For the record
Bruce D’Arcus explains faculty publication defaults. Correcting a few details (and chanting “charitable reading, charitable reading, charitable reading” to myself like a mantra):
- My job is not to encourage faculty to publish in OA journals, though I’m certainly happy when they do and I plug OA journals when possible. I encourage them to self-archive in MPOW’s institutional repository, the running of which is my job. (Maybe I don’t talk about my job enough on CavLec? Nah, that can’t be it.)
- Open access versus prestige of publication venue is rather less an issue for self-archiving than for “gold-OA” publication. Many extremely high-prestige journals permit self-archiving, and there are ways to protect one’s self-archiving rights (such as author’s addenda) that do not require careful choice of publication venue.
- With respect, I believe I adequately understand the roots of faculty inertia regarding open access, though I haven’t always used that understanding as well as I ought. I live with faculty inertia every day of my working life. I have read and continue to read everything I can get my hands on about faculty scholarly-communication behavior, and I regularly interact with faculty at my institution, and librarians both at my institution and worldwide. I myself am subject to some of the same publication pressures as faculty. In other words: I get it. Really.
You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I’ve heard about this. The best one, perhaps, concerns a prominent scholar in a field that generally knows better who huffed, “I wrote them, so of course I own the copyright!” about his entire research output, and could not be convinced otherwise even by copyright statements on the printed works themselves. Do I believe the story? Heck yes, I do.
It’s not typical, though. Typical is genial cluelessness and unwillingness to investigate, much less read publishing agreements. I’ve run into one hell of a lot of typical. In fairness, copyright is complicated and not fun. Confusion is perfectly understandable. Deliberate incuriosity is not.
In other news, Harnad asks a question I’d quite like to see answered. While I still think Eysenbach’s exploratory study was extremely well-designed, the weaknesses Harnad zeroes in on are genuine, exacerbated by the not-universal circumstance of PNAS serving its journal from its own website (as opposed to a journal aggregator or portal), and by the short length of time covered in the study.
There’s a lot of room for more work in this area; plenty of interesting variables to test. I’m happy to see the productivity of this exchange.