Open Access Archivangelism

To combine Peter Suber's post with George Monbiot's: The only true cost (and service) provided by peer-reviewed research journal publishers is the management and umpiring of peer review, and this costs an order of magnitude less than the publishers extortionate fees and profits today.

The researchers and peer-reviewers conduct and report the research as well as the peer reviewing for free (or rather, funded by their institutions and research grants, which are, in turn, funded mostly by tax-payers).

Peer-reviewed research journal publishers are making among the biggest profit margins on the planet through almost 100% pure parasitism.

Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub is one woman's noble attempt to fix this.

But the culprits for the prohibitive pay-walling are not just the publishers: They are also the researchers, their institutions and their research grant funders -- for not requiring all peer-reviewed research to be  made Open Access (OA) immediately upon acceptance for publication through researcher self-archiving intheir own institutional open access repositories.

Instead the OA policy of the EC ("Plan S") and other institutional and funder OA policies worldwide are allowing publishers to continue their parasitism by offering researcher' the choice between Option A (self-archiving their published research) or Option B (paying to publish it in an OA journal where publishers simply name their price and the parasitism continues in another key).

Unlike Alexandra Elbakyan, researchers are freeing their very own research OA when they deposit it in their institutional OA repository.

Publishers try to stop them by demanding copyright, imposing OA embargoes, and threating individual researchers and their institutions with Alexandra-Elbakyan-style lawsuits.

Such lawsuits against researchers or their institutions would obviously cause huge public outrage globally -- an even better protection than hiding in Kazakhstan.

And many researchers are ignoring the embargoes and spontaneously self-archiving their published papers -- and have been doing it, inclreasingly  for almost 30 years now (without a single lawsuit).

But spontaneous self-archiving is growing far too slowly: it requires systematic mandates from institutions and funders in order to break out of the paywalls.

The only thing that is and has been sustaining the paywalls on research has been publishers' lobbying of governments on funder OA policy and their manipulation of institutional OA policy with "Big Deals" on extortionate library licensing fees to ensure that OA policies always include Option B.

The solution is ever so simple: OA policies must drop Option B.

Regardless of what one feels about photo copyright or about (nonhuman) animal (legal) personhood, the "monkey selfie" trial is absurd. The trivial counterexamples abound:

1. If a photographer sets up a camera so the sun's rays automatically trigger a photo of the sun, is it the sun's copyright?

2. Is it different if the "sun's" photo is of a tree? or of a monkey?

3. Is it different if the photo is triggered by acoustic triggers from thunder? or from someone's footsteps?

4. Is it different if it's time-lapse photography triggered by touch from the growth of a plant?

5. What has "selfie" to do with it? Doesn't it apply to any remote-triggered image by anyone or anything, of anything or anyone?

6. If the monkey deliberately triggered a photo to get a food-pellet would that be different from deliberately triggering it for a look at the photo? of self? of other? of a tree? of a file-photo? of a mirror?

7. Does it make any difference if it's a monkey (who does not recognize self in mirror or photo) or an ape (who does)? or an infant?

8. Or monkeys typing Shakespeare?

Perhaps copywriting deliberate, repeated finger-paintings treated as personal property by apes makes more sense, but it's on a slippery slope to copywriting vomiting on a canvas...

It’s ironic that billionaire George Soros (who is less wealthy than billionaire Bill Gates but has done a lot more philanthropy, both absolutely and proportionately) is today being notably vilified in a hate campaign by Hungary’s incipient dictator, Viktor Orban, who is expelling the Central European University (founded by Soros, and the best university in Hungary) while blaming its founder for Hungary’s ills. (Meanwhile Orban is busy becoming a billionaire -- in Hungarian Forints stolen from EU funds and Hungarian tax-payers)

Soros’s Open Society Institute was also the one that founded and funded the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) that launched OA 15 years ago. (But I suspect that yet another US billionaire will find a way to trump Orban’s odia with his own...)

FROM THE MONTRÉAL RODEO TO ALL QUÉBEC RODEOS

Summary of Settlement Agreement Approved by Superior Court Judgment Friday, June 16, 2017

Montréal - June 16, 2017

1. On May 23, 2017, Professor Alain Roy of the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal, supported by a group of law students, presented to the Superior Court a Motion for an Interlocutory Injunction to cancel the rodeo planned for this August as part of Montréal’s 375th Anniversary Celebrations;

2. On June 7, 2017, the parties signed a Settlement Agreement which deals with the social concerns at issue involving rodeos across Québec and not only Montréal’s 375th Anniversary Celebrations;

3. Normally, settlement agreements remain confidential and are not made public. In this case, it was agreed that the Settlement Agreement would be made public and fully transparent to deal with the concerns of Quebec citizens.

4. On June 16, 2017, the Superior Court approved and certified the Settlement Agreement. This Agreement is now a COURT JUDGMENT;

5. Pursuant to this Judgment, the parties are now required to jointly request MAPAQ — or the government ministry responsible for the application of the Animal Welfare and Safety Act (BÊSA) — to establish an Advisory Committee by June 22, 2017 at the latest. This committee will consist of:

• 3 representatives (soon be to appointed by Professor Roy) from the animal rights field
• 3 representatives from the rodeo industry
• 2 representatives from MAPAQ.

6. The Judgment directs the parties to the Advisory Committee “to identify the different standards of conduct for animal safety and welfare applicable to rodeo activities in the Province of Québec, TO EVALUATE THE SCOPE AND SUFFICIENCY OF SUCH STANDARDS WITH REGARD TO THE APPLICABLE LAWS (INCLUDING THE MATTER OF THE SPURS AND STRAPS USED IN BRONCO RIDING TRIALS), and to make the recommendations to MAPAQ that the Committee deems requisite for the safety and welfare of animal beings”;

7. The judgment also directs the parties to comply with additional obligations that were not part of the Injunction. Two experts (a veterinarian and a behaviorist) in addition to a photographer will therefore be appointed by Professor Roy to attend both the Montréal (NomadFest 2017) and Ste-Tite (Ste-Tite 2017 Western Festival) rodeos to make their own findings concerning the well-being and the safety of the animals used in the rodeos. Each of the expert reports will be submitted to the Advisory Committee and will then be made public;

8. In accordance with the Judgment, the report must be filed and made public no later than one year after the Advisory Committee’s creation;

9. At the conclusion of the Advisory Committee's report, nothing precludes Professor Roy from filing a Motion for a Declaratory Judgment in Court in order to obtain a ruling on the legality of the rodeo practices identified by the Advisory Committee and evaluated by the two experts (see paragraph 8 above), in light of the provisions of the BÊSA Act;

10. In summary, on June 16, 2017, the Superior Court issued a public and fully accessible Judgment setting out the legal obligations of all parties and furthermore establishing legal deadlines. In the event that a party fails to comply with its obligations, the Judgment may be enforced in Court.

SOURCE
Droit animalier Québec - DAQ
https://www.facebook.com/droitanimalierquebec/

INFORMATION
Me Michael Simkin
msimkin@legallogik.com
Phone: 438-478-3456

There are multiple reasons for depositing the AAM (Author Accepted Manuscript) immediately upon acceptance:

1. The date of acceptance is known. The date of publication is not. It is often long after acceptance, and often does not even correspond to the calendar date of the journal.

2. It is when research is refereed and accepted that it should be accessible to all potential users.

3. The delay between the date of acceptance and the date of publication can be anywhere from six months to a year or more.

3. Publishers are already trying to embargo OA for a year from date of publication. The gratuitous delay from acceptance could double that.

4. The date of acceptance is the natural date-stamp for deposit and the natural point in the author’s work-flow for deposit.

5. The AAV at date of acceptance is the version with the least publisher restrictions on it: Many publishers endorse making the AAM OA immediately, but not the PV (Publisher’s Version).

6. Having deposited the AAM, the author can update it if and when they wish, to incorporate any copy-editing and corrections (including the PV).

7. If the author elects to embargo the deposit, the copy-request button is available to authorize the immediate automatic sending of individual copies on request. Authors can make the deposit OA when they choose. (They can also decline to send the AAM till the copy-edited version has been deposited — but most authors will not want to delay compliance with copy requests: refereed AAMs that have not yet been copy-edited can be clearly marked as such.)

8. The acceptance letter provides the means of verifying timely compliance with the deposit mandate. It is the key to making the immediate-deposit policy timely, verifiable and effective. And it is the simplest and most natural way to integrate deposit into the author’s year-long workflow.

9. The above timing and compliance considerations apply to all refereed research, including research published in Gold OA journals.

10. Of the 853 OA policies registered in ROARMAP 96 of the 515 OA policies that require (rather than just request or recommend) deposit have adopted the immediate-deposit upon acceptance requirement.

Below are references to some articles that have spelled out the rationale and advantages of the immediate-deposit requirement.

Stevan Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67(11) 2815-2828

Swan, Alma; Gargouri, Yassine; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report.

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference)

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. The Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

Postings about the immediate-deposit requirement in Open Access Archivangelism

Re: Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated (Richard Poynder)

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Let’s simplify:

1. Stick to peer-reviewed research articles: that’s all FOA is or was ever about.

2. Copyright and re-use rights are and always have been a red herring in the FOA age.

3. All that’s needed is an FOA version of the peer-reviewed research article.

4. That’s the author’s peer-reviewed final draft.

5. The only thing needed from “journals” (or equivalent) is the adjudication and certification of the peer review.

6. That’s a service, not a product: Nothing to “copyright.”

7. To make the current house of copywrit (sic) cards collapse, all authors need do is make 4 (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft FOA (freely accessible online)

8. FOA immediately (upon “acceptance”) and permanently (“FIPATRAFTO”).

9. For the faint-hearted and superstitious, there’s the Copy-Request Button during any (bogus) publisher “embargo” on “OA.”

10. Like Copyright worries (2), Button worries are red herrings.

11. FOA is all that’s needed or was ever needed.

12. Once researchers, their institutions and their funders get round to providing FOA (= “Green, Gratis OA”), Fair Gold “OA” (peer-review service fees) and all the re-use rights researchers need will be within trivial reach.

(Waiting for researchers, their institutions and their funders to get their heads around this and to set their fingers in motion continues to be yawningly boring; please wake me when they get round to it...)

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Charles Oppenheim:
Stevan is not quite correct. Copyright IS relevant because the authors foolishly agree to assign (or give an exclusive licence) it to the publisher. For Stevan's proposal to work, they must stop doing that. If a researcher has foolishly given away that right, Stevan's No 7 onwards in principle cannot work. So amend Stevan's 12 point plan by adding a final sentence to his point 6, "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE AUTHOR ASSIGN COPYRIGHT TO THE PUBLISHER, OR GRANT IT AN EXCLUSIVE LICENCE TO THE WORK". Then his plan is legally watertight. I do agree with Stevan's final thoughts in brackets. I too am waiting.....

Stevan Harnad: Charles’s formal caveats are quite correct — for pedants and poltroons. But think: if the physicists in 1991 (or the computer scientists even earlier) had had the slightest inclination to give such reservations a single moment’s credence — instead of going ahead and doing exactly what they did (self-arxiving their preprints, and then their refereed final drafts, immediately, and not bothering with the publisher’s “version of record”), FOA would never have made even the modest strides it has made:

So let’s stop fussing about copyright and start self-archiving all our refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication! It’s 2017, almost 3 decades since good sense first erupted and prevailed in some intrepid subsets of the research community. Coraggio!

Apart from that (which should be done in any case), Charles is also right that it is foolish (and unnecessary) to assign copyright or grant an exclusive license to the publisher. The limited right to publish and sell the version of record, online and on paper, is more than right enough — and as much reward as they deserve for their one and only “value-added,” which is the administration of the peer review (which the peers provide for free, just as the author provides the text for free).

Scholastica Interview:

You’ve long championed the Green OA movement. Why do you feel this model has the most promise, and what do you envision for a Green future? 

Green-first is the only approach to OA (1994) that I have ever championed since long before the term “OA” was coined (2002):

My approach is, and always has been:

1. All researchers self-archive all their peer-reviewed research (immediately upon acceptance for publication, or even earlier, in their own institutional repositories). Self-archiving (1994) came to be called BOAI-I (2002) and then “Green OA” (2004) (with OA journal publishing, formerly BOAI-II, dubbed “Gold OA”).

2. Once Green OA is universal, libraries can cancel subscriptions (because everything is available as Green OA), making subscriptions unsustainable, and forcing peer-reviewed journal publishers to cut obsolete products and services and their costs and downsize to their only remaining essential service: the management of peer review. There is no more print edition and all archiving and access-provision is offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories.

3. Journals then have to down-size to just peer review and its cost and convert to Gold OA for cost-recovery (this is what I now call “Fair Gold OA”) paid for by authors’ institutions out of a small fraction of their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings.

4. But Gold OA before universal Green-OA-induced downsizing is “Fool’s Gold OA” because it is unnecessary, arbitrarily inflated in price, double-paid (uncancellable institutional subscriptions for their input and Fool’s-Gold OA fees for their output) or even double-dipped (in the case of hybrid subscriptions/fool’s-gold journals) at a time when subscriptions alone are already unaffordable.

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/ Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. 

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. 

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). 

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

What has delayed this optimal, inevitable and obvious outcome is (1) researcher slowness in self-archiving, (2) institutional and funder slowness in implementing and monitoring Green OA self-archiving mandates and (3) Fool’s-Gold-Fever. Publishers have also tried to embargo Green OA — but for this there is a solution, the institutional repository’s eprint-request Button for any embargoed deposits:

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) 

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference) 

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

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What do you think are the pros and cons of current Gold OA solutions such as using an APC or library subsidy model to fund publications? Do you think these models could become sustainable or do you think they are replacing current research funding struggles with new ones (e.g. instead of grappling with subscriptions libraries will now grapple with APCs)? 

For pre-Green Fool’s-Gold OA, it’s all cons and no pros. The pros are for Green OA, and that can be provided free. 

Pre-Green Fool’s-Gold is enormously over-priced (because it still includes the products and services and their costs that universal Green OA makes obsolete), double-paid, double-dipped (in hybrid Fool’s Gold journal), unaffordable and unsustainable.

In contrast, down-sized post-Green Fair-Gold (for peer review service only) is affordable and sustainable.

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Do you think control of research publication needs to be taken away from corporate publishers or do you think it is possible for them to work with the academic community? If the former, who do you think needs to take over research publication and dissemination - groups of academics running their own journals, societies or university presses taking back journals, library publishers etc. and why?  

No, I think this is all nonsense and has been holding us up for decades. There is no way to “take over” and it’s unnecessary. What’s necessary is for all institutions and funders to mandate Green OA. That will force downsizing and conversion to Fair-Gold without the need for "take-overs" (except in the case of abandoned titles, which can then indeed be taken over by Fair-Gold OA publishers).

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5 (10) e13636  

Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the  Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)  67

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In the OA movement do you think there is a place for discussion about substantially lowering research access fees as opposed to trying to eliminate them entirely? Do you think this is something that is/should be considered more (e.g. iTunes model where articles are $2 instead of $40)? 

This is the oldest and silliest approach of all: the SPARC approach in the 1990’s (till they realized it doesn’t work and switched to Green and Gold OA): try to collectively negotiate licenses to lower the price of subscriptions. It doesn’t work, because journals are independent and will not downsize unless they are forced to. And only mandatory Green OA and cancellation can force them to do it. And no subscription price is a fair price because subscriptions are unnecessary and obsolete with universal Green OA

It is taking the author/institution/funder/library community a ridiculously long time to learn that that their only path to universal OA is by first universally mandating Green. The outcome remains optimal and inevitable (and obvious) but I have tired of repeating myself, so I am no longer actively archivangelizing except when asked.

Harnad, S. (1997). How to fast-forward learned serials to the inevitable and the optimal for scholars and scientists. Serials Librarian, 30(3-4), 73-81.

Harnad, Stevan (2016) Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview? CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open Science), Summer Issue 

http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml

https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/homenews?id=112

Re: "The NIH Public Access Policy: A triumph of green open access?"
by Richard Poynder.

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OA advocates are a plurality, not a monolith. “They” do not agree that only CC-BY = OA. 

There are two "shades" of OA:

"Gratis OA" = free access
"Libre OA" = CC-BY

The right measure of proportion OA for PMC (or any repository) is the percent that is Gratis or Libre OA, not just the percent that is CC-BY. (It also matter when it is deposited: immediately or a year or more after publication.)

The PMC figures are insufficient. Percent OA in PMC does not even represent percent OA in biomedicine, in the US or globally, let alone in all fields. And PMC, as Richard notes, is largely publisher-deposited, which means it's For-Fee Fool's Gold OA rather than author-deposited For-Free Green OA.

That the percentage OA is growing globally with time  is inevitable, as the old researchers are retiring with time, and the young researchers have more sense. 

The goal, however, is OA, not "living up to the BOAI definition."

And the growth rate is still absurdly slow, compared to what it could and ought to be (and have been).

To measure compliance with an immediate-deposit (Green OA) mandate, the following would provide an estimate:

1. Require immediate deposit of the dated letter of acceptance.

2. Require immediate deposit of the accepted final draft. (You and I know that the publisher's PDF-of-record is superfluous for OA.)

3. Retrieve the institution's published output from WoS monthly (it is updated about monthly) or from SCOPUS via institution-name search.

4. Check (via software) each title for whether and when it is deposited (deposit date)

5. Compare deposit date with dated acceptance date.

6. Calculate percentage of monthly output that is deposited, as well as the latency (timing) of the deposit relative to the acceptance date.

7. Calculate proportion and length of OA embargo on deposits.

8. Calculate the volume of Request-Button traffic for embargoed deposits (requests, compliances, latencies)

.No, this is not too complicated nor too demanding (as everyone will of course cry). It's exactly the simple, natural compliance monitoring system that needs to be put into place in order to establish a natural long-term practice, one that ensures that immediate Green OA is always provided.

Of course, the institutions and funders need to stand firm on the carrots/sticks: Non-compliance should have consequences. It doesn't take much, because the policy does not ask for much.

Once it's a reliable and universal habit, the checks and stats can become less frequent.

Vincent-Lamarre, P, Boivin, J, Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V. and Harnad, S. (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67(11) 2815-2828