RE: OA Now

[John Ober <john.ober@ucop.edu>]

[complete; previous message was truncated]

I'd like to offer a quick response to David Goodman's 
characterization that the University of California faculty have 
"ignored" a collectively constructed "policy." It may lead the 
list to consider or discuss more about the differences between 
principles, resolutions/intentions, policies, and verifiable 
actions or about the ability to build "coalitions" as Richard 
Fienman first inquired.

As a matter of accuracy, it is important to track both what is 
and is not "policy" as well as what the 10 separate UC campuses 
have done and what the university as a whole (and/or its faculty 
as a whole) has done. Peter Suber's blog and newsletter have 
covered these well, and a scan of 
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ also gives a 
snapshot. Of course faculty resolutions, including several 
candidates from 2003, as well as concomitant faculty actions 
(such as boycotts and refusals to donate labor to over-priced 
journals), have provided a very good foundation from which UC has 
taken further action.

These further actions, certainly no one of which is unique to UC, 
include, among many others, principled negotiations for content, 
support for alternative publishers and publishing business 
models, creation of the eScholarship repository and publishing 
platform (which hosts several OA journals), and support for 
value-based metrics such as the Bergstrom-McAfee indices.

Interestingly, the recent UC faculty-authored white paper titled 
"Responding to the Challenges Facing Scholarly Communication: The 
Case of Journal Publishing" (link below) includes further actions 
reminiscent of Richard Fienman's description 
(http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/committees/scsc/reports.html). 
Other actions are called for in the companion papers to that one, 
the most explicit of which proposes specific new copyright 
management practices for UC faculty.

I would enjoy seeing this thread produce some more reports of, or 
speculation about, the formation and actions of a "coalition of 
librarians, editors and end-users."

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John Ober, Director, Policy, Planning and Outreach
Office of Scholarly Communication
California Digital Library
University of California
  john.ober@ucop.edu  tel: (510) 987-0425   fax: (510) 893-5212
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At 07:44 PM 3/28/2006 -0500, David Goodman wrote:
> Dear Richard,
>
> Your last paragraph proposes a perfectly sensible course of 
> action, and similar policies were even possible in the print 
> era. The University of California adopted just such a policy in 
> 2003, with the enthuastic support of its faculty* -- who then 
> proceeded to ignore it.
>
> It is often an easy question what a university ought to do, but 
> It's quite another matter getting them to do it.
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> Associate Professor
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> Long Island University
> dgoodman@liu.edu
> dgoodman@princeton.edu
>
> * http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#actions
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Richard Feinman
> Sent: Mon 3/27/2006 6:43 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: OA Now
>
> > How could this be done? A coalition of librarians, editors and
> > end-users could demand that existing publishers do this or could
> > move operations to an existing journal.  In other words, the
> > prestige of a journal is dependent on the collective opinions of
> > end-users, authors, reviewers and editors (many of whom are the
> > same people).  A group decision to define an OA journal as the
> > premier journal in a field is within their power. Journals that
> > refused to compete would be avoided by this group.
> > When could this be done?  How about now?
> > Richard D. Feinman, Professor of Biochemistry
> > (718) 871-1374
> > FAX: (718) 270-3316