Trust

At that session in DC, one of the publisher reps described being in a working group meeting, with a librarian on either side of him, both of whom told him that FRPAA would be just the first step, that if they could get the 6-month embargo enshrined, the next thing to work for would be the elimination of embargoes altogether.

Anyone who believes this, but argues publicly that publishers should have no complaint about FRPAA because the embargo is designed to protect their subscription base, is arguing in bad faith.  They should not be trusted.  They should not be listened to.

Unfortunately, there's so much noise in the discussion that it is very difficult to assess what people really believe based just on what they say.    The publishers have decided it is safer not to trust any of 'em.  That's probably a sensible position.

I am, intentionally, committing a version of the same fallacy when I say, "the publishers".   I have long been convinced that there is almost no statement of the form "Publishers [verb] [clause]" that can possibly be more than trivially true, because of the vast variety of business models, objectives, sense of mission and organizational pressures affecting publishers.

So let me put it this way -- individual people with whom I have had conversations, who work for publishing entities and have expressed concerns about FRPAA, seem to have a lot of trouble trusting that the proponents of FRPAA are not acting in bad faith.    And I'm hard pressed to say that I blame them -- even though individual people with whom I have had conversations, who are FRPAA advocates and believe in the benefits of it, actually ARE acting in good faith.   

I don't know how we get around this.   I wonder what the impact would be if proponents of FRPAA were willing to go on record that, for federally funded research, a six-month embargo is sufficient to meet the needs and moral demands of open access.  Maybe I should start my own petition:

We, the undersigned, believe that the results of federally funded research should be made freely available to the public within a reasonable period -- generally six to twelve months depending on the discipline and other relevant economic factors -- and we encourage scholarly societies to develop policies and practices to make that happen.  We further believe that subscription revenue plays an important and useful role in managing the scholarly communication process and we pledge to support the activities of those not-for-profit entities that actively develop policies that minimize subscription rates.  Finally, we believe that there are research potentials that can only be gained when copies of scholarly papers are deposited in robust, interoperable archives, and we encourage scholarly societies to make such deposits, but only when the policies of such archives are designed to protect the brand and quality control mechanisms of those scholarly societies.

Nah.  Nobody'd sign.

 

Comments

[Marcus Banks]

I only sign petitions that include the words "revolutionary" and "disruptive."

[T Scott]

Yeah, I just knew it wasn't sexy enough.