Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: Comments on Cliff Lynch's "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points":
"Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?" Universities and research funders can and do mandate OA (Green) self-archiving. Cliff seems to be fixated on waiting instead for a transition to OA (Gold) Publishing (and a rather vague definition of OA as "reduced barriers"). He recognizes that Gold's asking price is too high, but not that the transition is also far too uncertain, has already wasted far too much time, and is out of the hands of the research community, whereas Green OA mandates are fast, sure, virtually cost-free, and entirely within the hands of researchers, their universities and their funders. Cliff thinks Green OA is "less optimal" for no reason other than that he thinks it will lead to "fragmentation": Of course it won't: the unifying glue for distributed journal articles is their metadata tags, including their journal's name, not the glue binding any journal's contents.
"Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers." Advice and support from universities (and funders) on retaining rights is welcome, but rights retention is not a necessary precondition for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archivhiving; so if it poses any obstacle to agreement on immediate adoption of a self-archiving mandate (e.g., because researchers are concerned that rights retention might constrain their choice of journals or might put too big a negotiating burden on them), it should be dropped. On no account should rights-retention be a substitute or precondition for mandating deposit of all articles in the Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Even if the deposit is provisionally set as "Closed Access" during an embargo period, all immediate research usage needs can be fulfilled by each IR's semi-automatic individual EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button.
"We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies." It is not at all clear why we need to do that! What we need is OA. Green Self-Archiving mandates provide 100% OA. Publisher permission -- whether Scholarly Society or commercial -- is not required for funders and universities to mandate immediate deposit. It is not a conversion to Gold OA publishing that is being mandated. (Funders and universities can only impose mandates on their fundees and employees, not on publishers.) In any case, the funding of Scholarly Societies' "good works" should not be subsidized at the cost of researchers' lost usage and impact. (Cliff does not disagree, but the reason he wants to talk is because he is thinking only of Gold.)
"We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing." Cliff is right to be sceptical about Gold OA's current asking price but this is only an issue for those who for some reason want to promote immediate conversion to Gold OA, right now. For those who merely seek 100% OA now, the current price of Gold is irrelevant.
"Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review." OA has nothing to do with peer review. Cliff wants to talk about peer review reform anyway. That's fine, but why in an OA context? The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; peer-review reform is a different agenda.
"Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End: Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity." The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; publishing reform is a different agenda.

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Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Thread:
"Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives" (started Mar 2003)

At the SPARC/ARL Forum on "Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research Policy Issues and Practical Strategies" (Oct 20 2006), Cliff Lynch presented "Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points". Some of Cliff's six points are welcome and valid but a few are a bit more debatable:

Lynch: "1. Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?
"I don't want to spend time here arguing about a precise definition of open access -- suffice it to say that open access means an increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature..."

Unfortunately, it does not suffice to say that Open Access (OA) is just "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature."

OA is a very specific special case of the "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature," and it does not help to dissolve that specific case into the vaguer general category of "reducing barriers":

OA is free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles.

Neither (i) the specific problem that OA is specifically meant to solve -- that of making research accessible to all its would-be users online -- nor (ii) the specific means of solving that specific problem is brought into focus by blurring the objective into generalities about "reducing barriers."

The means of solving the specific problem of OA is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate OA self-archiving ("Green OA") of peer-reviewed research journal articles:

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?"

And although there is a link between (1) research accessibility and (2) journal affordability, that link is indirect, and subtle, in the online age. It would be incorrect and simplistic to imagine that the research accessibility problem and the journal affordability problem (or their respective solutions) are one and the same. They are not.

Lynch: "There's been a lot of discussion about the desirability and potential implications of federal government mandates about deposit and access to the reports of findings of federally funded research. We should not forget that, even in disciplines where federal agencies are generous funders, a substantial part of the literature reports on the results of research that isn't federally funded."

That is why the discussion is about both funder mandates and institutional mandates: That covers all research output, funded and unfunded. (See Lynch's own Point 2.)

Lynch: "In my view, when we think about the fundamental integrity of the scholarly record available for open access via the Internet, we would be much better served if we can make the shift to open access at the level of entire journals or entire publisher journal portfolios rather than article by article."

100% OA would be welcome in any way it could be provided, whether Green OA, by self-archiving 100% of journal articles, or "Gold OA", by converting 100% of journals to OA publishing, and then publishing therein.

But most publishers are not converting to OA Gold publishing; and funders and institutions cannot mandate that they convert.

Moreover (as Cliff points out in two of his other, valid points below) there is the sticky question of the per-article asking price for OA Gold publishing, which is rather arbitrary at this time. Gold OA is not worth purchasing at any price -- in view of the fact that Green OA is available as an alternative, and can be mandated, and can drive the price of Gold OA down to the true cost of the essentials.

Hence there is no earthly reason to wait and hope for a direct transition to 100% OA via Gold OA, journal by journal. What needs to be OA is the articles, and those can and should and will be made 100% OA via institution/funder self-archiving mandates of exactly the kind that are increasingly being implemented and proposed today.

If there is to be Gold OA at all, then the road to Gold OA is via Green OA. But once we have mandated 100% Green OA, we already have 100% OA, so whether or not there is eventually a transition to Gold OA becomes supererogatory. Rather than speculating about this now, we should get on with doing the do-able task of mandating and providing Green OA.

Lynch: "We know from past experience that it's very difficult for many users of the scholarly record to understand what they are navigating and exploiting when there's only partial coverage. "

The remedy for that "partial coverage" is not to keep waiting for (and/or to pay the pre-emptive asking price of) journal-by-journal Gold OA, but to mandate Green OA right now, so we can reach 100% OA at long last.

Lynch: "Of course, if we can't persuade the journals and the publishers to support the move to open access, we'll have to go to less optimal approaches like author self-archiving and mandates by specific research funding agencies (both government and private)."

How much longer does Cliff propose that we keep waiting, trying to persuade journals and publishers to move? (We have already been waiting well over a decade now.)

And what determines whether the asking price is the right one (or the "more optimal" approach to 100% OA)?

Lynch: "it may well be that the threat of legislation mandating deposit of research results may be doing more good, in terms of advancing progress and focusing discussion on the issues with a certain sense of urgency, than actual legislation would. And while I'm not opposed to legislative intervention here, I'd hope that any legislation that is enacted is transparent and invisible to authors who publish with journals that appropriately support open access."

It is gratifying to hear that Cliff is not opposed to the OA mandates that have already been enacted and the others that are being planned, but the foregoing passage does sound a bit confusing, or confused: The mandates are to self-archive published articles (Green) not to publish in OA journals (Gold). The goal is to generate OA (Green), not to pressure publishers into converting to Gold.

If what Cliff means is that mandates should not constrain publishers' choice of journals, that makes sense; but journals need not even be mentioned in mandates: Only the requirement to deposit the final peer reviewed draft, as soon as it is accepted for publication, has to be mentioned. And if the mandates allow an embargo period at all (most OA advocates don't think they should, or need to, but if some funders are nevertheless bent upon allowing delays, as some appear to be), let the allowable embargo be minimal (6 months at most); and during the embargo period, while the deposit is in Closed Access rather than Open Access, all ongoing research access needs webwide can be fulfilled via each Institutional Repository's semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button, which can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA on an individual request basis. Such a an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate also moots any journal copyright policy issues that might have constrained the journal-choice of the author in complying with the mandate.

Lynch: "2. Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers"

Here Cliff is perhaps advocating mandated rights retention, which would not be a bad idea if such a mandate could be successfully adopted over author objections that it too could constrain their choice of journal!

And successful rights negotiation is not really necessary as a precondition for mandated self-archiving. Immediate deposit can be mandated without any reference to journal policy; 70% of journals already endorse immediate setting of access to Open Access. For the remaining 30%, access can be provisionally set to Closed Access and the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button can tide over usage needs during any embargo period. (Embargos will soon collapse under OA usage pressure in any case, as self-archiving grows.)

So the best thing universities can do for OA is not merely to throw their weight behind rights retention by their authors, but to mandate immediate deposit of all final drafts accepted for publication ("postprints"), thereby complementing the funder mandates.

Lynch: "My worst nightmare is that rights to the scholarly literature become so fragmented"

Practices should not be dictated by nightmares but by clear reasoning, in the light of day: Once the full-texts of all articles are self-archived and freely accessible online, all the uses Cliff envisages (automatic harvesting, data-mining, etc.) come with the (free, online) territory, inexorably. No need to keep them all in the same (Gold) journal or "portfolio" for that, nor to renegotiate rights. Just deposit all articles in OA Institutional Repositories, free for all.

And the PostGutenberg "glue" to keep a corpus from getting fragmented is metadata tags, not a shared spatial locus (nor the glue in the binding of a single shared journal locus).

Lynch: "Again, this connects to the theme of the overall integrity of the scholarly record, and our need to be able to manage this record at scale."

The scholarly record will now be distributed across a worldwide network of interoperable Institutional Repositories. Articles and data will be the principal items of interest; and the journal they were peer-reviewed and accepted by will simply be certified by one of their metadata tags (but a critically important tag).

Lynch: "3. We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies"

Here Cliff rightly calls into question whether the other "good works" of Scholarly Societies should continue to be subsidised by authors' lost research impact. The answer, of course, is No; and that will become clear to all once it is discussed openly.

But, again, what is at issue is not cajoling or coercing publishers -- whether Scholarly-Society, commercial or otherwise -- to convert to Gold. (It would be helpful if they endorsed immediate Green, but even that is only desirable, but not necessary in advance.) The issue is research institutions and funders mandating Green OA. Scholarly Societies simply risk baring their blatant conflict of interest with their own membership (researchers) if they venture to oppose mandating Green OA.

Lynch: "their journals typically are viewed as offering high quality at reasonable cost, and there's no reason that they shouldn't continue to be highly competitive if one moves away from a reader-pays model."

No special need to talk to Scholarly Societies if one is not proposing to "move away" from any model but merely mandating self-archiving (with or without publisher endorsement). (And, to repeat, OA is not solely, or primarily about OA Gold: it is about OA. No need to "move way from models": just to move fingers to keyboard so as to deposit articles...)

Lynch: "4. We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing"

This recommendation too, is far too focussed on OA Gold and its speculative economics, rather than just plain old vanilla OA.

What "we" need to do right now is to forget about affordability and to mandate OA self-archiving. And to move our fingers to the keyboard, to get going on the depositing...

Lynch: "One takes the operating budget or historic revenue stream of a given journal and divides by the number of articles published or submitted, and announces the per-published-article cost (or submitted-article-cost, if one uses that model) for an open access journal."

It is certainly true that this is an extremely arbitrary way of setting the asking price for OA Gold publishing. The only essential component of that current price is the cost of implementing peer review, which is somewhere between $50 and $500 per article.

But there is no earthly reason we should still be fussing about that now at all. It's already late in the day. Time to forget about Gold Fever and get the fingers moving, to provide immediate OA...

Lynch: "Perhaps the system needs to be redesigned to deliver a price point per article that we can afford. Suppose we redesigned journal publishing with the goal of $100 per article published?"

Pick your price, but this is all just notional designing of notional solutions in the skyways of speculation: Pre-emptive OA Gold.

The actual solution requires no guesstimating or publishing reform, voluntary or coerced, nor this interminable waiting and speculation: It just requires that researchers' institutions and funders mandate OA self-archiving, now.

(And who are "We"? We are the research community: We can mandate self-archiving by and for ourselves. We can move our fingers to provide the OA. But we can't redesign journal publishing. And we don't need to. That's not what OA is about. OA is about providing OA. Gold is just one possible way to provide OA, and it's proving to be an extremely slow and uncertain way, spending far more time contemplating hypothetical economics than providing actual OA. And it can't be mandated. Green, in contrast, can and does provide immediate OA, is already beginning to be mandated, and is only waiting for the mandating to propagate to all research institutions and funders in order to provide at last the 100% OA we have been wait for for so long. And the mandates are on the way. Because they come from Us, the research community, the providers and users of the articles that we are seeking to make OA. No need to "redesign" anything but our digital kinematics -- and I don't mean financial or even cybernetic digits, but the dactyls at the beck and call of every one of us...)

But Cliff is back again, at the financial digits:

Lynch: "Or, if articles really must cost several thousand dollars each, and we are unwilling to deal with the implications or results of massively reducing costs, we need to explore what can we do to reduce the number of articles going into this costly system."

By now, we have long forgotten the immediate, pressing, solvable problem, which is OA, and we have launched back into the usual round of passive armchair speculations about the journal affordability problem and publishing reform...

Lynch: "similar questions can and should be asked about monograph publishing"

Yes, but let those similar questions and answers be kept separate from the problem at hand, which is OA, i.e., in the first instance, Open Access to the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer reviewed journals, every single one of which is and always has been an author give-away, written solely for the sake of usage and impact, not for the sake of earning royalty revenue. Not necessarily true of all monographs (though it might be true of some).

First things first. Let's require and reach 100% OA for OA's primary target, journal articles, and then contemplate the generalizability of our fabulous success to other forms of literature.

In the meantime, no one is stopping monograph authors (or their fingers) from making their books OA too, if they so wish, and if their publishers can afford to publish them anyway. But let us not contemplate mandating that sort of thing just yet!

Lynch: "5. Open Access Is Not a Threat to Peer Review: In Fact, It Has Nothing to Do with Peer Review -- but It Is Also Time to Talk about Peer Review"

Yes, it is not a threat. Yes, it has nothing to do with it. And no, OA is not the context to talk about peer review. (If this is the time, then it should be talked about separately, elsewhere; nothing to do with OA.)

Lynch: "The economic model underlying a journal has nothing to do with its peer review policy -- or its quality. There are many online journals that practice rigorous peer review. Indeed, going beyond just peer review, there seems to be no correlation between journal cost and quality."

These truisms are worth repeating, since so many still fail to grasp them.

But Cliff raises them misleadingly: OA is not the same thing as Gold OA. The peer-review issue is not just raised as a question about the quality standards of Gold OA journals. It is also raised by some publishers who keep proclaiming willy-nilly the doomsday scenario that mandating Green OA self-archiving will destroy journals and peer review. That is the empty alarmism that needs to be exposed for what it really is:

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Lynch: "At the same time -- and having just emphasized the complete disconnect between open access and peer review, I almost hate to mention this for fear of adding to the confusion -- we are long overdue for a nuanced analysis and reevaluation of peer review practices in scholarly publishing as an entirely separate issue from open access."

Don't mention it! (In this context.)

It is indeed irrelevant to OA and only adds confusion to confusion, and delay and indecision to what has already been near-paralysis for far too long...

Lynch: "We need to understand the extent of these costs and their implications."

The costs of peer review alone can be vaguely estimated now, and have been. But the only way to determine the true costs of peer review alone (once all other obsolescent publishing functions have been jettisoned [like print] or offloaded [like online access-provision and archiving] onto the distributed network of OA IRs) is to mandate Green and then let nature take its course in the online era.

(Don't ask me why nature couldn't take its course without the help of mandates, when 34,000 researchers happily perform the requisite keystrokes to sign a threat to boycott their journals if they do not provide OA, but it never occurs to them to go ahead and do the keystrokes to provide the OA for themselves! Or when university provosts perform the keystrokes in droves to sign in support of a federal federal proposal to mandate the keystrokes of self-archiving, but it never occurs to them to adopt a keystroke mandate at their own local institutions already, instead of sitting on their hands waiting for the federal mandate! I don't know the answer. It's a paradox, a koan, and I've dubbed it Zeno's Paralysis. But the affliction is curable, by mandates, freely applied to the research community's body politick.)

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Lynch: "6. Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity."

By all means, let those who wish to reform the scholarly publishing system so as to better serve the academy so declare their intentions and proceed full-speed with their worthy agenda.

But let those who merely wish to maximise online access to a very specific subset of scholarly publications (peer-reviewed research articles), right now, proceed toward their specific, distinct, immediately reachable and already woefully overdue goal (OA) without being hamstrung by any other admirable but irrelevant agendas.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum