11. April 2017 – Archivalia

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/04/10/rather-than-simply-moving-from-paying-to-read-to-paying-to-publish-its-time-for-a-european-open-access-platform/

Zur üblichen Gold-OA-Strategie schreiben die Autoren zutreffend:

Firstly, this strategy reproduces the dependence of science and humanities on commercial publishers. Academia has long suffered from the oligopolistic market structure in scholarly publishing, where a handful of dominant publishers and their questionable pricing policies have led to severe financial strains on the budgets of public libraries. The current strategy will simply relocate the costs from libraries to research institutions and funding agencies while the market power remains with the same commercial publishers. The DEAL negotiations, in which German research organisations have repeatedly failed to come to an acceptable agreement with big commercial publishers, illustrate the limited negotiating power of the academic players. Sustaining this imbalance will not lead to an efficient and fair market for scientific outputs

Secondly, the large-scale gold open access strategy reproduces the dependence on an outdated publishing format: the academic article. There is an elephant in the room: scholars publish far too many articles and only a fraction of these have academic impact, let alone economic, political, or societal impact. Current endeavours offer virtually no effective incentive to cut down on articles and focus more on valuable alternative scientific products such as data or software, as well as science transfer services. Moreover, if commercial publishers are paid for each article published, they become incentivised to further increase their number of publications. Instead of capitalising on the potential of multimediality and hypertext to improve knowledge dissemination and acquisition, we will likely still work with a highly inflexible format, the article PDF. Who assumes we still need the look and feel of paper?