dim 13 sept 2009
Dans son blog The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication, Stuart Shieber, le directeur de l’Office for Scholarly Communication de l’Université Harvard, artisan du dépôt bibliographique institutionnel obligatoire de la prestigieuse université, pose la question: « Allons-nous maintenir le statu quo qui implique le soutien exclusif à un modèle économique connu pour ses spirales inflationnistes incontrôlées, ou allons-nous expérimenter de nouveaux modèles potentiellement beaucoup plus raisonnables sur le plan économique et plus ouverts au développement? » Sa réponse:
The answer is simple: The only reason the uncontrolled inflation of journal subscription costs is a problem at all (and also the reason the upward spiral continues uncontrolled) is the planet’s universities’ inelastic demand and need for access to the journal articles.
Hence the solution is for universities — the universal providers of all those journal articles — to provide Open Access (free online access) to them by mandating that their peer-reviewed final drafts be deposited in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Universal OA self-archiving moots the problem of uncontrolled subscription-cost inflation by putting an end to the inelasticity of the demand: If your university cannot afford the subscription price for journal X, your users will still have access to the OA version.
There is no need for universities to try to reform journal economics directly now. What is urgently needed, universally reachable, and already long overdue is universal OA self-archiving mandates from universities. Focusing instead on reforming journal business models is simply distracting from and hence delaying the fulfillment of this pressing need.
Harvard should focus all its energy and prestige on universalizing OA self-archiving mandates rather than dissipating it superfluously on journal economics and OA funds.
Once OA self-archiving is universal, journal economics will take care of itself.
Sans vouloir lancer de cocorico, ces affirmations sont un agréable écho aux propos que je tiens depuis quelques années dans les lignes de ce blog.
Et à ce propos, si vous n’êtes pas passés récemment au site d’ORBi, faites-le, son évolution visuelle et informative vaut le détour.
I am grateful for your reference to my post on open-access funds. I am, of course, fully supportive of the deposit-mandate approach that you yourself have consistently spoken for and now implemented at the University of Liège. As you know, we have been instituting similar approaches at Harvard through our open-access policies, which incorporate as close to a mandate as a university policy can.
However, I do not fully support the stance — raised in your quotation from Professor Harnad’s response to my post — that we should avoid working toward gold OA now. I believe that the issue is more subtle, and refer your readers to my earlier post on the issue.
Commentaire de Stuart M. Shieber, le 13 sept 2009 à 23:17Thank you for this rectification and my apologies for the overinterpretation!
Commentaire de Bernard Rentier, le 13 sept 2009 à 23:33I mistook Stevan’s response for yours!
B.R.