Friday, June 30. 2006
 SUMMARY: The three recent RCUK self-archiving mandates (ESRC, BBSRC, MRC) are extremely timely and welcome, but they still have two serious -- though easily remedied -- flaws. They are vague about both (1) WHEN and (2) WHERE research should be self-archived:
(1) WHEN: It should be specified that the author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Any allowable delay should pertain only to the date at which access to the deposited text is set as Open Access, not to the date at which the text is deposited. It should be strongly recommended to set access as Open Access immediately, but for articles from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving, access can be set as Closed Access (for a maximum of 6 months). The semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST feature of the Institutional Repository software will allow the author to fulfill individual eprint requests from fellow-researchers during a Closed Access embargo interval.
(2) WHERE: It should be specified that the deposit should be preferentially in the author's own institutional repository. Central repositories may harvest from the institutional repository if they wish, but the optimal practice, and the one that will scale to cover all researchers at all institutions, is to deposit locally; only if the institution does not yet have a repository should the author deposit directly in a central repository.
The three RCUK self-archiving mandates ( ESRC, BBSRC, MRC), though extremely timely and welcome per se, are still needlessly wishy-washy about one important thing: When the deposit should take place. Some (ESRC and BBSRC) say, vaguely, "at the earliest opportunity." Others (BBSRC) say "within six months of publication". And there is also hedging with: "depends upon publishers' agreements with their author".
None of this is specific enough for a clear, effective mandate. These are open-ended loopholes needlessly inviting non-compliance or opt-out. But there is an extremely simple way to fix them, and I and others will be pushing very hard for the fix to be implemented and announced formally, so they can serve as emulable policy models for the rest of the research world. (1) Deposit of the full text and metadata should take place immediately upon the article's acceptance for publication.
(2) The author, however, has a choice as to whether to set the deposited full-text immediately to Open Access or temporarily to Closed Access (for a maximum of 6 months, if necessary).
(3) Closed Access means that only the metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) are visible on the web. The full-text is not openly accessible.
(4) However, into the two most widely used institutional repository softwares, we have already built the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request button. Whenever a Closed Access text is needed, the would-be user pastes in his email address and clicks; that automatically sends an email request to the author, which contains a URL on which the author can click in order to have the full-text eprint emailed to the requester. (Individual researcher-to-researcher distribution of the researcher's own article by the researcher to individual requesters falls under Fair Use.)
(5) The permissible Closed Access interval should be capped at 6 months at the most. So with immediate deposit mandated, but immediate OA-setting only strongly recommended where possible ( 94% of journals have already given immediate author OA self-archiving their green light), the EMAIL-EPRINT button will tide over any embargo period (max. 6 months) for the 6% of articles that are not immediately OA.
But the immediate-deposit requirement itself has to be made crystal clear, lest the mandate turn out to be so fuzzy and open-ended as to be no mandate at all!
Also, all councils should mandate deposit preferentially in the author's own institutional repository (IR). Central repositories can harvest from there, if they wish. Direct deposit in a central repository is unnecessary, nonoptimal, and does not scale; it should only be done in cases where an author's institution does not yet have an IR.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Wednesday, June 28. 2006
SUMMARY: Bravo UK! Although we had rather hoped for a more concerted consensus from Research Councils UK (RCUK), nevertheless, with three out of the eight councils mandating Open Access Self-Archiving, one strongly encouraging it, and four not yet decided, that is still enough to restore the UK's commanding lead in worldwide OA Policy today.
(1) The RCUK's decision today to let individual funding councils decide for themselves whether or not to mandate OA self-archiving is both good and bad.
It is good that the individual councils will be able to mandate it if they wish (and bravo to MRC, BBSRC & ESRC for already doing so: CCLRC is close, and I am sure other councils will be mandating too!), but too bad that consensus by all the councils could not be reached.
(2) The "plans to assess the impact of author-pays publishing and self-archiving on research publishing" are empty nonsense.
First, the most important impact of OA is on research, researchers, and the public that funds them, and that impact has already been tested and repeatedly demonstrated to be highly positive, with OA dramatically enhancing research usage and impact.
Second, the only objective way to assess the impact of mandated self-archiving on publishing is to mandate it and monitor the outcome yearly. So far, spontaneous, unmandated self-archiving remains at about 15% overall, and that's why OA needs to be mandated. So far spontaneous self-archiving has had zero impact on publishing (i.e., subscription revenues), even in the few fields (of physics) where it has been close to 100% for years.
In other words, the spontaneous self-archiving experiment has already been done, and it has had no impact on publishing. The only way to go on to assess the effects of mandated self-archiving is to mandate it, and review the effects each year.
As to testing the effects of OA publishing: Publishers are now offering Open Choice, whereby authors (and their institutions and funders) can decide whether or not they wish to pay for OA for their individual articles. That promises to be a lengthy experiment, and the decision on whether to mandate OA self-archiving now should certainly not wait for its outcome -- particularly because 100% of publication costs are currently being paid by institutional subscriptions, and it is not clear where or why to find extra cash for paid OA until and unless institutional subscriptions start getting cancelled (in which case the institutional cancellation savings themselves would be the natural source for the cash to pay for the OA publication).
In other words, this call for further studies to "assess impact" before mandating OA self-archiving is merely a cop-out in response to publishing community lobbying, which has already successfully filibustered self-archiving mandates for several years now: In reality, the self-archiving mandates themselves are the only objective test of their own impact.
Let us hope the other individual Research Councils will, like MRC, BBSRC and ESRC (CCLRC is already close) have the good sense to go ahead and conduct the tests, by adopting the mandates.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Tuesday, June 27. 2006
SUMMARY: There is some difference of opinion as to what is delaying and disrupting OA: whether it is (1) promoting immediate OA self-archiving mandates (such as the FRPAA's, RCUK's, or EC's), or (2) opposing them. The following are excerpts from a series of exchanges in the American Scientist Open Access Forum. It is left to the reader (and history) to decide what, exactly, constitutes the delaying and disrupting.
The following are excerpts from a series of exchanges between Jan Velterop and me (Stevan Harnad), in the American Scientist Open Access Forum, on the notion that if research funders are to mandate OA at all, it should not be (i) by mandating that authors self-archive, in their own institutional repositories, their own final drafts of articles that they publish (in any journal), but (ii) by mandating that authors publish in OA journals, and by also providing them with the funds to pay the publication charges. (Note that Jan is not actually recommending that OA publishing and its funding should be mandated: yet that is clearly the notion we are discussing, on the premise that research funders should mandate OA at all, as is currently being proposed in the US, UK and EC):
Re: Royal Society Offers Open Choice:
Velterop (Sat Jun 24 16:48)
Harnad (23:20)
Harnad (Sun Jun 25 04:35)
Velterop (09:32:00)
Harnad (12:55:51)
Velterop (19:59)
Harnad (21:39:58)
Jan Velterop (quoted below) has both priorities and event-order exactly backwards, and I suspect he may not even be aware of it.
The priority is Open Access, now. This is an immediate and direct research priority as well as a public-good priority, because it is the public that benefits from research impact and progress, and it is for that reason that the public funds research. Hence OA's first priority is OA, 100% OA -- not OA publishing, nor publishing reform: OA; 100% OA. Moreover, the order of events, leading to OA publishing through publishing reform, is, almost certainly: mandating OA self-archiving --> 100% OA --> possibly subscription cancellations --> possibly substantial subscription cancellations --> transition to OA publishing. The order of events is almost certainly not, instead: transition to OA Publishing --> 100% OA.
Let me repeat: the priority of OA is immediate and direct: In particular, there is zero evidence at the present time that there is any other problem (such as self-archiving causing subscription cancellations) that first has to be solved before we can have immediate 100% Open Access.
Still more particularly, it is simple false to say that we cannot have immediate 100% OA until we first solve the problem of subscription revenue losses for publishers, for there is as yet zero evidence of subscription revenue loss for publishers as a consequence of self-archiving, whereas there is already overwhelming evidence of the benefits of OA self-archiving to research, researchers, and the public that funds them.
There is also overwhelming evidence that merely inviting or recommending self-archiving does not generate rates of self-archiving above its spontaneous baseline level of 15%. The only way -- and the sure, demonstrated way -- to achieve 100% self-archiving is to mandate it.
And that is the issue on the table: mandating self-archiving. Not protecting publishers from hypothetical risk, but mandating self-archiving, for its demonstrated benefits to research.
Now, in weighing Jan Velterop's remarks below, please do keep this logic in your mind, because alas those in Jan's position -- indeed anyone whose primary allegiance is to what is best for publishers' bottom lines rather than what is best for research, researchers and the public that funds the research -- is bound to have great difficulty in keeping this logic in mind, being preoccupied with their own, conflicting, interests: (1) 100% OA has been repeatedly demonstrated to benefit research, researchers and the public that funds research.
(2) Immediate, 100% OA has been repeatedly demonstrated to be achievable in practise, rapidly and reliably, by mandating OA self-archiving.
(3) There exists no evidence whatsoever to date that OA self-archiving reduces subscriptions.
(4) Publishers are nevertheless lobbying against mandating OA self-archiving (with no supporting evidence) on the grounds that it might threaten their business.
(5) In place of mandating OA self-archiving, publishers are now lobbying for mandates to pay publishers their asking price for providing paid OA.
(6) The asking price is being set at a time when subscriptions are paying all publishing costs and there exists no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces subscription revenue.
(7) If research funders and researchers are able and willing, right now, to mandate and provide for paying publishers' asking price, all is well.
(8) But if research funders and researchers are not able or willing, right now, to mandate and provide for paying publishers' asking price, then publishers are delaying and deterring a demonstrated benefit for researcher, researchers and the public on the basis of no evidence of any actual cost (let alone substantial cost) to themselves.
(9) The rational and practical thing for research funders and institutions to do under these conditions would be to act on what has already been demonstrated to be true: Mandate OA self-archiving, generate its demonstrated benefits for research, researchers and the public, and thereby test, at the very same time, whether it ever induces any subscription decline -- and if so whether that decline is substantial enough to require restructuring publishers' cost-recovery system.
(10) With the objective evidence that cost-recovery needs to be restructured will come the funds for paying for it -- because institutional subscription cancellations mean corresponding institutional subscription savings, out of which institutions can then pay for their researchers' publishing costs using the very same money that is currently being spent on subscriptions -- instead of extra money taken from what is currently being spent on research. Jan does not see it this way because his first allegiance is to making sure publishers make ends meet, and because he is convinced that they will not be able to make ends meet if self-archiving is mandated, even though there exists to date absolutely no evidence in support of this conviction. The conviction, in turn, warrants -- not for Jan, who, I believe, supports the self-archiving mandate despite his reservations, but for many other publishers -- trying to prevent research funders from mandating OA until and unless they can agree to pay in advance for the hypothetical subscription shortfall (of which there is as yet not the slightest sign).
The demonstrated and readily reachable immediate benefits of OA to research, researchers and the public are hence set aside, and hypothetical risks to the publisher's bottom line are instead given the priority, with the insistence that if OA is to be mandated at all, it is OA publishing that needs to be mandated (along with the extra funds to pay for it), not OA self-archiving.
I add only one other point to reflect upon, before turning to Jan's specific points:
Institutional subscriptions today are not paying only for online access, but also for the print edition (among other perks). Is the publishers' "realistic" asking price for author-institution-funder-paid OA meant to be covering the costs of supplying the paper edition to all those institutions too? (I take up this theme again in replying to Ian Russell of the Royal Society in another posting.)
Harnad: "... if mandated SA does generate substantial institutional subscription cancellations, then those very same substantial institutional subscriptions cancellations will generate the institutional windfall savings out of which PA costs (again determined by the market and not by a-priori fiat) could be paid without taking any money away from research funding." Velterop: "I'm afraid Stevan fails to appreciate three things here:
1. Access to scientific literature and the formal publishing of articles are not optional, but essential parts of doing research, so the cost of access and publishing is an essential cost of doing research, and in that regard entirely comparable with the cost of laboratory equipment, reagents, et cetera;
I agree completely. I am advocating immediate OA, through immediate self-archiving mandates. What is your point? Velterop: "2. If the cost of essentials is seen as 'taking money away from research funding, then money is already being 'taken away' from research funding because subscriptions are largely paid out of the overhead that institutions take out of research grants (often more than 50%);
I agree completely. I am advocating immediate OA, through immediate self-archiving mandates. What is your point? Velterop: 3. Shifting payment patterns from subscriptions to open access via institutional self-archiving mandates (the 'windfall' argument) is unnecessarily disruptive and as such only delays open access [emphasis added] as it inevitably causes entirely predicatable and understandable doubt as to the real intentions and ulterior motives of the OA 'movement' (which often seems more about money than about access), and consequent defensive attitudes amongst publishers and scholarly societies, and even amongst researchers themselves.
Advocating immediate OA, through immediate self-archiving mandates is
unnecessarily disruptive and only delays open access? (Could you explain that please? because on the face of it it sure looks like the exact opposite.)
And whose real intention and ulterior motive is money rather than access? Those who support or those who oppose immediate OA, through immediate self-archiving mandates? (Who is hastening and who is delaying OA? Who is facilitating and who is disrupting OA? Are you perhaps, again, conflating OA with paid-OA publishing?) Velterop:" Advocating open access should not be conflated with advocating cost-evasion (the ultimate free-ridership). Access and costs are two independent variables. Lower costs do not necessarily bring open access; and open access does not necessarily bring lower costs. But we would be able to make a great deal more progress on an equal-revenue basis, were that advocated more widely. The amount of money now being spent, Academia-wide, on subscriptions, could, almost by definition for the vast majority of journals, also fund full open access. That's what we should be focussing on. [emphasis added]
Isn't that precisely what I said in your opening quotation from me, with which you were disagreeing? viz: Harnad: "... if mandated SA does generate substantial institutional subscription cancellations, then those very same substantial institutional subscriptions cancellations will generate the institutional windfall savings out of which PA costs (again determined by the market and not by a-priori fiat) could be paid without taking any money away from research funding."
I keep focussing on immediate OA, through immediate self-archiving mandates, and you keep focussing on money.
Can we agree to focus on money only if and when there is objective evidence that immediate OA, through immediate self-archiving mandates, is actually starting to make someone lose money? Until then, it would seem, focussing on money instead of access is "unnecessarily disruptive and only delays open access."
On Sun, 25 Jun 2006, Jan Velterop wrote: Velterop: " I'm glad Stevan agrees with me on so many points. The only thing that seems to separate us is the judgement that an unfunded self-archiving mandate carries an appreciable risk of destroying the valuable system of formal peer-reviewed journals to communicate and preserve scientific findings. Stevan thinks there is no such risk. I think there is, and that it is a wholly unnecessary risk. My motive is to come to a solid, stable, economically sustainable, and reliable method to ensure open access to the formal research journal literature.
I'm also glad that Stevan is a psychologist and not an engineer. The 'empirical' evidence on which he bases his no-risk hypothesis is comparable to the evidence that a layer of 10 centimeters of snow doesn't cause a roof to collapse and that there has been at least 10 years with no more than 10 centimeters of snow on any given day. He would construct a roof that can deal with 10 centimeters of snow, only to see it collapse when that one night comes when there is snowfall of 25 centimeters. He would say "no problem, we'll just rebuild the hall".
I'm also glad that he is not in charge of fire prevention. His empirical evidence from establishing that an unsupervised toddler who lit a whole box of matches and yet somehow didn't burn the house down would lead him to happily hand out matches to all toddlers, since lighting matches is a valuable learning experience for them and there is no proof whatsoever that any houses might be burnt down. And if they do he would simply say "no problem, we'll just rebuild them".
Stevan asks: "Can we agree to focus on money only if and when there is objective evidence that immediate OA, through immediate self- archiving mandates, is actually starting to make someone lose money?"
No. I'm afraid I cannot agree. First of all, I'm not focussing on money. I'm focussing on a solid, stable, economically sustainable, and reliable method to ensure open access to the formal research journal literature, which I do not accept that Stevan's desired mandates in their current formulation would bring. Secondly, would we allow the engineer to wait for objective evidence, i.e. the collapse of a roof, before using higher specifications with ample safety margins? Is it necessary to wait for such objective evidence? Would we wait for the objective evidence of a house burning down before making sure that matches cannot be reached by toddlers?
Reasoning By Escalating Doomsday Prophecies: Pascal's Wager
The gentle reader need not cringe at the prospect of yet another verbose Jan/Stevan exchange. The reply here is mercifully short:
With all his lurid analogies above, Jan is merely reasoning by escalating the shrillness of his prophecies of the doom and gloom that will befall us should the many research funders (US, UK, EC) who have proposed to mandate OA self-archiving actually go ahead and adopt their mandates (instead of paying publishers' asking price for paid OA).
The strategy is simple: To every point showing that one's own view is contrary to the evidence, improbable or illogical, one simply responds by escalating the direness of the consequences, should one's view (per impossibile) nevertheless prove right.
This reasoning is exactly the same as that of Pascal's Wager, which "proved" that it was more rational to believe and do as Scripture dictated, whether or not it was true, because otherwise one risked burning forever, if, against all evidence, Scripture turned out to be true after all. "Pascal's Wager and Open Access (OA)" (Dec 2004) The trouble is that any belief and action and its opposite can be defended in this way, simply by raising the agony ante in the other direction!
Should I now reply with lurid stories about how CURES for diseases will be lost, and millions will perish, because we failed to provide access to research findings for the scientists who could have used and built upon them, simply because we were afraid the sky might otherwise fall down, as per publishers' rival prophecies?
Enough said. Time to mandate OA self-archiving.
Jan, let's cut to the quick (because the rest is really just ideology, hypothesis and posturing, on both of our parts):
Are you and Springer part of the publisher lobby opposing the FRPAA, RCUK, and EC proposals to mandate author self-archiving, right now?
Springer is green on author self-archiving. If it is not, at the same time, a part of the publisher lobby against mandating author self-archiving, right now, then Springer is on the side of the Angels and the rest of our quibbling does not amount to a hill of beans.
Remember that the postings by me on which you intervened were aimed against the publisher lobby opposing the self-archiving mandates -- in particular, the latest attempt to replace the author self-archiving mandate with a publisher paid-OA mandate.
And my objection to this attempt is conditional. If the funders have the cash and the willingness to mandate paid-OA, and pay for it, right now, and they implement that mandate, right now, not a peep of objection from me. Years of delay, disruption and non-OA will be over.
But if this move just results in still more delay and disruption, and still no OA mandate, after it has been dragging on like this for years already, then of course there will be more dissension.
I won't comment on your follow-up comments, except the very last one, which I think illustrates the yawning gap between the interests of publishers (whether OA or non-OA) and those of researchers (and it also limns who is delaying/disrupting what, and why). You wrote: Velterop: "why wait and in the mean time set up costly institutional repositories... not just costly, but OA-wise sub-optimal...?
I think any disinterested 3rd party would see very clearly that the research community is not "waiting": Its funders are trying to mandate OA self-archiving, and it is publishers who are delaying and disrupting that, and forcing the research community to keep waiting for OA.
And not only are the ( small) costs of setting up Institutional Repositories utterly irrelevant to publishers (who are not being asked to pay for them) but IRs are being set up anyway, for a variety of reasons, OA being only one of them (and alas not always the primary one!).
And as to the "sub-optimality" of having access only to the author's refereed final draft, in an IR, instead of the publisher's proprietary PDF: Please tell that to the many, many would-be users all over the planet who have no access to either of those, and whose access to the "sub-optimal" OA draft is being delayed and opposed by the publisher lobby.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
SUMMARY: France has one of the most centralised research networks in the world. Hence it is in a better position to generate Open Access on a national scale overnight than most other countries. It is not happening overnight, but it may be happening. The French research and higher education institutions are to issue a Joint Draft Agreement on Open Access which will begin as a request but may become a requirement for all French researchers to deposit their articles in HAL, the French network of Open Access Archives. There is still some timidity about mandating, as well as about legalities, but the empirical evidence of the feasibility and the efficacy of self-archiving mandates, plus the strategy of requiring deposit but merely requesting that access be set as Open Access (while allowing the option of Closed Access) moots all practical and legal objections to an exception-free, immediate-deposit mandate -- and adding the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT feature to HAL will tide over research access needs during any Closed-Access embargo interval. Let us hope France will put its Joint Draft Agreement into practice soon.
Below is a synoptic translation, followed by the original, of an important French press release about forthcoming OA developments in France. I would add only that CNRS is mistaken in its worry that CNRS researchers would resist or resent a self-archiving mandate: Multiple author surveys -- international and multisciplinary -- as well as repeated actual experience with implemented self-archiving mandates -- have shown that there will be very high (95%) rates of compliance (over 80% of it willing rather than reluctant).
Second, legal issues are mooted if the mandate is an immediate deposit mandate, but the author has the option to set access to the deposit as either Open Access or Closed Access: 94% of journals already endorse setting access immediately to Open Access. For the remaining 6%, the HAL repository software should implement the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT feature, based on the metadata (visible webwide even with Closed Access to the full text) that has already been implemented in the GNU Eprints and DSpace repository software. That will tide over access during any embargo period (and embargoes will fade away once everything is being systematically self-archived and used).
Press release synopsis:
The STI 'Professional Days' 2006 (4th edition) conference on "Archives institutionnelles et archives ouvertes" took place in Nancy from 19 - 21 June.
All the major French research organizations were represented: CNRS, INSERM, INRIA, INRA, INERIS, IRD, and ADEME are to sign a Joint Draft Agreement (already finalised), defining a coordinated approach, at the national level, for open-access self-archiving of French research output. Also to sign the agreement are the conference of university presidents (CPU), the conference of Grandes Ecoles (France's Elite Universities), and the Pasteur Institute.
This marks an important advance in the implementation of a French national policy for open access institutional archives (OA/IA). There is also a protocol of agreement about metadata to enrich the articles and some assistance to depositers on legal matters.
Elsewhere, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD) has also recommended that making results open access in open archives should be made a condition of R&D funding, and so have NIH and FRPAA in the US and RCUK in the UK.
In France there is first to be a 'statement' as a prelude to a 'directive'. The difference is important. NIH and CERN have different deposit rates, reflecting the difference between a request and a requirement.
NIH, with only a request, has a deposit rate of, 4%, whereas CERN, with a requirement, is approaching 100%. OA cannot achieve its objectives unless deposit rates approach 100%.
A laisser-faire policy, only requesting self-archiving, generates a deposit rate of a few percent. Systematic activism from librarians and information professionals (informing, encouraging, helping with deposits) raises the rate to about 12%. Adding a 'carrot and stick' component (e.g., making the deposit rate one of the criteria in annual evaluation) might raise rates to 20% but not much more. By contrast, organizations that have a contractual obligation to deposit (such as CEMAGREF, since 1992, and INERIS) have deposit rates near 100%, fulfilling their contract to have open institutional archives which reflect the full research output of their organizations.
The Joint Draft Agreement is being formulated at a time when France is considering many other questions about legal aspects, voluntary vs. obligatory deposit, and the purpose of knowledge repositories. For fear that restive researchers might resent the imposition of administrative rules, the question is mostly evaded (especially by the CNRS), but there is evidence of progress: at the Nancy conference, INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research), announced that it plans to make self-archiving in its open-access archive compulsory within the next few years -- but this progress is far too slow.
A sense of legal uncertainty is one of the factors holding back deposit rates. Paradoxically, it is information professionals (librarians and documentalists) -- not researchers or management -- who have been pressing for a clear legal framework on open access archiving from the directorate of the CNRS.
There is a French call for proposals (drawing on a total source of only 1 million euros) for studies on the creation and support of new Open Access Journals. In contrast, in the UK, the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) is spending approximately 115 million euros, much of it devoted to studies on the creation and support of the infrastructure for open access archives in British universities and research institutions. According to some of the participants at the Nancy conference, France's new National Agency of Research ( ANR) refers in its contracts to requirement (or is it a request') linking its research funding to the provision of 'Open Access' to the results.
L’information : Les journées 2006 des professionnels de l’IST (4ème édition de ce rendez-vous) se sont déroulées à Nancy du 19 au 21 juin. Deux thèmes étaient inscrits au menu de ces journées qui sont devenues un classique et ne touchent plus uniquement les professionnels de l’information du CNRS, puisque aussi bien dans la salle qu’en tribune, tous les grands établissements de recherche français (INSERM, INRIA, INRA, INERIS, IRD, ADEME…) étaient représentés. Annonce majeure de ces journées : la signature d’un protocole d’accord (déjà finalisé), définissant une approche coordonnée, au niveau national, pour l’archivage ouvert de la production scientifique française. Outre le CNRS et les organismes déjà cités, la conférence des présidents d’université (CPU), la conférence des grandes écoles, l’Institut Pasteur, signeront cet accord. Celui-ci marque une avancée importante dans la mise en place d’une politique nationale en matière d’archives ouvertes (A0) et d’archives institutionnelles (AI).
L’analyse de la Dépêche : Le protocole « archives ouvertes » bientôt signé, qui au travers d’un guichet commun, prévoit la mise en place d’une « infrastructure nationale » OI/OA est à marquer d’une pierre blanche. Tout d’abord, il concrétise une volonté de coopération entre grands organismes de recherche (l’accord restant ouvert, sa signature va probablement avoir un effet d’entraînement sur d’autres EPST spécialisés), volonté qui est encore trop rare pour ne pas être soulignée – même si la mise en place sous l’égide de l’INIST du portail TermScience (cf. la Dépêche du 6 juin dernier) relevait déjà de cette mutualisation des stratégies et des moyens. Comme toute initiative négociée entre des entités ayant des objectifs et des rôles différents, les compromis nécessaires que reflète ce « traité multilatéral », ne satisfont pas tout le monde. Le guichet envisagé à ce jour, construit autour de la plate- forme HAL (mise en place et développée depuis 2001 par le Centre de communication scientifique directe – CCSD – du CNRS), a tous les avantages et tous les inconvénients d’une solution dont il n’était pas, dès l’origine, prévu qu’elle puisse jouer ce rôle d’infrastructure fédératrice. On n’entrera pas ici dans ce débat : il faut simplement souligner que le protocole d’accord définit bien une vraie « philosophie commune » en matière d’archives ouvertes et va assez loin dans des aspects directement fonctionnels : la définition du cœur de métadonnées qui doivent enrichir les articles déposés quelle qu’en soit l’origine ; la définition des procédures de travail collaboratif pour l’alimentation de ce guichet commun ; enfin la définition des besoins en terme «d’assistance aux déposants en particulier l’expertise juridique (1)».
Par une initiative « consortiale » qui ne relève que de leur propre volonté, ces organismes parent à ce qui semble une totale incurie des politiques et des pouvoirs publics français – et en tout premier lieu du Ministère de la Recherche (2) sur ces questions. La dimension politique de ces questions est pourtant désormais sur la place publique, bien au-delà des seuls milieux de la recherche. Le rapport de l’OCDE (septembre 2005) préconisant la généralisation systématique d’un lien obligatoire entre financement public de la R&D et mise à disposition des résultats de la recherche dans des archives ouvertes a fait grand bruit. La question de cette obligation est au cœur d’un très vif débat parlementaire aux Etats-Unis (projet de loi des sénateurs Lieberman (D) et Cornyn (R) et au Royaume-Uni (prise de position du House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee). La Commission devrait publier prochainement une « communication » sur ce thème, prélude à une éventuelle directive.
Le signal de réactivité et de mutualisation des approches et des moyens qu’envoient les acteurs de la recherche français au travers de ce protocole est donc important. Mais l’analyse ne serait pas complète si on ne posait la question des conditions de valeur d’usage à terme de ces archives ouvertes. Les grands modèles d’archives ouvertes (PubMed - piloté par le NIH aux Etats- Unis dans le secteur du biomédical ou ArXiv piloté en Europe par le CERN – dans le domaine de la physique) font apparaître des taux de dépôt très contrastés.
Si la logique communautaire fonctionne bien en physique et assure une réelle représentativité des matériaux déposés dans ArXiV, PubMed, malgré sa notoriété, n’obtient dans un cadre qui ne définit pas d’obligation, un tau Xde dépôt de 4% (c'est-à-dire que seuls 4% des articles reflétant des recherches biomédicales financées par le NIH sont versés dans PubMed). Or le taux de dépôt est un paramètre essentiel du développement des valeurs d’usage de ces gisements « ouverts » d’information scientifique élaborée. Que l’on assigne à ces AO des objectifs de simple communication directe des résultats de la recherche publique, ou des objectifs plus ambitieux de visibilité internationale des entités de recherche, de reflet exhaustif des activités de R&D financées sur fonds public, d’articulation de cette R&D avec l’économie de l’innovation (perspective OCDE), ces gisements en cours de constitution ne pourront atteindre ces objectifs que si le taux de dépôts sans atteindre 100% se rapproche asymptotiquement de cette limite. Puisque c’est une condition évidente de leur « représentativité » de la recherche en train de se faire. Or les « retours d’expériences » enregistrés ces derniers jours à Nancy confirment le « modèle PubMed » : trop d’énergies sont actuellement consacrées sur le terrain à la « bataille du dépôt » (convaincre les chercheurs de déposer), avec des résultats très mitigés. Pour simplifier, disons qu’une politique de « laisser faire » permet d’enregistrer un taux de dépôt de l’ordre de quelques %. Un investissement des professionnels de l’information dans la « bataille du dépôt » (sensibilisation, prise en charge de certaines tâches) permet d’atteindre un taux de dépôt de l’ordre de 12 %. L’association à l’invitation au dépôt d’une politique de la « carotte et du bâton » (en faisant par exemple du taux de dépôt des chercheurs l’un des éléments de leur évaluation annuelle) permettrait de porter la performance au-dessus de 20 % mais guère plus. Par contraste, les organismes (le CEMAGREF, qui a introduit cette obligation en 1992; l’INERIS, Institut national de l'environnement industriel et des risques où le taux de dépôt atteint 100 %) ont, pour des raisons évidentes, rempli leur contrat, à savoir disposer d’archives institutionnelles ouvertes qui reflètent de façon exhaustive l’activité de recherche de ces organismes.
Le protocole d’accord intervient donc en France à ce moment précis où commence à se poser la question essentielle de l’articulation entre « cadre réglementaire » (obligation de dépôt, pas obligation) et des finalités de ces entrepôts de connaissance. Même si, de crainte de prendre à rebrousse-poil la sensibilité des chercheurs rétifs à l’introductions de contraintes administratives la question est pudiquement éludée (en particulier au CNRS). Indice d’une évolution des esprits : lors des journées de Nancy, la représentante de l'INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale), a annoncé que cet organisme projette de rendre obligatoire le dépôt dans ses archives ouvertes dans les prochaines années. Une évolution de l’INSERM sur ce point aurait probablement valeur d’exemple en raison de l’importance et du prestige de cet EPST. Les mauvais esprits et les pessimistes souligneront qu’en raison des crédits dérisoires allant en France tant à ces outils qu’aux recherches sur ces questions, l’inutilité éventuelle (liée à un trop faible taux de dépôt) de ces « machins » ne pourrait cependant guère être qualifiée de gâchis de ressources. On se console comme on peut.
(1) Cette question de l’encadrement juridique du dépôt en archives institutionnelles ouvertes apparaissant lors des journées de Nancy comme un « point douloureux » surtout au sein du CNRS au sein duquel s’affrontent des sensibilités différentes, allant d’un laisser-faire laisser-passer minimisant l’importance du cadre juridique au profit d’une spontanéité autorégulée par les chercheurs et la sensibilité de ceux qui soulignent que l’actuelle insécurité juridique est l’un des freins importants au dépôt. Paradoxalement ce sont les professionnels de l’information – les documentalistes accompagnant les chercheurs dans leurs logiques de « publication sur archives ouvertes » qui - plus que les chercheurs ou les directions générales – formulent une demande très claire de définition au niveau de la direction du CNRS d’un cadre juridique clair. (2) Pour mesurer cette incurie, il suffit d’interroger le site www.recherche.gouv.fr avec les mots clés « archives ouvertes » « archives institutionnelles » ou « accès libre ». On constatera qu’aucun document de cadrage politique – ou même de simple synthèse didactique – sur ces questions ne figure dans la vitrine Web du Ministère. Le seul document (datant de 2004) qui s’approche d’un peu près de ce que pourrait être un cadre didactique/programmatique sur ces questions sont les deux pages d’ « exposé des motifs » pour un appel à propositions (royalement doté de 1 million d’euros, un montant sans doute inférieur au budget « petits fours » du ministère) visant à soutenir le développement de nouvelles revues scientifiques en ligne satisfaisant aux critères de l’Open Access. Il n’a pas été possible de vérifier sur le site du ministère si ce type d’opération s’est depuis 2004 inscrit dans une continuité d’action (mais il semble que la réponse soit négative). Pour mémoire rappelons que le JISC, Joint Information Systems Committee, l’entité jouant outre-Manche à la fois le rôle d’un consortium d’achat, d’un centre d’études et de gestionnaire d’une infrastructure réseau dédiée, a obtenu en octobre 2005 de ses autorités de tutelle une enveloppe de 80 millions de livres (environ 115 millions d’euros) qui seront essentiellement affectés au développement d’archives ouvertes d’articles scientifiques (« Open repositories ») au sein des universités et institutions de recherche britanniques et de l’ « infrastructure » (mise en réseau et exploitation à partir d’un moteur de recherche unique) nécessaire à l’exploitation de ces archives. La toute jeune Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) ne fournit pas non plus sur son site Internet de « cadre » sur ces questions. Il semble cependant, d’après certains participants aux journées de Nancy, que l’ANR, dans ses contrats inclut une clause posant le principe d’une obligation (ou d’un souhait ?) liant ses financements sur projets à une mise en œuvre d’une logique d’ « open access » pour les articles scientifiques résultant de ces projets.
Indexation : Information scientifique, technique et médicale
Suite à une erreur, la Dépêche diffusée hier était une dépêche qui vous avait déjà été transmise en date du 20 juin 2005. Nous vous prions de bien vouloir nous en excuser.
Mentions de responsabilité et de propriété : Dépêche élaborée par MV Etudes et Conseil, qui assume seul la responsabilité journalistique de ces contenus. Tous droits d'utilisation réservés GFII. Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2006 08:56:38 +0200
From: GFII
To: Stevan Harnad
Cc: Helene Bosc
Subject: Re: [depeche-gfii] CNRS, INSERM, CEMAGREF,INRIA, INRA, INERIS, IRD
Bonjour,
Je vous remercie de l'intérêt que vous portez à la Dépêche du GFII.
Nous vous donnons l'autorisation de faire figurer cette information en
mentionnant la source.
Cordialement
Ruth Martinez
Déléguée Générale
GFII - Groupement Français de l'Industrie de l'Information
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Sunday, June 25. 2006
SUMMARY: Some publishers are offering a high-priced Paid-Publisher-Archiving (PPA) alternative to free Author-Self-Archiving (ASA), and trying to redirect the OA mandates that have been proposed by the US, UK and EC toward mandating OA through PPA instead of ASA. If research institutions and funders have the spare cash to pay whatever publishers ask today for PPA without having to take it away from research allotments, then the outcome (100% OA) is welcome and optimal for all. But if they do not have the spare cash (e.g., because it is already tied up in paying subscriptions today), then it makes more sense to mandate ASA, as proposed by the US, UK and EC, and let the market decide whether and when PPA ever becomes necessary, and if so, at what price. The cash may not be needed at all, if subscriptions hold; or the subscription cancellations themselves will release the cash needed for redirection to PPA. Right now, for example, the PPA asking price is bloated with the cost of the print edition. Surely today's author-institutions wishing to provide OA for their own publication output are not to be burdened with paying for their articles' print runs too, particularly when those are already being paid for by institutional subscriptions today, with no evidence of subscription decline as a result of self-archiving?
It is a very canny gambit on the part of publishers to offer a maximally priced Paid-Publisher-Archiving (PPA) alternative to free Author-Self-Archiving (ASA), and to focus their anti-mandate efforts now on trying to redirect the OA mandates that have been proposed by the US, UK and EC toward mandating OA through PPA instead of ASA.
It can even be stated ( again) that if research funders feel they have the spare cash -- and researchers are ready to believe that that cash would be redirected from elsewhere, and not from their research allotments -- to pay whatever publishers ask today (or a capped amount that the funders impose) for PPA, then the outcome (namely, 100% OA) would be welcome and optimal for all.
But if the research funders do not have the spare cash today to match and duplicate the funds that are already changing hands today in the form of annual institutional subscriptions, paid by institutional libraries to publishers -- and/or if the prospect of committing to the payment of such sums today would result in the funders balking at the adoption of OA mandates at all today -- then it would make a good deal more sense for funders to insist, today, on the ASA mandate they have already proposed, rather than the publishers' counterproposal of a PPA mandate, and to let the market decide empirically, at its own tempo, whether ASA indeed generates institutional subscription cancellations.
For if mandated ASA does generate substantial institutional subscription cancellations, then those very same substantial institutional subscription cancellations will constitute the institutional windfall savings out of which PPA costs (again determined by the market and not by a-priori fiat) could be paid quite naturally, without taking any money away from research funding.
And if mandated ASA does not generate substantial institutional subscription cancellations, then there is no need for PPA.
This is an empirical question. Neither its probability nor its price are decidable a-priori, by fiat.
The thing to bear in mind is that publication costs today are bloated -- by the costs of continuing to provide the paper edition, for which there is still hefty subscription demand, as well as the deluxe online edition, and many other extras that subscribing institutions are still happy to pay for today. If/when subscribers should ever cease to want those extra features, and are satisfied with just the author's free, online, refereed final draft, then the cost of PPA can only shrink, and may well reduce to just the cost of implementing peer review.
Publishers are basically asking funders, today -- who have every right to insist on immediate OA for the research they fund, today -- to pay for the entire status quo (print edition and all), today, even though there are plenty of institutions paying for it all already, and even though no one knows whether they will be any less willing to pay for it once the entire system is supplemented, thanks to the ASA mandates, by a free online version of the author's refereed final draft for those who cannot afford all the rest!
But, to repeat, the need for OA would be fully met if funders (and institutions) found the extra cash to mandate and pay for PPA just as surely as the need for OA would be met if funders (and institutions) simply mandated ASA.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Friday, June 23. 2006
 SUMMARY: The new Director General of France's large, distributed national research network, the CNRS, has reiterated his predecessor's recommendation to all CNRS researchers to deposit their articles in HAL, the CNRS's nationwide institutional repository. Unfortunately, recommendations alone do not generate much more Open Access self-archiving than the spontaneous worldwide baseline of about 15%. To accelerate CNRS self-archiving toward 100%, the recommendation must be transformed into a requirement. The only obstacle to adopting an OA self-archiving requirement is the perception that it could contravene copyright agreements with publishers, so the simple, certain solution is to make it an immediate deposit requirement (no exceptions, no delays), with Open-Access-setting merely a recommendation rather than a requirement. (For the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval, the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request feature of the institutional repository softwares can provide for all would-be users' access needs during the embargo.)
On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Thierry Chanier wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: "Arnold Migus, the new head of the CNRS recommends depositing in HAL" Recommending has been demonstrated to be insufficient to generate self-archiving above the worldwide spontaneous self-archiving baseline of 15%: Only requiring (a mandate, directive, compulsory policy) will generate self-archiving that approaches 100% of institutional research output.
Moreover, this CNRS recommendation is not new. It was already registered in ROARMAP on 17 Mar 2005 under the former CNRS Directorate by the former Head of Scientific and Technical Information (Laurent Romary) Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
"HAL (Hyper Article en Ligne), is an open archive that already covers the fields of Physics, Mathematics and Humanities within CNRS and which is our software platform for our future institutional archive. The CNRS intends to establish an institutional archive -- a high quality and wide coverage repository of its research publication output. It is expected that the adoption of a highly incentivized institutional self-archiving policy for our researchers will ensure that the majority of CNRS publications deposited in the archive will also be made externally visible in Open Access."
From the growth data for HAL, the deposit rate does not seem commensurate with all of CNRS's annual research output. If you consult by year of publication you will find that from the totatlity of the country's CNRS research units, there are, respectively, only 4430, 5462, and 2110 articles for 2004, 2005, and 2006, respectively.
It would be very helpful to know what percentage of CNRS's total annual research output this represents, and how it distributes across CNRS's many fields and research units. "the researcher should [first] ask the publisher for permission to deposit." This is a big mistake. No permission is required from anyone merely to deposit.
The CNRS policy should be a requirement to deposit all published articles (full text and metadata) immediately upon acceptance for publication (no exceptions, no delays). The only optional component should concern when the access to the deposited full-text is set as Open Access. (Until then the deposited full-text is in Closed Access, but its metadata are already accessible webwide.) Setting full-text access immediately to Open Access should be recommended, but not required (for the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval), in order to avoid further delay in adopting the policy, and in order to rule out all exceptions or delays in depositing). "They suggest spending time to negotiate with the publisher when signing the copyright statement, even asking him the permission to deposit the preprint!" Nonsense. All deposits should be immediate; negotiation can come afterwards, if the author wishes, in order to decide when to set access to OA for the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval. In the interim, I would strongly urge that HAL implements the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request feature of EPrints (now also implemented in DSpace).
Authors need no permission at all from anyone, however, to immediately set access to 100% of their unrefereed preprints to Open Access at the moment of deposit (which can be done even before the preprint is submitted to any journal for refereeing!) -- but the decision about whether or not to deposit an unrefereed preprint at all must be left entirely to the author: encouraged but not required. "Hence if the publisher is against any form of deposit, the researcher should do nothing." Nonsense. Deposit should be de-coupled from access-setting. Postprint deposit should be mandatory and immediate, and with no exceptions. Access-setting should be left up to the author, with immediate OA strongly encouraged, but not required. For preprints, deposit itself should only be encouraged but not required -- but access to deposited preprints can always be set as OA immediately. "I do not that know any French publisher appears on the Sherpa list. They avoided responding and taking any official position. Informally they are against We could consider this text as an invitation to open the debate with them" Please, before debating: deposit! " - there is no statement that research funded with public money should in any case be made open access" It would be a good idea for French research funders to follow the example of other research funders worldwide, including the European Commission, the UK and the US, in requiring that the results of publicly funded research be made be deposited immediately -- and made Open Access as soon as possible. " - there is no requirement in French research contracts, when claiming funds to deposit the resulting publications in an OA repository [like HAL]" There is alas no requirement in any other country's research contracts yet either! The EC, UK and US have so far only proposed to require self-archiving: they have not yet implemented their respective proposals. So far, only the Wellcome Trust, a private funder, plus 6 individual universities and research institutions worldwide, have actually implemented a self-archiving mandate. So there is still time for France to become the first... " - [in any case] it is nonsense to ask the publisher for the right to deposit a preprint, the preprint not being part of any copyright statement" Correct. But it is also nonsense to ask the publisher for permission to deposit any article: If the publisher's policy is relevant to anything at all, it is relevant only to access-setting, not to depositing. " - it is contrary to our current position to deposit first and then consider whether the deposit can be made free immediately or after a given delay." Then please change your current position, which is arbitrary, counterproductive, and has obvious not been thought through. "What do you think of this position? Will it promote or hamper the development of OA?" Recommending self-archiving is better than not recommending self-archiving, but it is not enough. What is needed is requiring (i.e., a self-archiving directive or mandate). And the mandate should be an immediate-deposit mandate. Any delay and negotiation should only pertain to the date of Open-Access-setting, not to the date of deposit (which should be on the day of acceptance of the refereed, revised, final draft for publication)...
The failure to distinguish deposit from release, the failure to mandate immediate deposit, and the bad advice on copyright and negotiation would hamper rather than promote OA. But fortunately this is all very easy to correct. All that is required is to understand exactly how and why to correct it -- and then to correct it.
Stevan Harnad
A l'attention de Mesdames et Messieurs les directeurs d'unité Sous-couvert de Mesdames et Messieurs les délégués régionaux Objet : Développement des archives ouvertes
Chère Collègue, Cher Collègue,
Le CNRS soutient le mouvement international en faveur des archives ouvertes. Il a, à cet égard, exprimé une position de principe lors de la déclaration de Berlin, signée le 22 octobre 2003, en faveur du modèle du libre accès à la connaissance. Et l'établissement a agi concrètement en mettant en oeuvre la base pluridisciplinaire Hal hébergée au Centre pour la communication scientifique directe (CCSD), unité propre de service (UPS) du CNRS. L'Académie des sciences a exprimé, pour sa part, son fort soutien dans un avis rendu le 5 juillet 2005 et un accord inter-établissements (établissements d'enseignement supérieur et de recherche et organismes de recherche) est en cours de signature pour l'utilisation commune de Hal.
Dans ce contexte, je souhaite que vous invitiez tous les chercheurs des unités propres ou associées au CNRS à déposer, chaque fois que c'est possible, les manuscrits de leurs travaux sur la base Hal, les rendant ainsi librement consultables par la communauté scientifique internationale. Outre une large visibilité immédiate des travaux de recherche, ce dispositif permettra, dans un cadre académique, une préservation à long terme des documents sous forme électronique. Il permettra également aux laboratoires et institutions une identification facilitée de leur production scientifique via une collection constituée sur la base Hal.
Je vous incite donc à prendre des mesures pour que ce dépôt soit effectué régulièrement. Le CNRS veillera, pour sa part, au maintien de ces bases en libre accès, à la conservation à long terme du corpus de connaissances ainsi constitué et à la stabilité des adresses des documents mis en ligne. Il ne s'agit évidemment pas de renoncer à la publication des travaux de recherche dans des revues à comité de lecture. L'évaluation scientifique par les pairs et l'amélioration des textes soumis aux revues scientifiques, en particulier internationales, sont des composantes essentielles de la recherche. Cependant, comme l'ont déjà montré certaines grandes communautés scientifiques, une publication par les canaux classiques n'est pas incompatible avec la communication des résultats sur une base en accès libre.
Il existe bien évidemment des cas oû il est inopportun ou impossible de diffuser les résultats de recherche, que ce soit dans le cadre des bases en libre accès ou des publications traditionnelles. C'est aux chercheurs et aux laboratoires d'appliquer le discernement nécessaire.
Il convient en particulier de veiller à ne pas rendre publics des résultats confidentiels, par exemple s'ils sont destinés à être brevetés, et de vérifier que les droits de diffusion en archives ouvertes n'ont fait pas l'objet d'une cession à un éditeur (cf. le guide du dépôt et du bon usage de Hal qui rappelle les règles à respecter en matière de droit de propriété
Les chercheurs des laboratoires propres ou associés au CNRS sont invités à ce titre à favoriser les revues et éditeurs dont les contrats sont compatibles avec le dépôt des documents sur Hal, mais bien évidemment ce sont eux les mieux placés pour décider en dernier ressort si cela est possible, compte tenu des habitudes dans chaque discipline et de la nécessité d'une bon ne diffusion.
Dans les cas oû il s'avère que le dépôt du texte dans son intégralité n'est pas approprié, il demeure toujours la possibilité de déposer dans Hal une notice bibliographique ne contenant que les références de publication. Sachant pouvoir compter sur votre actif concours pour contribuer à développer le modèle du libre accès à la connaissance, je vous prie de bien vouloir agréer, Chère Collègue, Cher Collègue, l'expression de mes salutations les meilleures,
Arnold Migus, Directeur Général du CNRS
Thursday, June 15. 2006
SUMMARY: Some publishers have suggested that because a 6-month embargo on Open Access self-archiving by authors is too long for researchers and too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead pay publishers to provide the Open Access immediately. This is fine if the research funders have the extra cash to pay whatever price publishers are currently charging for this (it varies from under $500 to over $3000 today) or to impose a standardized cap on the price and pay that. But otherwise it makes more sense for authors to self-archive for themselves, at no cost, now, exactly as proposed by the FRPAA, and to allow the market to decide the price, if and when subscription revenues should ever prove unsustainable. There is no evidence at all of subscription revenue decline yet, as a consequence of self-archiving, even after 15 years in the fields where self-archiving has been practised the longest and effectively reached 100% years ago. The FRPAA should mandate that the deposit of all articles must be immediate (upon acceptance for publication), with only the Open-Access-setting (vs. Closed Access) open to embargo (capped at 6 months) from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open-Access-setting. Semi-automatized email-eprint requests made possible by the institutional repository softwares can provide for the needs of the researchers during the embargo period for articles in those journals.
(From Peter Suber's Open Access News)
Springer's unexpected response to FRPAA
Peter Suber: "I've learned --and Jan Velterop has confirmed-- that Springer has sent a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate committee considering FRPAA, raising an unusual objection to the six-month embargo allowed by the bill. The letter argues that six months is too short to satisfy publishers and too long to satisfy researchers. In its place, Springer proposes a policy that would require full-text open access immediately upon publication --provided that the policy makes clear that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is an inseparable part of research and therefore that the funds for doing so (article processing fees) will be available to researchers as a special overhead on their publicly-funded research grants. The letter proposes that the new policy might be phased in after a short grace period to give publishers a chance to modify their business models."
The Federal Research Public Access Act ( FRPAA) proposes to mandate that all federally funded researchers must not only publish their research findings in journals (as they already must), but they must now also make all the peer-reviewed journal articles in which those findings are reported openly accessible (OA) to all the potential users of those findings -- by self-archiving them free for all on the web (within at most 6 months of publication).
A publisher (Springer) has now recommended to the sponsors of the FRPAA that because a 6-month embargo on self-archiving is too long for researchers and too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead mandate immediate self-archiving and pay the publishers to do it in place of the authors. The recommendation does not mention the amount that the publishers should be paid, but currently publishers are charging between $500 and $3000 or more for making articles OA (Springer charges $3000).
I would like to make some comments on this suggestion. Please note that they contain some nested contingencies: (1) If the federal funding agencies have the extra cash, and are willing to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today (or to impose a capped amount of their own), and if the FRPAA can be successfully passed as an immediate-OA mandate in this way (i.e., no embargo allowed), this would be a perfectly fine outcome -- acceptable to research and researchers as well as to publishers.
(2) If, however, the federal funding agencies do not have the extra cash to pay publishers the amount they ask today (or an acceptable capped amount), and/or if the FRPAA cannot be successfully enacted into law if burdened with a commitment to pay publishers the amount they ask today (or an acceptable capped amount) for OA, then the suggestion that FRPAA should be revised to do so is just another way to delay or doom the passage of the FRPAA, and should be ignored.
(3) The present version of the FRPAA does not propose to pay anyone anything: it merely mandates that federally funded research must be made OA by the fundee, by self-archiving it, within (at most) 6 months of publication, in the fundee's own institutional repository (or a central one).
(4) To date there is no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces publisher subscription revenues; and the two publishers whose authors have been self-archiving the longest and the most, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, have both reported publicly that they have (4a) no detectable subscription declines and are (4b) unopposed to an immediate (no-embargo) OA self-archiving mandate.
(5) The objective, empirical way to test whether or not there is any truth to the hypothesis of some other publishers that self-archiving will reduce subscription revenue -- and the only way to find out how much and how fast it would reduce subscription revenue if ever it did so at all -- is to adopt the FRPAA mandate now (both it and variants of it have been debated, delayed and deferred for 3 years now, with no new information or evidence forthcoming) and then to monitor its outcome annually, making further adjustments only as and when there is evidence that they are necessary.
(6) It is quite true that a 6-month embargo is bad for research, which is conducted in order be immediately used and applied once it has passed peer review, and that in many rapidly moving fields the very earliest "growth tip" of research is the most important of all. But if an immediate no-embargo OA mandate cannot yet be agreed upon, an interim way to minimize that damage to research is to require immediate deposit and to allow only the date at which access to the deposited full text is set to Open Access (OA) to be delayed (for no more than 6 months) where necessary (Closed Access until then).
(7) 94% of journals already endorse setting access immediately to OA.
(8) For the remaining 6% of articles set to Closed Access, the article's bibliographic metadata will still be visible and accessible to all immediately, and the self-archiving repository software provides a semi-automatic feature for individual would-be users to request -- and authors to provide -- an individual eprint of the full text by email, almost instantly.
(9) This immediate-deposit/delayed-OA-setting compromise is the preferable one if the federal funding agencies do not have the extra cash, or are unwilling to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today (or to impose a capped amount of their own) to provide instant OA.
(10) At the moment, institutional subscriptions are paying the costs of peer review. If/when subscription revenues were indeed ever to decline to unsustainable levels because of institutional cancellations, the institutional windfall savings from the cancellations would themselves be a natural candidate source for covering the peer-review costs for the institution's own research output, rather than any arbitrary amount requested from federal research funders today -- especially as subscription decline would first generate pressure toward publisher cost-cutting, downsizing and readjustment to the new reality of OA publishing, and hence a more realistic, market-driven figure for the true costs of peer review (which publishers merely manage, whereas researchers themselves actually perform the refereeing itself for free). Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Tuesday, June 13. 2006
SUMMARY: The publisher lobby can defeat the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) (to mandate self-archiving of all federally funded research so as to make it freely accessible online) if FRPAA is promoted merely or mainly as a means of providing public (student, practitioner, patient, general public) access to publicly funded research. Publishers can and will argue (and already are arguing) that the public does not really want or need access to most of this specialized peer-reviewed journal literature, across all fields (not just clinically relevant medicine), written by and for specialized researchers, and that it is hence not justified to put publishers' subscription revenues at potential risk by mandating that this entire literature must be made freely accessible online. Instead, publishers will propose special arrangements in which they themselves would make the tiny fraction of what they publish that is of potential public interest freely accessible online. The right response to this by FRPAA proponents is to make it very explicit that the primary purpose of the bill is not public READS, but "CURES" -- i.e., the public benefits that come from applying and building upon research findings in further research and practical applications, for the sake of which the research was publicly funded in the first place. And CURES come from researcher access and usage -- researchers applying and building upon current research in further research and applications -- not from public access and usage. Because no researcher can currently afford access to anywhere near all the research they might need to read and use, researcher self-archiving substantially accelerates and increases research usage and impact, which is the measure of speed and progress toward CURES. And substantially accelerating and increasing progress toward CURES -- unlike providing public READS -- does outweigh any hypothetical risk to publisher revenues (although there is as yet absolutely no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues.) Moreover, with free online access (Open Access) to self-archived research, the public (students, practitioners, patients, tax-payers) get full access too, as a secondary benefit, but not because that is the primary benefit from or justification for mandating Open Access self-archiving.
ANON: " Your arguments are totally logical. However, a factor you are not taking into account: if researchers are focused on their research- impact - politicians are focused on their own image and reelection potential. It is the politicians who need to vote in FRPAA."
And it is the publisher lobby that will be pressuring them not to. SPPP (Student/Practitioner/Patient/Public) access is a good intro, to get the politicians' and voters' attention, but then you need a follow-through that can hold up against the publisher lobby -- and SPPP-access has no follow-through when publishers inevitably say, as they will (and are already): "You want to mandate that our business revenue should be put at risk for the sake of SPPP-access, yet there is no evidence that the SPPP reads (or has the slightest wish to read) most of the highly specialized research that we publish! Why not just make a side-deal that we make publicly accessible that tiny fraction of (mostly clinical-medical) research that is likely to be of SPPP interest, and leave the rest of it -- which is the overwhelming majority of it -- alone, rather than putting all of our revenues at risk for no objective reason? (And denigrate logic all you like, in the end, the pro-mandate argument has to make sense, otherwise the publisher lobby wins and the OA self-archiving mandate -- and the best interests of research and the public that funds it -- lose.)
The requisite follow-through is CURES, not SPPP-access. Students, practitioners, patients and the public do not produce CURES, researchers do. And the reason researcher usage and impact is so important is not because it produces money and prizes for researchers, but because it generates CURES. In fact, that is what research is funded for, not to produce reading matter for the SPPP.
("CURES" is of course over-simplified too, and medically biassed, but it will do, as long as it is put in scare-quotes or CAPs: more generally, it means applications of research, including technology; even more generally, it means pure research progress itself, which might eventually lead to applications; and when it comes to social science and especially the humanities, which rarely has any applications at all, it means the production of specialized scholarship, which we presumably fund because we think it is a social benefit to promote scholarship, not because the general public or even students actually need or wish to read the peer-reviewed journal articles reporting the research the public funds, written by specialists for specialists, but because the public wants to promote scholarly progress, which may eventually trickle down into education.) ANON: " Is there evidence that FRPAA will result in the kind of citations that politicians care about - photo ops and positive pieces in the news, funding support and votes so that they can be re-elected?"
CURES produce photo-ops, and for researchers to produce CURES, researchers (not SPPP) need to have access to the ongoing research, in order to use it and build on it.
Moreover, the politicians are not just responsive to votes, as you know, but also to money and lobbying, especially from big business, and to what fosters or threatens business revenue flows. Yes, "public access to publicly funded research" sounds like a good vote-getter on the surface, even if it doesn't amount to much research the public would actually want to access and. But the publishing lobby is another matter, and they are the ones to contend with now.
It's not the vote-getting power of the OA principle that has been blocking the RCUK policy for two years and that has watered down the ,a href="http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm">NIH public access policy to near-nothingness: it's the publisher lobby; and this time FRPAA has to come forearmed: If it tries to coast on the public-access-to-publicly-funded-research slogan alone, or primarily, it will be defeated, no matter how sexy it may sound as a vote-getter. (And, by the way, most individual citizens don't read research and couldn't care less about this issue, one way or the other.)
Publishers will float doomsday scenarios about ruinous risks to their ability to make ends meet if self-archiving is mandated (not based on any evidence, but sounding ominous just the same). These doomsday scenarios need a more convincing answer than that "we are doing it so the public can read the research it funds" -- because then the publishers will simply adduce the abundant evidence that the public is not reading most of the peer-reviewed research they publish, and would not and could not have the slightest interest in ever reading it. So the revenue-risk is completely unjustified.
Not so if the rationale is CURES rather than SPPP READS, for research progress and the possibility of cures is the very reason we fund research in the first place. CURES -- but not READS -- offset publishers' hypothetical doomsday scenario very effectively. ANON: " To put it another way: is there research showing that politicians care about researcher-impact at all, never mind enough to stand up to the publisher anti-OA lobbying?"
Politicians care about CURES, and "cures" is the simple (simplistic) encapsulation of research uptake, usage, application, productivity and progress. And that in turn is something that can only come from researchers using and applying research, not from the public, reading research. And it is for CURES that the public is funding research in the first place, not for its own READing delectation.
So the right public issue politicians need to focus on is CURES, not SPPP-access; and CURES means research usage and impact, which comes from researcher-use, not from SPPP-reading. ANON: " Arguments focussed on students, patients, and the public are much more likely to persuade politicians than arguments based exclusively on benefits for researchers. The two streams of arguments complement each other. It is not necessary, or desirable, to limit pro-OA arguments."
OA is not about benefits to researchers! It is about CURES. Researcher access means more progress and momentum toward CURES.
Moreover, it is now no longer just about persuading politicians but about resisting the publisher lobby, which is trying to dissuade politicians. Answers to their objections are needed too; and SPPP-access is not the answer, CURES is; and that means researcher-access, not SPPP-access. (Yet, let us not forget, SPPP-access can and will come too, with the OA territory: So it's fine to mention both benefits, but essential to make it clear that CURES is the primary rationale for mandating self-archiving, and READS merely a secondary benefit. ANON: " The politician who cares about patients but thinks the researcher-arguments are abstract, will support a patient-based OA argument. It is unlikely that a person with this viewpoint would support a research-only focused argument."
The focus is on CURES, not on abstract researcher-arguments: Everyone knows that CURES come from researchers, not from students, practitioners, patients or the general public. I think that is a concrete matter that politicians and voters are quite capable of understanding. And it has the virtue of trumping the publishers' arguments about hypothetical revenue risks: progress toward actual CURES (monitored in the form of research impact) trumps hypothetical revenue risks; SPPP-READS do not.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
SUMMARY: "Public Access to Publicly Funded Research" is a good way to draw voter and elected-official attention to the need for Open Access, but then it has to be made clear that research is publicly funded primarily for the sake of the benefits it brings to the public: so its findings can be used and built upon in the form of further research progress and applications ("CURES") and not primarily because the public has a great desire or need to read peer-reviewed research articles ("READS"), written by and for researchers (and research students). Hence it is primarily for the sake of making publicly funded research accessible to its intended users -- researchers -- that Open Access is so important and urgent for the public that funds it: because, right now, researchers do not have access to all or most of the research they need in order to maximize research progress and applications (CURES), to the benefit of the public that funded the research. Public access READs, however, come as a secondary side-benefit of Open Access anyway (for everyone, including students, practitioners and patients); yet the reason it is so important not to argue that public READs are the primary rationale for Open Access is that that rationale can be challenged (and perhaps even defeated) by the publisher lobby, arguing that it is unjustified to put their subscription revenues at potential risk by mandating author self-archiving (even though there exists no objective evidence that author self-archiving causes subscription decline) merely for the sake of public READS when the public (including students, practitioners and patients) in fact has little interest in reading peer-reviewed research journal articles apart from a minority of health-relevant articles, for which the publishers can instead make special arrangements to make them -- and only them -- Open Access. In contrast, the true primary rationale for Open Access, "CURES" (i.e., research progress and applications) for the public that funded the research, does over-ride hypothetical risks to publisher subscription revenue (for which no actual evidence even exists).
Below is a reply to an anonymized query on an often-confused issue concerning Open Access (OA), the rationale for providing OA, and the rationale for mandating the provision of OA (by mandating self-archiving, as the RCUK in the UK, the FRPAA in the US and the European Commission (EC) are each proposing to do): (1) OA is about Open Access to research: about 2.5 million articles per year, published in about 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals and congress proceedings in all disciplines, from maths, physics and engineering to biology and medical sciences, to the social sciences and the humanities.
(2) The only ones who can provide access to these 2.5 million annual researchers articles are their authors, the researchers: either by publishing them in an OA journal, or by publishing them in a conventional journal and also self-archiving them in their institutional repository (or a central one).
(3) Author surveys have shown that although only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously, 95% will comply if mandated to self-archive by their research funders and/or their institutions. The half-dozen self-archiving mandates that have already been adopted (including those of the Wellcome Trust, CERN, and several universities) have since confirmed this high compliance rate.
(4) The FRPAA, RCUK and EU mandate proposals are facing stout opposition from the publisher lobby, even though 94% of journals have already given their green light for immediate author self-archiving.
(5) The two main bases for the publishers' objections are that OA is unnecessary and that mandating self-archiving would put their subscription revenues at risk.
(6) There is to date no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces publisher subscription revenues, but even if it were ever to do so, the question is whether the benefits (to research, researchers, and the public that funds them) outweigh the risks (to publishers).
(7) The chief evidence that the benefits (to research, researchers, and the public that funds them) outweigh the risks (to publishers) is that OA substantially accelerates and increases research usage and impact, hence research progress and productivity (as measured by download and citation counts): This is the primary motivation for mandating the provision of OA, through self-archiving: to maximize research usage and impact, hence research productivity and progress ("CURES").
(8) A side-benefit is that OA increases access and usage for practitioners, patients and the general public too -- in those fields in which there is practitioner, patient, and public (PPP) interest in the research articles. (It has to be noted, though, that there is as yet no systematic quantitative measure of this PPP interest and that PPP interest is almost certainly limited to only a small fraction of the annual 2.5 million articles published across all research fields.)
(9) Hence the primary rationale for mandating OA self-archiving has to be the objectively measurable and demonstrated benefits it provides for research, researchers, and the public that funds them -- in terms of usage and citations as measures of progress toward CURES -- rather than merely PPP interest.
(10) OA of course also provides access for PPP use, but the important strategic point to understand is that PPP-needs (being limited to only a fraction of the OA fields and being difficult as yet to measure and document) cannot be adduced as the primary reason for putting publisher subscription revenues at even hypothetical risk -- otherwise there is a strong actual risk that the proposals to mandate self-archiving will be successfully defeated by the publisher lobby. The rationale for OA is primarily to provide access to research by researchers for researchers -- all for the benefit of the public that funded the research. PPP access is merely a side-benefit of OA. It would come nowhere near justifying an OA mandate just on its own. Here is my detailed reply to a well-meaning (anonymous) query concerning PPP interests: ANON: " When I read your 8-point agenda I believe that the clinical faculty would feel that they were not being embraced in it." I think you are not quite understanding the OA problem, hence its solution: The objective is to provide free online access (OA) for all would-be users (whether they be researchers or practitioners, patients and public [PPP]).
The problem, however, is that the providers of the research, namely, the researchers who wrote the research articles, are not yet providing OA to their articles spontaneously.
The solution is to mandate that they must provide OA, for the benefit of the public that funds their research -- by self-archiving their own final, refereed, accepted drafts of their own articles free online in institutional or central repositories.
In order to get that solution (mandate) adopted, it is necessary to persuade those who are in a position to mandate self-archiving -- namely the researchers' own funders and institutions -- to mandate it. In order to persuade them to mandate it, it is necessary to persuade them that there is a need to mandate OA -- especially because the publishers are trying to prevent self-archiving mandates, or, failing that, to embargo them, because they fear they could reduce their subscription revenues (even though there is no evidence of this, even after 15 years of self-archiving, some of it at or near 100% for years now in some subfields).
Now comes the critical point: To persuade researchers and their funders and employers that there is indeed a strong need to mandate self-archiving despite the publishers' objections that there is no need for OA and that it might put their subscription revenues at risk, you have to make it clear exactly what the need for OA is, and how and why it is to researchers' advantage to self-archive their research:
The chief need for OA is on the part of those who are in the position to use and apply the research, for the benefit of the public that funded it, namely, the researchers by and for whom the research articles were written. And the objective measure of their need is download and citation counts: It has been demonstrated that self-archiving accelerates and increases downloads and citations substantially (meaning that without it, many potential users are denied access). Citation counts mean salary and funding for researchers, and overheads for their institutions, and both citations and downloads mean a return on the funder's investment of tax-payer money in funding the research, in terms of research productivity, applications and progress ("CURES"), in all fields.
So the way to solve the problem of how to persuade researchers to provide OA is to persuade funders and institutions to mandate self-archiving. And the way to persuade them to mandate self-archiving is to persuade them that OA is to the advantage of research and researchers (and their institutions and funders and especially the tax-payers that fund the funders) because it both accelerates and increases research citations and downloads (i.e., research impact and progress: "CURES").
Downloads are not as yet being systematically measured and compiled (although they will be eventually), but citations are already being systematically measured and compiled -- and, moreover, they are correlated with downloads.
So the simple, straightforward argument for mandating self-archiving, the one that is immune to publishers' objections that OA is unneeded or that it might ruin their business, is that self-archiving is optimal for research progress itself ("CURES"), because it substantially increases research citations, which indicates that the research is being taken up, used, applied and built upon.
If we could add download counts to the argument, and downloads in particular by practitioners, patients and public (PPP), we would, but there are no such download counts yet, so we cannot add them directly and empirically to the usage/impact argument. It is not necessary, however, because free access for researchers also means free access for everyone else too, including PPP. So there is no need to adduce specific evidence that there is substantial PPP demand and need for access (especially because in most specialized fields there is unlikely to be!).
We cannot, however, say that the primary reason we need OA is because of PPP needs, because (1) we have no data on PPP use yet and (2) PPP use applies to only a small fraction of the research literature -- 2.5 million articles a year, across all fields, in 24,000 journals. Hence this is not a valid argument for OA self-archiving in general, and, if put up front as the main reason for seeking OA mandates, would lead to debate, delay and defeat after years of haggling, with publisher offers of "special deals," with the publishers making only a select subset of their articles OA -- those that might have some PPP interest -- rather than all articles, which would put all of the research journal needlessly at (hypothetical) risk, for no compelling reason.
That would be the PPP tail wagging the entire OA research dog: PPP needs are only a tiny (though important) subset of OA needs. And, more important, direct PPP access is definitely not the main way the public benefits from OA! Focussing primarily on PPP access is the wrong strategy for persuading researchers, their institutions and their funders of the need to mandate OA, even though PPP access does undeniably have superficial appeal with voters and politicians; in the end, on its own, or in the lead as the primary rationale for Open Access, PPP access would lead to debate, delay and defeat for a self-archiving mandate.
But using PPP access needs as the primary rationale for OA needs is not necessary. The solution is to put the irrefutable direct needs of researchers for research access (for the sake of the research and application benefits -- "CURES" -- it will provide for patients, practitioners, cures, the public) first, and note that OA will also provide PPP access as a side-benefit wherever wanted or needed.
It is ever so important not to weaken the case for OA -- the case that must be put to the researchers and their institutions and funders, across all fields -- by giving primacy to access by patients and practitioners. They will get access anyway. But they are not the research providers: Researchers are; and most of them don't do clinically relevant research; and even those who do are rewarded for their research impact, and not yet for their practical impact. (They will be rewarded for the latter after OA prevails, but not before, so that cannot be used to induce them or their institutions and funders to self-archive: research impact can, and it gives everyone else access too.)
I hope you understand these issues of logic and practicality better now: Only a small fraction of research is PPP-relevant, so the need for PPP access cannot be made the principle argument for OA or OA will lose.
Now some comments: ANON: " I don't think that folks understand this distinction well. You and I do but researchers=lab to the more social sciences. We have a large health science program here and our faculty have "divisions" (i.e. research faculty versus clinical faculty). It is from these clinical faculty I have extended my appreciation of the problems in the field. When I read your 8-point agenda I believe that the clinical faculty would feel that they were not being embraced in it." If the clinical faculty publish research (i.e., if they are OA providers), they are embraced by it. If they merely use research, they are irrelevant to a mandate that addresses research providers. However, since OA means OA for everyone, clinicians (indeed, all of PPP) are embraced by its outcome, which is Open Access to all the research they need.
Please distinguish what concerns research providers from what concerns research users. The OA problem is that of getting the providers to go ahead and provide the OA (and the solution is to mandate providing it). And the users are the beneficiaries (whether researchers, practitioners, patients, or the public). (Moreover, the public benefits incomparably more from the CURES than the READS). Please do not conflate the problem of getting access (the user problem) with the problem of getting providers to provide OA (the mandate problem). The solution to the mandate problem is also the provider solution to the user access problem. ANON: "As we try to go about courting our disciplines I think that the language is important when we cross over to the professional/social sciences. There are few, if any, practitioners of particle physics. But there are lots of nurses, social workers, educators, and so on who could use the research but they are challenged to get it.... the situation is really grim... once students leave the school and move to "disconnected" areas of which there are many)." You are mixing up the user problem and the provider problem here: The point is that providers have to be mandated to provide OA. You are also mixing up the (minority) practitioner-relevant OA fields with the vast majority of practitioner-irrelevant OA fields. OA and OA mandates need to cover them all, and the research impact argument is the decisive and universal one, not the practitioner argument, which is a minority special case, and could be strategically manipulated by publishers with special side-deals.
By the way, students could be added to PPP too, making it SPPP, and the same argument applies to them: OA gives them access along with the territory, and eventually their usage will be measured and credited too, through download counts. Moreover, to the extent that students are or become researchers, their usage also translates into citations and more research (and "CURES"). ANON: " I think that all that needs to be added is something along the lines of "research-practitioners benefit [from OA] too" and this is particular important to "isolated", "international" and "less-resourced" communities." It's fine to add SPPP needs to research needs in the overall rationale for OA wherever possible (though I think it is already covered by "all would-be users"). Eventually, Connotea-style tagging will help quantify SPPP need and its benefits, the way it is already quantified by research citations...
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Sunday, June 11. 2006
SUMMARY: All objections to the FRPAA proposal to mandate OA self-archiving can be decisively answered: (1) Open access has been empirically demonstrated to benefit research, researchers and hence the public that funds the research, by substantially increasing research usage and impact. (2) There is no evidence to date that self-archiving has any negative effect on subscription revenue. (3) With an immediate-deposit/optional-access (ID/OA) mandate, deposit must be immediate (upon acceptance for publication), not delayed; only the access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access) can be delayed ("embargoed"). (4) In recognition of its benefits to research, 94% of journals already endorse immediate OA-setting; so the semi-automatic email-eprint request feature of the Institutional Repository software (allowing would-be users to email the author individually to request and receive the eprint by email) will only be needed for 6% of articles, to tide over any embargo interval. (5) OA is optimal for research and immediately reachable via self-archiving mandates right now; publishing models can and will adapt, if and when it should ever become necessary. (6) In response to attempts to delay and filibuster the adoption of the self-archiving mandate by calling for more "empirical studies to test for its likely impact": mandating self-archiving is itself the empirical test; the impact of the mandate can be reviewed annually to see what other effects it may be having -- apart from the positive effects evidence has already shown self-archiving to have. (7) The way to answer any suggestion that it is unfair to put publisher revenues at potential risk for the sake of general public access to a literature most of which none of the general public is ever likely to want to read is to note that OA is intended for the sake of the public benefits of the research that the public funds, which are maximized by making research maximally available to the users for whom it is mostly written, namely, researchers, so they can use and apply it in further research and applications, as intended, for the benefit of the public that funded it. (It will be publicly accessible to everyone else too, but only as a secondary benefit, not the primary rationale for OA, which is free access to publicly funded research, for researcher use, for public benefit.) (8) All evidence indicates that voluntarism, invitations, etc. simply do not work to generate self-archiving, whereas mandates do.
The AAP (and PSP and FASEB and STM and DC Principles Coalition) objections to the FRPAA proposal to mandate OA self-archiving (along with its counterpart proposals in Europe, the UK, Australia and elsewhere worldwide) are all completely predictable, have been aired many times before, and are empirically as well as logically so weak and flawed as to be decisively refutable.
But OA advocates cannot rest idle. Empirically and logically invalid arguments can nevertheless prevail if their proponents are (like the publishing lobby) well-funded and able to lobby widely and vigorously.
There are many more of us than there are in the publishing lobby, but the publishing lobby is fully united under its simple objective: to defeat self-archiving mandates, or, failing that, to make the embargo as long as possible.
OA advocates, in contrast, are not united, and our counter-arguments risk gallopping off in dozens of different directions, many of them just as invalid and untenable as the publishers' arguments. So if I were the publisher lobby, I would try to divide and conquer, citing flawed pro-mandate or pro-OA or anti-publishing arguments as a camouflage, to disguise the weakness of the publishing lobby's own flawed arguments.
We managed to unify behind our Euroscience recommendation. If we could unify in our response to the anti-mandate lobby, making a strong, coherent, common front, and if we then recruited our respective research communities behind that common front (again, being very careful not to let anyone get carried away into weak, foolish arguments!) I am absolutely certain we can prevail over the publisher lobby, definitively, and see the self-archiving mandates through to adoption at last.
Our simple but highly rigorous 8-point stance is the following (and we can be confident enough of its validity to lay it bare in advance for any who are inclined to try to invalidate it): (1) Open access has already been repeatedly and decisively demonstrated -- with quantitative empirical evidence -- to benefit research, researchers and the public that funds research: It both accelerates and increases research uptake, usage, citations, and hence progress, substantially. in all disciplines so far tested (including physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences) substantially. This is the key rationale for mandating OA self-archiving, because it is simply not possible for publishers to argue that protecting their current subscription revenue streams from undemonstrated, hypothetical risk outweighs the substantial demonstrated, actual benefits to research. (They know that well. Hence they will not and cannot try to push that argument. They will try to skirt it, by instead trying to exploit potential weaknesses in our own stance. This is why it is important to make our stance rigorous and unassailable by resolutely excluding as gratuitous and unnecessary all weak or controvertible arguments or rationales.) (2) There exists zero evidence that self-archiving reduces subscriptions; and for physics, the longest-standing and most advanced in systematic self-archiving, there are actually published testimonials from the principal publishers, APS and IOP, to the effect that self-archiving has not generated any detectable subscription decline in 15 years of self-archiving (even in the subfields where it has long been practised at or near 100%), and that APS and IOP are actively facilitating author self-archiving rather than opposing it. So although even evidence of subscription decline would not be a valid reason for denying research the benefits of self-archiving, there is not even any evidence of subscription decline. Hence here too, the publishing lobby will only be able to speculate and hypothesize to the contrary, evoking ever shriller doomsay prophecies, but not to adduce any supporting empirical data, because all evidence to date goes in the direction opposite to their predictions of catastrophe.  (3) The publishing lobby's most vulnerable strategic point, however -- and this is ever so important -- is precisely the matter of the embargoes they are so anxious to have (if they cannot succeed in blocking the mandate altogether): But the immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate that we have specifically advocated immunises the mandate completely from embargo-haggling, because it is a deposit mandate, not an Open-Access-setting mandate: Deposit must be immediate (upon acceptance for publication), not delayed; only the access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access) can be delayed, with immediate OA-setting merely encouraged "where possible," but not mandated. This means that not even copyright arguments can be invoked against the mandate, and embargoes cannot delay deposit: they can only delay OA-setting.
The part we must keep clearly in mind, however, is that an immediate-deposit mandate is enough! There is no need to over-reach (by either holding out for an immediate-OA mandate or capitulating and allowing delayed deposit). An immediate (no-delay) deposit mandate will generate 100% OA as surely as night follows day. There is now and has all along been only one obstacle to 100% OA: getting the deposit keystrokes to be done. Once those are done, the benefits of OA itself will see to it that authors all soon choose to set access as OA.  And until then, the bibliographic metadata will be visible immediately webwide, and would-be users can use the semi-automatic email-eprint request feature of the Institutional Repository software to email the author individually to request and receive the eprint by email, just as they used to request reprints by mail in the paper era, but much more quickly. This will tide over research usage needs until Nature takes its course.
So what we must insist upon is an immediate -- no embargo, no exception -- deposit mandate (full text plus bibliographic metadata) together with encouragement to set access to the full text immediately as OA, but allowing the option of a Closed-Access delay period if necessary. On no account, however, should the delay be in the deposit itself -- just in the OA-setting. (4) In addition, 94% of journals already endorse immediate OA-setting. So the email-eprint option will only be needed for 6% of articles, to tide over any embargo interval. This need not be rubbed in the noses of publishers (it is for our own quiet satisfaction); but the fact that 94% of journals already endorse self-archiving can be used strategically to weaken publishers' arguments against mandating it. ["You (94%) give authors the green light to go ahead and self-archive, because you recognise that self-archiving is to the benefit of researchers and research, and then you try at the same time to prevent their institutions and funders from ensuring that researchers go ahead and reap those very benefits by mandating the self-archiving that generates them!" Making that contradiction explicit (affirming yet blocking the benefits of author self-archiving) will go a long way toward invalidating the weak and incoherent arguments publishers will be making against self-archiving and self-archiving mandates.]
I am absolutely certain that (1) - (4), clearly and resolutely put forward, and used to defeat every angle of the publishers' argument ("it will destroy peer review" "it will be expensive to the tax payer" "it will kill subscriptions" "it will destroy learned societies" "it's not needed: we have enough access already," "there will be multiple versions," etc. etc.), can be successful, even triumphant. However: (5) We should definitely not allow ourselves to be drawn into publishers' counterfactual speculations about subscription revenue loss, for which there is zero evidence, by replying in kind, with counter-speculations of our own about the way publishing will change, evolve etc. Just stick to the facts: that OA is reachable via self-archiving right now and that OA is optimal for research. Everything else can and will adapt, if/when it should ever become necessary, but that is all merely hypothetical: The only sure thing now is that self-archiving is good for research, and hence it needs to be mandated, just as publishing itself is mandated.
(6) In response to attempts to delay and filibuster the adoption of the mandate by asking for more "empirical studies to test for its likely impact" the reply is crystal clear: Mandating self-archiving is itself the empirical study to test its impact; the policy can be reviewed annually to see what other effects it may be having -- apart from the beneficial effects we already know self-archiving has.
(7) One tricky point to watch out for is the "public access" argument: The rationale that OA is needed for the tax-payers who funded the research is a very shaky one. It may be a good vote-getter for a politician, but it definitely does not have the empirical, logical and practical force of the demonstrated research impact benefits of OA;p nor does it need to. The way to rebut the publishers' (valid) claim that it is unfair to ask them to put their revenues at risk merely or mainly for the sake of general public access to a literature that almost none of the general public is ever likely to want to read (except in a few practical areas of medicine, etc.) is to firmly redirect the "public right" and "public good" argument toward the public benefits of the research that the public funds, which are maximized by making research maximally available to the users for whom it is mostly written, namely, researchers, so they can use and apply it in further research and applications, as intended, for the benefit of the public that funded it. (It will be publicly accessible too, but only as a secondary benefit, not the primary rationale for OA, which is free access to publicly funded research, for researcher use, for public benefit.)
(8) And last, we of course have all the evidence (e.g. from the failed NIH public access "invitation" and the many near-empty institutional repositories worldwide) that voluntarism, invitations, etc. simply do not work to generate self-archiving, whereas mandates (CERN, Wellcome Trust, QUT, Southampton, Minho, NIT, Zurich) do -- thereby confirming the outcome of the JISC international, interdisciplinary surveys, which found that 95% of researchers report they will comply with a self-archiving mandate from their employers or funders. Otherwise, only 15% self-archive spontaneously. All eight of these points are simple, transparent, sound and cannot be invalidated: There are no viable counter-arguments, counterexamples or counter-evidence to any of them. So if they are rigorously and systematically deployed, the publisher lobby will fail to block the self-archiving mandate. If, however, we needlessly venture instead into any shakier areas (publishing reform, copyright reform, public "right to know"), it is we who will fail!
I am certain, from long experience, that no argument at all against a self-archiving mandate can be rationally sustained in the face of (1)-(8), clearly and rigorously applied. We have no weapon against irrationality, of course, or against arbitrariness or brute force. But inasmuch as reason, evidence and public good are concerned, the case for a self-archiving mandate is extremely strong and I would say irresistible (if we ourselves can resist weakening it, gratuitously, by invoking other, fuzzy or defeasible arguments, or by failing to invoke the eight rigorous points we have, clearly and explicitly!).
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
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