Saturday, June 17. 2006
SUMMARY: In addition to despositing in their institutional repositories the metadata plus the full-texts of their journal articles, researchers should also deposit the metadata plus the cited-reference lists of their books. This will allow the book citations to be harvested webwide and citation-linked, exactly as article citations will be, thereby providing book citation-impact metrics for book-based disciplines, alongside the usual journal-article citation-impact metrics.
For all disciplines -- but especially for disciplines that are more book-based than journal-article-based -- it would be highly beneficial for authors to self-archive in their institutional repositories the metadata as well as the cited-reference lists (bibliographies) for the books they publish annually. That way, next-generation scientometric search engines like citebase will be able to harvest and link their reference lists (exactly as they do the reference lists of articles whose full texts have been self-archived). This will generate a book citation impact metric.
Books cite and are cited by books; moreover, books cite articles and are cited by articles. It is already possible to scrape together a rudimentary book-impact index from Thompson-ISI's Web of Knowledge along with data from Google Books and Google Scholar, but a worldwide Open Access database, across all disciplines, indexing all the article output as well as the book output self-archived in all the world's institutional repositories could do infinitely better than that:
All that's needed is for authors' institutions and funders to mandate institutional (author) self-archiving of (1) the metadata and full-texts of all their article output along with (2) the metadata and reference lists of all their book output.
We can even do better than that, because although many book authors may not wish to make their books' full-texts Open Access (OA), they can still deposit their books' full-texts in their institutional repositories and set access as Closed Access -- accessible only to scientometric full-text harvesters and indexers (like google books) for full-text inversion, boolean search, and semiometric analysis (text endogamy/exogamy, text-overlap, text similarity/proximity, semantic lineage, latent semantic analysis, etc.) -- without making the full-text text itself OA to individual users (i.e., potential book-buyers) if they do not wish to.
This will help provide the UK's new metrics-based Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) with research performance indicators better suited for the disciplines whose research is not as journal-article- (and conference-paper-) based as that of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. Carr, L, Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J.W., Champion, T. & Harnad, S. (2006) Can journal-based research impact assessment be generalised to book-based disciplines? (Research Proposal)
SUMMARY: The "impact" of academic research is typically measured by how much it is read, used and cited, and by how much new work it generates and influences. Services that measure impact work well for journal-based disciplines. Book-based disciplines can now benefit from online tools and methods of impact analysis too.These analyses also predict fruitful directions for future research, and so can inform research assessment and funding. The present research project will extend tools for online bibliometric data collection of publications and their citations with the aim of testing and evaluating new Web metrics to assist research assessment in book-based disciplines. Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Friday, June 16. 2006
 SUMMARY: Larry Hurtado (Divinity, Edinburgh) suggests that a metrics-based alternative to the panel-based UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) may not be appropriate for some disciplines because their research is not journal-article-based, and hence citation-impact metrics are not valid. I reply that all disciplines have research output, and its usage and impact can be objectively measured. For example, book citation-impact can be measured too, if authors deposit their books' reference lists in their institutional repositories. Moreover, the RAE is just one of the two components of the UK dual research funding system. The other, far larger component, continues to be individual research proposal funding, adjudicated by peer review. Metrics are merely a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- peer review, but published articles and books have already been peer reviewed, hence there is no need for RAE panels to try to repeat the exercise.
On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, Larry Hurtado, Department of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: LH: "Stevan Harnad is totally in favour of a "metrics based" approach to judging research merit with a view toward funding decisions, and greets the news of such a shift from past/present RAE procedure with unalloyed joy." No, metrics are definitely not meant to serve as the basis for all or most research funding decisions: research proposals, as noted, are assessed by peer review.
Metrics is intended for the other component in the UK dual funding system, in which, in addition to directly funded research, based on competitive peer review of research bids, there is also a smaller, secondary (but prestigious) top-slicing system, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It is the RAE that needed to be converted to metrics from the absurd, wasteful and costly juggernaut that it used to be. LH: "Well, hmmm. I'm not so sure (at least not yet). Perhaps there is more immediate reason for such joy in those disciplines that already rely heavily on a metrics approach to making decisions about researchers." No discipline uses metrics systematically yet; moreover, many metrics are still to be designed and tested. However, the only thing "metrics" really means is: the objective measurement of quantifiable performance indicators. Surely all disciplines have measurable performance indicators. Surely it is not true of any discipline that the only way, or the best way, to assess all of its annual research output is by having each piece individually re-reviewed after it has already been peer-reviewed twice -- before execution, by a funding council's peer-reviewers as a research proposal, and after execution, by a journal's referees as a research publication. LH: "In the sciences, and also now social sciences, there are citation-services that count publications and citations thereof in a given list of journals deemed the "canon"of publication venues for a given discipline. And in these disciplines journal articles are deemed the main (perhaps sole) mode of research publication. Ok. Maybe it'll work for these chaps." First, with an Open Access database, there need be no separate "canon": articles in any of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals and congresses can count -- though some will (rightly) count for more than others, based on the established and known quality standards and impact of the journal in which it appeared (this too can be given a metric weight). Alongside the weighted impact factor of the journal, there will be the citation counts for each article itself, its author, the co-citations in and out, the download counts, the hub/authority weights, the endogamy/exogamy weights. etc. etc.
All these metrics (and many more) will be derivable for all disciplines from an Open Access database (no longer just restricted to ISI's Web of Knowledge).
That includes, by the way, citations of books by journal articles -- and also citations of books and journal articles by books, because although most book authors may not wish to make their books' full-texts OA, they can and should certainly make their books' bibliographic metadata, including their bibliography of cited references, OA. Those book-impact metrics can then be added to the metric harvest, citation-linked, counted, and duly weighted, along with all the other metrics.
There are even Closed-Access ways of self-archiving books' digital full-texts (such as google book search) so they can be processed for semiometric analysis (endogamy/exogamy, content overlap, proximity, lineage, chronometric trends) by harvesters that do not make the full text available openly. All disciplines can benefit from this. LH: "But I'd like to know how it will work in Humanities fields such as mine. Some questions, for Stevan or whomever. First, to my knowledge, there is no such citation-count service in place. So, will the govt now fund one to be set up for us? Or how will the metrics be compiled for us? I.e., there simply is no mechanism in place for doing "metrics"for Humanities disciplines." All the government needs to do is to mandate the self-archiving of all UK research output in each researcher's own OAI-compliant institutional (or central) repository. (The US and the rest of Europe will shortly follow suit, once the prototype policy model is at long last adopted by a major player!) The resulting worldwide interoperable database will be the source of all the metric data, and a new generation of scientometric and semiometric harvesters and analysers will quickly be spawned to operate on it, to mine it to extract the rich new generation of metrics.
There is absolutely nothing exceptional about the humanities (as long as book bibliographies are self-archived too, alongside journal-article full-texts). Research uptake and usage is a generic indicator of research performance, and citations and downloads are generic indicators of research uptake and usage. The humanities are no different in this regard. Moreover, inasmuch as OA also enhances research uptake and usage itself, the humanities stand to benefit from OA, exactly like the other disciplines. LH: "Second, for us, journal articles are only one, and usually not deemed the primary/preferred, mode of research publication. Books still count quite heavily. So, if we want to count citations, will some to-be-imagined citation-counting service/agency comb through all the books in my field as well as the journal articles to count how many of my publications get cited and how often? If not, then the "metrics"will be so heavily flawed as to be completing misleading and useless." All you need to do is self-archive your books' metadata and cited reference lists and all your journal articles in your OAI-compliant Institutional repository. The scientometric search engines -- like citebase, citeseer, google scholar, and more to come -- will take care of all the rest. If you want to do even better, scan in, OCR and self-archive the legacy literature too (the journal articles plus the metadata and cited reference lists of books of yore too; if you're worried about variations in reference citing styles: don't worry! Just get the digital texts in and algorithms can start sorting them out and improving themselves). LH: "Third, in many sciences, esp. natural and medical sciences, research simply can't be conducted without significant external funding. But in many/most Humanities disciplines truly groundbreaking and highly influential research continues to be done without much external funding." So what is your point? That the authors of unfunded research, uncoerced by any self-archiving mandate, will not self-archive? Don't worry. They will. They may not be the first ones, but they will follow soon afterwards, as the power and potential of self-archiving to measure as well as to accelerate and increase research impact and progress become more and more manifest. LH: "(Moreover, no govt has yet seen fit to provide funding for the Humanities constituency of researchers commensurate with that available for Sciences. So, it's a good thing we don't have to depend on such funding!)" Funding grumbles are a worthy topic, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with OA and the benefits of self-archiving, or metrics. LH: "My point is that the "metrics"for the Humanities will have to be quite a bit different in what is counted, at the very least." No doubt. And the metrics used, and their weights, will be adjusted accordingly. But metrics they will be. No exceptions there. And no regression back to either human re-evaluation or delphic oracles: Objective, countable performance indicators (for the bulk research output: of course for special prizes and honours individual human judgment will have to be re-invoked, in order to compare like with like, individually). LH: "Fourth, I'm not convinced (again, not yet; but I'm open to persuasion) that counting things = research quality and impact. Example: A number of years ago, coming from a tenure meeting at my previous University I ran into a colleague in Sociology. He opined that it was unnecessary to labour over tenure, and that he needed only two pieces of information: number of publications and number of citations. I responded, "I have two words for you: Pons and Fleischman". Remember these guys? They were cited in Time and Newsweek and everywhere else for a season as discovers of "cold fusion". And over the next couple of years, as some 50 or so labs tried unsuccessfully to replicate their alleged results, they must have been among the most frequently-cited guys in the business. And the net effect of all that citation was to discredit their work. So, citation = "impact". Well, maybe, but in this case "impact"= negative impact. So, are we really so sure of "metrics"?" Not only do citations have to be weighted, as they can and will be, recursively, by the weight of their source (Proceedings of the Royal Society vs. The Daily Sun, citations from Nobel Laureates vs citations from uncited authors), but semiometric algorithms will even begin to have a go at sorting positive citations from negative ones, disinterested ones from endogamous ones, etc. Are you proposing to defer to individual expert opinion in some (many? most? all?) cases, rather than using a growing wealth and diversity of objective performance indicators? Do you really think it is harder to find individual cases of subjective opinion going wrong than objective metrics going wrong? LH: "Perhaps, however, Stevan can help me see the light, and join him in acclaiming the advent of metrics." I suggest that the best way to see the light on the subjective of Open Access Digitometrics is to start self-archiving and sampling the (few) existing digitometric engines, such as citebase. You might also wish to have a look at the chapter I recommended (no need to buy the book: it's OA: Just click!): Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 21. Chandos. Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
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
Saturday, June 10. 2006
SUMMARY: Research quality is ensured through peer review, which is performed by the research community for free. Publishers manage the peer review process; in exchange they get to sell subscriptions to the paper edition as well as to the online edition of their journals. Supplementing paid subscription access for those would-be users who cannot afford the publisher's version by self-archiving the author's version brings substantial positive effects to research, researchers and the tax-payers that fund them in terms of increased research usage and impact. Self-archiving has had no detectable negative effects on subscription revenues to date, even for the two publishers (American Physical Society and Institute of Physics) in the fields that have been practising self-archiving the longest and most (15+ years). The way to test whether the FRPAA self-archiving mandate will ever have any effect on subscriptions is to adopt it and monitor its effects yearly, not to keep denying and delaying its already demonstrated benefits to research on the grounds of hypothetical risks to publisher revenues. Research is not publicly funded and conducted in order to immunise publisher revenue flows against all risk but in order to maximize research productivity and progress.
The latest AAP/PSP critique of the latest US Public Access Bill ( FRPAA) makes the same points (already rebutted two years ago) that they made in their prior critique of the NIH Public Access Proposal.
Peter Suber has already sounded the right overall note by way of reply in OA News (see his 10 detailed points, much the same as mine, below): (a) There is zero evidence that mandating self-archiving reduces subscription revenue.
(b) But even if self-archiving were ever to reduce subscription revenue, surely what is in the best interests of publishers' current revenue streams should not over-ride what is in the best interests of research and of the public that funds it.AAP/PSP: "The proposed legislation would require the majority of recipients of U.S. federal research agency funds to make their findings free within six months of publication. Publishers argue that the legislation, if passed, will seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process, and is a duplicative effort that places an unwarranted burden on research investigators."
AAP provides no evidence of how making research findings accessible for free to would-be users who cannot afford access would "seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process." AAP merely stipulate that it would.
Nor is it clear why AAP is speaking on behalf of researchers about "unwarranted burdens". Surely enhanced research usage and impact is not an unwarranted burden for research and researchers? AAP/PSP: "According to the publishers, the provisions of S.2695 threaten to undermine the essential value of peer review by removing the publishers' incentive and ability to sustain investments in a range of scientific, technical, and medical publishing activities."
Translation: "Self-archive and I may not want to publish journals any more."
Peer review is done by researchers, for free. Whoever funds the management of peer review and the certification of its outcome is a journal publisher. There is no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenue but even if there should ever be such evidence it certainly does not follow that research and researchers should renounce the demonstrated benefits of self-archiving. If/when some publishers should ever become dissatisfied with reduced subscription revenues, their journal titles can migrate to other publishers who are not dissatisfied, or to Open Access ("gold") Publishers.
Surely demonstrated benefits ( increased research impact) for research, researchers and the public that funds them are not to be sacrificed in order to insulate publishers from an undemonstrated hypothetical risk to their current subscription revenues. AAP/PSP: "The proposed legislation comes at a time when increased public access to government-funded research is already occurring in a voluntary and highly effective manner through a variety of publisher-initiated mechanisms and cooperative approaches."
"Highly effective" for whom? The fact is that many researchers cannot afford access to much needed research, and the proof of this is the fact that when subscription access is supplemented by author self-archiving, research usage and impact increase dramatically.
(Note that the issue is not primarily public access to research, but researcher access to research, in order to maximize the benefits of research to the public that funds it.) AAP/PSP: "Americans have easy access to scientific and medical literature through public libraries, state universities, existing private-sector online database, as well as through their professional, academic, or business affiliations, low-cost online individual article sales, and innovative health literacy initiatives such as patientINFORM."
The primary objective of Open Access is to provide access to researchers, worldwide, for the sake of research uptake, usage, applications, and progress, by way of a return on the public's investment in the research. Researchers do not now have nearly as much access as they need, because no research institution can afford all or most of the journals in which the research appears. The demonstrated impact advantage of self-archived research is the direct evidence of the substantial access shortfall there is for research that is not self-archived.
Paid or library access is certainly not what OA is about or for. OA means online access, free for all would-be users. AAP/PSP: "The Cornyn-Lieberman bill would create unnecessary costs for taxpayers"
This is complete nonsense. Self-archiving costs are negligibly small. AAP/PSP:
"[it would] place an unwarranted burden on research investigators"
Again complete nonsense. Self-archiving takes a few keystrokes: Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. AAP/PSP: "[it would] expropriate the value-added investments made by scientific publishers-many of them not-for-profit associations who depend on publishing income to support pursuit of their scholarly missions, including education and outreach for the next generation of U.S. scientists" Nothing whatsoever is "expropriated": Publishers can continue to sell subscriptions and licenses for their paper and online editions, exactly as before. The author's self-archived final draft is not a substitute but a supplement, online only, for all would-be users who cannot afford the publisher's version. And so far there is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues at all, even in the areas that have been doing self-archiving the longest (15 years in high energy physics, even longer in computer science) and that are already at or near 100% self-archiving for years now. Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC Survey:
"[W]e asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory [and shortly the IOP will host one too]). Not-for-profit publishers (e.g. Learned Societies) do not differ in any way insofar as any of these considerations are concerned: There is abundant evidence that self-archiving increases research usage and impact and no evidence that it reduces subscription revenue. And research is not funded, conducted and published in order to generate revenue for publishers, let alone in order to guarantee their current revenue streams and insulate them from any risk. In particular, what has already been demonstrated to be in the best interests of research outweighs what has not even been demonstrated to have any negative effects on the interests of publishers. AAP/PSP: "If enacted, S.2695 could well have the unintended consequence of compromising or destroying the independent system of peer review that ensures the integrity of the very research the U.S. Government is trying to support and disseminate."
Pure nonsense. See prior reply about peer review, done for free by researchers (the peer reviewers); publishers merely administer it, and for any publishers who may no longer wish to administer it, other publishers will be happy to do so in their place. AAP/PSP: "publishers invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in publishing and disseminating peer-reviewed journals. These investments ensure the quality of U.S. taxpayer-supported scientific research by subjecting all articles to a rigorous technical review by experts in specialized fields prior to publication and pay for the development of technological innovations that enable broad web dissemination."
Quality is ensured through peer review done by the research community itself; and the peers review for free. Publishers merely administer the peer review, and in exchange they get to charge for the paper edition as well as the online edition. There is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving diminishes their revenues from any of this, and if/when it should ever do so, the solution is certainly not to not self-archive, and thereby deny research of self-archiving's substantial benefits in terms of research uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.
The solution -- if/when subscription cancellation pressure were ever to happen -- would be to cut costs and adapt, scaling down to the new, smaller but still essential niche of peer-review service provision that will remain for peer-reviewed research journals in the PostGutenberg age even if no one wants to pay for the paper edition or the publisher's official online version any more because the author's self-archived draft is enough. The solution is certainly not to deny research, researchers and the public that funds them the benefits of the research impact and progress that self-archiving brings them. AAP/PSP: "Mandating that journal articles be made freely available on government websites so soon after their publication will be a powerful disincentive for publishers to continue these substantial investments."
At the moment, over 90% of journals have given immediate author self-archiving their green light. If some publishers are not happy with conferring this benefit on their authors' research, there are plenty of other publishers for their journal titles to migrate to (including the new breed of Open Access "gold" publishers). AAP/PSP: "publishers are concerned that S.2695 would result in a significant loss of revenue from subscriptions, licensing, and individual article sales, thereby making it difficult for them to sustain and recoup the investments they make in support of scientific communication."
There is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving has reduced subscription revenue in the very fields that have been doing it the longest and the most (see above). So this publisher concern is purely hypothetical; and the actual effects to date contradict the hypothesis.
But if/when there should ever be a subscription revenue decline, the remedy is to adapt, cut costs, drop inessentials, and downsize to the new PostGutenberg niche for peer-reviewed journal publishing. The remedy is certainly not to sacrifice research impact in order to sustain current publishing revenues instead of adapting to the new technological contingencies opened up by the newfound possibility of providing Open Access to all research. AAP/PSP: The proposed bill was introduced on the first anniversary of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) adoption of its Public Access policy, which encourages the posting of journal articles based on NIH-funded research within 12 months of publication on its existing PubMedCentral database -- a policy that gained PSP/AAP member publisher support and yet remains in its early stages of government-led implementation. A departure from the NIH's voluntary approach, the Cornyn/Lieberman bill would mandate that 11 federal agencies create new systems and data repositories to enforce internet posting of government funded research within six months of publication. As the NIH's implementation of the policy has not yet progressed to the point where its impact can be assessed, publishers view the introduction of the Cornyn-Lieberman proposal as premature."
(1) The NIH policy can be and has been assessed, and it is a failure: The level of compliance with its non-mandatory "invitation" to self-archive is less than 4% after a year. The spontaneous self-archiving baseline worldwide and across disciplines is 15%!
(2) Meantime, self-archiving mandates (such as those of the Wellcome Trust, CERN, and several universities) have been tried, tested, and shown to be successful in generating high compliance rates, exactly as the JISC author surveys had reported they would be: Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report, Key Perspectives Inc:
"The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." (3) Research is funded, conducted and published in order to be taken up, used, and applied as soon as it has been validated by peer review. Research is not funded, conducted and published to be embargoed so as to guarantee publishers' current revenue streams. AAP/PSP: "No evidentiary record exists, and no impact studies have been conducted, to document the long-term cost to tax payers of government agencies developing yet another system to promote public access.
Surely it is not the business of American Association of Publishers to concern itself with the cost to tax payers of providing open access to government-funded research. But studies have indeed been done, across disciplines, and they have found that self-archived research has substantially higher research impact (25% - 250+%), and this translates into substantially higher return on the tax payers' investment in research than what they are getting for their research money today.
Competitively speaking, it also means higher salaries and more research income for the early self-archivers. And all, as noted, at a negligibly tiny cost per paper in terms of either author keystrokes or distributed institutional self-archiving costs.
So it is a self-serving red herring for publishers (in reality fretting about their own current revenue streams) to portray this as a "tax payer" issue. AAP/PSP: "Moreover, no consideration has been given to what the impact of this government mandate will be on publishers and scholarly societies ability to maintain their broad base of library and other customers worldwide and invest in independent peer review systems."
The purpose of research and research funding is not to ensure publisher revenue streams, but to conduct, use and apply research, to the benefit of the tax payers that fund it. Peer-reviewers (researchers) review their peers' research for free. Journal editors merely manage the peer review process, and the true costs of managing peer review can and will certainly be paid out of just a small portion of institutions' own annual windfall subscription cancellation savings -- if and when subscription revenues were ever to collapse catastrophically as a consequence of universal self-archiving.
But at the moment there is not even the slightest sign of a subscription decline: just speculations about doomsday scenarios, intended to hold self-archiving, with all its demonstrated benefits to research, researchers and tax-payers, at bay, so as to protect publishers' current revenue streams from a hypothetical risk.
Surely the rational thing to do is to mandate the self-archiving now, and then review its effects on publishers' revenues yearly, rather than to deny its certain benefits to research on the grounds of its hypothetical risks for publishers. (The delay has already been unconscionably long and wasteful of research impact and progress, and will be all the more embarrassing in historic hindsight.) AAP/PSP: "Responsible major U.S. government policy revisions must be based on a solid, researched understanding of the long-range impact of any policy changes. This perspective is conspicuously absent from the proposed legislation, which would cause severe harm to the publishing community, scientific societies, and taxpayers."
The long-range effects should be investigated empirically. The positive effects of OA self-archiving for research, researchers and the tax-payers that fund them have already been empirically tested and found to be substantial. Meanwhile, there have been no detectable effects of self-archiving on subscription revenues at all so far, even for the two publishers (American Physical Society and Institute of Physics) in the fields that have been doing it the longest and most (15+ years).
The way to test the long-range effect of the FRPAA self-archiving mandate on subscriptions objectively and empirically is to adopt the mandate and monitor its effects annually, not to deny or keep delaying its already demonstrated positive effects on research impact on the basis of undemonstrated hypothetical negative effects on publisher revenues. AAP/PSP: "publishers and scholarly societies urge that an independent study be conducted to measure the potential impact that any changes to the existing NIH policy or the adoption of the proposed Cornyn-Lieberman legislation would have on scientific quality, the peer review process, and the viability of numerous journals and societies--as well as the additional costs that would need to be shouldered by taxpayers."
To do the study in question amounts to adopting the self-archiving mandate and testing and reviewing its empirical outcome annually. All else is merely filibuster and bluster.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
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