts) and typesetting. A move towards OA therefore needs to take into account what the Finch Report terms 'disintermediation'. This involves reconsidering the role of for-profit academic publishers, who demonstrably add very little value to the publishing process.

    • CC-BY licenses allow the author to retain copyright for their own work, unlike the current policies operated by e.g. Elsevier and John Benjamins.

    This is important, as it is a clear benefit to the individual author over the current model. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that CC-BY will cause attribution problems; attribution is attribution, and if it is not present authors will have legal recourse. See this excellent blog post by Martin Eve for more on this issue.

    • Business models for open access monographs in linguistics are in development as we speak. The first such endeavour has already been founded by Stefan Müller in Berlin, and manuscripts have already been submitted.

    In sum, I think that linguistics has nothing to gain from standing in the way of this development, and that we should support it wholeheartedly.

    My only qualm about the HEFCE document is that it does not make provision for any embargo period whatsoever. Some journals (Language, for instance) are moving to a model in which there is a twelve-month embargo period, which would count as OA under the RCUK's current definition but not (necessarily) under the HEFCE definition given in point 11 here. Since HEFCE have stated that they welcome advice, I suggest the LAGB advises them to treat articles with a one-year embargo period as OA for the purposes of the REF. Embargo periods are not ideal, but they would allow for some flexibility during a transitional period.

  • 14 Mar 2013 13:58
    Reply # 1242507 on 1237921
    Posted on behalf of Kasia Jaszczolt

    Thank you for distributing this, it is a very important change and I am amazed that we haven't been informed about it through the university channels: so far I have only heard rumours. My view is that in principle it is a very welcome move in that information should be distributed freely. However, the timescale that HEFCE is proposing is simply not feasible. Projects that are due to be published in 2014 are already in progress and in the case of large monographs they are already near the completion stage and the contractual agreements for their publication are not reversible. Also, it takes time for researchers, especially in humanities, to explore new possibilities of publication as well as new sources for funding if the gold route is to be pursued.For example, new funds may have to be thought through at the university and college level and new sponsors of research identified. This will take much longer than the remaining nine months and, as I said, in the case of work in progress, it just won't apply at all. In my own case, I have signed contracts for books and book chapters for two years in advance and it looks like under current proposal I will be at the mercy of the publisher and their response to open access as to whether this work will count towards the next ref. I hope this helps.

    With best wishes,
    Kasia

    Kasia M. Jaszczolt, Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, MML, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA. Professorial Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics, Newnham College, Cambridge CB3 9DA, United Kingdom. Tel. +44 1223 335744; http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/~kmj21
    Last modified: 14 Mar 2013 18:21 | Anonymous member
  • 15 Mar 2013 08:40
    Reply # 1243274 on 1237921

    I find the anonymous 1242488 reply very helpful. Just two points from that post:

    • 1.     “access to knowledge should not be restricted to those who are either a) affiliated to a university or b) rich.” Exactly, and this includes access for colleagues in parts of the world where research conditions are dismal. Making research results freely available is something that wealthy countries and (relatively) wealthy institutions can offer fairly easily.
    • 2.     Since HEFCE have stated that they welcome advice, I suggest the LAGB advises them to treat articles with a one-year embargo period as OA for the purposes of the REF.” This is the type of small and sensible suggestion that might just get taken notice of.

    Greville Corbett

  • 16 Mar 2013 05:57
    Reply # 1244018 on 1237921
    This thread concerns Open Access, but the HEFCE letter also mentions Open Data (paras 24-25).  They invite comments on their provisional decision that "while we expect to see considerable progress in the provision of access to data which are pertinent to those publications submitted in a future REF, we do not consider it feasible at present to make this a formal requirement".  The template of areas for advice does not include Open Data, so nothing imminent seems to be planned.  We might decide to let sleeping dogs lie. 

    Not that I think Open Data is a bad idea in principle:  amongst other things it can help to expose poor research, clearly a desideratum.  However, in our field there are obvious difficulties in making it an absolute requirement.  The context I have in mind is corpus linguistics, where corpora frequently contain copyright material and cannot be made publicly available.  Other colleagues have mentioned fieldwork notes and recordings which they could not in good conscience make generally available.

    For all I know, these sorts of concern may have contributed to the current HEFCE position, and perhaps no unreasonable requirement for open data is likely to be imposed on our research community in the foreseeable future.  I simply pose the  question:  is it in our interests to raise such concerns at this stage?  I'd be interested to know whether other linguists have considered this matter.

    David Denison
  • 16 Mar 2013 12:36
    Reply # 1244108 on 1237921
    To respond to David (D.): I think it is useful to mention concerns surrounding Open Data in linguistics at this stage even though nothing specific is being proposed yet. It is likely that Open Data requirements will be considered further and probably introduced formally at some stage. As David points out, the two areas of concern for us are fieldwork notes and recordings, and corpus data. Much of the debate in this whole area has been driven by the sciences and there is a sense that humanities should just follow the procedures that have been proposed in the sciences. I think it is important to point out areas where we are different and can't simply follow. Copyright of third-party material prevents release of data in linguistics and some other subjects. Anonymity of data collected in fieldwork is much harder for us to achieve and is not analogous to, for instance, patient anonymity in biomedical research. For these reasons, I think it's important to say from the start that there may be practical limits on the extent to which we can support Open Data.
  • 17 Mar 2013 20:45
    Reply # 1244842 on 1237921
    Anonymous
    Although I agree with the bulk of George's comments, I feel compelled to weigh in on the topic of APCs. I think it would be a good idea for LAGB to be (yet another) society pointing out the importance of institutional funding in a field like ours and the potential impact on linguists in less wealthy and/or smaller institutions, which are likely to be unable and/or unwilling to commit the sort of resources that are required by OA publishing in linguistics now and will presumably continue to be required at least in the next few years (which amounts to a good chunk of the next REF period). Ventures such as eLanguage and the Journal of Historical Syntax are extremely welcome, but until the infrastructure gets up and running a very sizeable share of OA publishing in linguistics will have to go through the hybrid model offered by Springer, Elsevier et al., where the APCs are quite hefty. (It might also be useful to point out that, since much of the research in linguistics is 'cheap', in that even where it is supported by external funding, the external funds are no necessarily very large, paying for APCs from grant money - viable in many sciences - is less likely to be effective for us: putting in an APC provision in a small grant may jack up the total by quite a considerable percentage.)
  • 18 Mar 2013 22:54
    Reply # 1245910 on 1237921
    Deleted user
    Posted on behalf of Martin Haspelmath

    I have comments on two of the items on this list (as well as a general comment below):

    (1) comment on open-access monographs:

    Stefan Müller and I have been working intensively on a business model for no-fees Gold open-access monographs (see http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/OALI/). The basic idea is to take book publication back into the hands of academics themselves, and to show that the huge costs charged by for-profit companies are not warranted. Over 200 linguists have joined our initiative, so this seems to be the way of the future. Nonprofit publishing is far more efficient than publication by huge shareholder-owned companies (see Stuart Shieber's detailed discussion of this at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/01/29/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies/). In the longer term, scientific publication should be seen as very similar to doing basic science itself: Both are best supported by public funding, because there is no functioning market and they cannot lead to justified profits. But both lead to prestige, so public (or charitable) funders have a strong incentive to invest in them (see http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2013/02/14/science-publication-should-be-seen-as-a-public-service-just-like-science-itself/).

    (2) comment on the passage "some linguistics journals will never be compliant with open access (particularly small specialist ones and those produced by small publishers in countries with no tradition of open access)":

    Actually, the OPPOSITE is true: The major journals in countries like the UK, the US and Germany are not open access, but the linguistics journals in countries like Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Finland, Taiwan ARE open-access:

    http://www.linguistics.fi/skyjol-en.shtml
    http://hrcak.srce.hr/suvremena-lingvistika
    http://versita.com/lp/
    http://www.kirj.ee/lu/
    http://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/publ_j_en.asp.htm

    This is a general trend, found in all fields. The Brazilian journal platform SciELO (http://www.scielo.org/php/level.php?lang=en&component=42&item=1) has many hundreds of open-access journals from developing countries.

    This is easy to explain: Open-access publication on the internet is much cheaper than traditional print publication, and in the less rich countries, the big shareholder-owned companies like Informa (Taylor & Francis), Wiley and Elsevier have not bought up everything yet. So the public funders have decided to make the journals open-access, because otherwise they would have no readers. In the rich Western countries, where we have big library budgets, scholars can just ignore the problem and continue to publish with the usual companies, even though their business model is extremely inefficient (see Stuart Shieber's post mentioned above).

    So we should emulate the Estonians and Brazilians: We should submit our papers to no-fees ("Platinum") open-access journals, and we should start new ones, such as the Journal of Historical Linguistics mentioned in the 1242488 reply. The support can come from institutions (such as universities or research institutes), charities, or scholarly associations such as LAGB. In the future, open-access journal platforms such as Revues.org can make it even easier for decentralized journals to operate. This would mean venturing into uncharted territory, but other organizations such as SLE and DGfS are also discussing similar steps.

    Martin Haspelmath, Leipzig
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