You would have thought I was requesting a field manual for interrogating prisoners of war or a list of members on Dick Cheney’s Energy Taskforce. At least in those instances, I would have received a response that answering my questions violated national security or “executive privilege.”
“Can you provide a list of Open Access articles that you have supported through your author support program,” and “Have you rejected any requests to date?”
Now, before I give you the results, I need to mention that the librarians I contacted all serve in public institutions (University of California, Berkeley; University of Wisconsin-Madison; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; University of Calgary, Canada; and University of Nottingham, UK), which means that their library budgets are also public documents....
Two weeks after asking my simple questions, I received just two short responses. No list, no numbers, but at least a few details: There was some confusion on the part of faculty of what an OA article publication charge really was. Some faculty requests were actually for page charges in conventional subscription journals; one faculty submitted a request for reprint charges; others submitted invoices to the library when they should have been directed to the external granting agency (like the HHMI). To date, no bonafide requests have been denied.
While I am thankful for these two responses, I am troubled by a lack of transparency of how participating libraries are disclosing the details of their programs....
Comment. Phil's title and opening sentence are a little melodramatic in light of the results, but he asked two good questions and I'd like to know the answers myself. Or at least I'd like to know how many requests the funds received (for OA journal publication fees rather than something else) and how many they rejected. I don't need to know which authors or articles were subsidized. I'd also like to know the range of fees requested, and how often the fees would pay for libre OA rather than gratis OA. I'd like to know how often the fees would go to hybrid journals with a double-charge business model (i.e. not promising to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake). I'd like to know the fields or departments of the requesting faculty. If the funds have a good reason not to share anonymized data about their use, I'd like to know what it is. (This is not a hostile question; there may be very good reasons which haven't occurred to me.) I should add that I also have lots of questions about the business information at OA and TA journals.
One more question: When a survey has a low response rate, why assume that the surveyed people or institutions are suppressing information?
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
