Marc L. Greenberg

Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe

Abstract A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant. In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple disciplines in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as diverse political and economic situations. We believe that this global sampling of researchers can provide the nuance and perspective necessary to grasp this complex problem. The group was assembled without an attempt to achieve global coverage through random sampling. This contribution differs from other approaches to the open-access problem in several fundamental ways. (A) It is scholar-driven, and thus can represent the ‘other side of the coin’ of scholarly communication. (B) It focuses on narrative report, where scholars were free to orient their responses as they saw fit, rather than being confined to binary or scalar choices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, (C) it distinguishes among institutions and countries and situations, highlighting inequalities of access among wealthy and economically-challenged nations, and also within countries depending on the size and location of particular institutions.

Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars

Out of concern for its lifeblood—communication—academia is rushing to correct serious inequities in access and revenue distribution by embracing open access (OA) in a variety of ways: some journals provide access openly to all readers, some allow authors to pay for OA options, some share copyrights with authors to allow open sharing, etc. For publication in some fully OA journals, though, publication charges associated with an ‘author-pays’ business model can be substantial, reflecting costs involved in production and publication of quality scholarly articles and (sometimes) significant profit margins for publishers. Such charges may constitute significant barriers for potential authors, particularly those at institutions or in countries with fewer resources. Consequently, an OA journal for readers may in reality be a closed-access journal for authors.

Subsidizing Truly Open Access

Comment on “Sensitivity of seaf oor bathymetry to climate-driven f uctuations in mid-ocean ridge magma supply” Peter Huybers, Charles Langmuir, Richard F. Katz, David Ferguson, Cristian Proistosescu, Suzanne Carbotte Olive et al. (Reports, 16 October 2015, p. 310) argue that ~10% fl uctuations in melt supply do not produce appreciable changes in ocean ridge bathymetry on time scales less than 100,000 years and thus cannot refl ect sea level forcing. Spectral analysis of bathymetry in a region they highlight as being fault controlled, however, shows strong evidence for a signal from sea level variation. Full text at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.

Multiple Causation in the Spread and Reversal of a Sound Change: Rhotacism in South Slavic

Prispevek obravnava spremembo i > r (.rotacizem-) v juinoslovanskih jezikih. Zaradi zapletene razvrstitve spremembe tako po jezikovni geografiji kot po besednih vrstah se zdi, da se je ne da razloiiti z enim samim vzrokom. Ugotovlja se namret, da je sprememba nastala zaradi vrste glasoslovnih in analognih vzrokov; umikanje inovacije proti zahodu pa so otitno povzrotili sociolingvistitni dejavniki.

Prekmurje Grammar as a Source of Slavic Comparative Material

Prispevek, predstavljen kot referat na 16. bienalnem simpoziju o južnoslovanskih jezikih, zagovarja objavo Pavlove rokopisne prekmurske slovnice Vend nyelvtan, dokoncane l. 1942. Ceprav je prvotni namen slovnice, tj. uveljavitev pokrajinskega knjižnega jezika, zastarel, rokopis ponuja informacije o posebnem ustroju prekmurscine in je s tem tudi dragocen vir za tipoloske, primerjalne in zgodovinske studije slovanskih jezikov.