Wednesday, January 31. 2007
Please Display Open Access Petition Banner On Your Website Or Blog
To help the OA petition grow even faster and bigger, please run the following html banner (or equivalent) on your website (substituting : "<" for "{" and ">" for "}" ) Many thanks,{br}{br}
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{td}{font color="white"}{center}Please sign the {a
href="http://www.ec-petition.eu/"}{font
color="gold"}petition{/font}{/a} in support of the European
Commission's proposed
{a
href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/198-guid.html"}{font
color="gold"}Open Access Self-Archiving
Mandate{/font}{/a}{/center}
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Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Tuesday, January 30. 2007
Pit-Bulls vs. Petitions: A Historic Time for Open Access
Tempting as it is to keep chattering about pit-bulls and commercial venality we should perhaps refocus on something far, far more important and substantive that is going on at the moment. This is where today's real historic Open Access (OA) developments are transpiring:The petition in support of the European Commission's Proposal to mandate OA self-archiving has already amassed 13,000 signatures in 13 days and is still growing. It is being signed not only by individual grassroots researchers but by universities, learned societies, scientific academies:
Rectors/principals of research organisations (51)The petition is also being signed by institutional libraries, research organisations and publishers:
Heads of university/research institution departments or schools (44)
International societies or research-based organisations (38)
National societies or research-based organisations (35)
Research-based or research-centred charities/foundations (21)
National or international research funding bodies (8)
National academies (3)
Rectors' Conferences/University associations (2)
Government departments (2)
Institutional libraries (144)Please consult the petition's current updates as these figures are changing by the minute. (And if you or your organisation support the OA mandate proposals, please sign too.)
R&D-based companies (66)
Publishers (30)
International or national library organisations (26)
National ICT organisations (11)
Museums (research-based) (2)
In addition to this petition in support of proposed mandates (of which the EC's is one, but of course the United States has a huge proposed mandate pending too: the FRPAA), the number of actually adopted mandates is growing steadily too (and will no doubt be accelerated by the growth of the EC petition):
ROARMAP now lists 58 registered OA policies, 27 mandates (21 adopted, 6 proposed)
11 institutional and departmental mandates:
10 funder mandates:AUSTRALIA inst-mandate Queensland U. Technol
EUROPE inst-mandate Eur Org Nuc Res (CERN)
INDIA inst-mandate Nat Inst Tech Rourkela
PORTUGAL inst-mandate U. Minho
SWITZERLAND inst-mandate U. Zurich
FRANCE dept-mandate Lab Psych Neurosci Cog
UNITED KINGDOM dept-mandate U Southampton Dept ECS
6 funder mandate proposals:
And the FRPAA proposal already has the support of many of the US universities' presidents and provostsCANADA proposed funder-mandate Can Insts Health Res (CIHR)
UNITED STATES proposed funder-mandate Fed Res Pub Access Act (FRPAA)
So let us accelerate OA's now-unstoppable progress toward the optimal and inevitable. The sterile debates of the past are behind us.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, January 25. 2007
Green OA is no threat to grants: Pre-emptive Gold OA, today, might be
Peter Suber has excerpted in OA News the following passages fromSUMMARY: An article in The Australian -- "Open access a threat to grants" -- has wrongly implied that the Australian Research Council [ARC] OA policy would redirect research grant money toward the payment of OA journal publishing charges. What ARC has mandated is OA self-archiving ("Green OA"). It has definitely not proposed diverting research funds to OA publishing ("Gold OA").
(1) The first OA priority is 100% OA itself, via Green OA self-archiving mandates.
(2) The need to redirect funds toward Gold OA is hypothetical.
(3) Any "Gold Rush" today is premature and unnecessary.
(4) 100% Green OA does not take a penny from research.
(5) But direct conversions to Gold now certainly do.
(6) Most Gold journals don't charge publication fees today, but it is unlikely this will scale to 100% Gold OA.
(7) It is not a bad idea to start thinking about how to prepare for that eventuality.
(8) But it is misleading to think of and plan for the conversion to 100% Gold OA as a redirection of current research funds toward OA Gold publication charges.
(9) The "redirection" that needs to be planned is from the (vast) funds that are currently being used to pay for (non-OA) publication -- namely, institutional subscription/license fees, if and when those are ever cancelled.
(10) Hence pre-emptive redirection of scarce research funds to pay for Gold is premature and unnecessary today; what is necessary today is the Green mandates for which so many are now petitioning the European community.
(11) Once Green OA prevails, we have 100% OA already.
(12) Then, if/when Green OA causes unsustainable subscription cancellations, those very savings will pay the OA Gold publication costs without taking a penny from the current research pot.
Mandating OA self-archiving ("Green OA") by researchers is what needs to be focussed upon, as that is the pressing issue today, and mandating self-archiving by its fundees is exactly what ARC has done. But ARC has definitely not proposed diverting research funds to OA publishing ("Gold OA"), as the Lane article incorrectly assumes and implies.Lane, Bernard (2007) Open access a threat to grants."The historically low success rate for competitive grant applications could dip further as an unintended consequence of the move to open access publishing.
The Australian, January 23, 2007
"The Australian Research Council [ARC], which has just adopted its first policy to encourage grant winners to make their results widely and freely available, said open access was shifting publication costs to authors.
"If authors were allowed to cover those costs from grant money, then a new administrative and financial burden would fall on agencies such as the ARC.
"Funding agencies would have to estimate publication costs before giving a grant and would probably have to audit this expenditure at project's end, the ARC says in a new submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into public support for science and innovation.
" 'If the agencies' budgets were not supplemented to cover those costs in full, then the proportion of grant funding devoted to research activity would diminish,' the ARC says...."
(1) The first OA priority today, and an immediately reachable one, once we reach for it, is 100% OA itself, via Green OA self-archiving mandates from funders and universities.
(2) The need to redirect funds toward Gold OA is hypothetical, not real and actual, like the need to mandate Green OA. And the constant speculative focus on hypothetical (Gold) economics is getting in the way of actual, reachable (Green) OA.
(3) In addition, as we see from the Lane article, as well as from the concerns occasioned by CERN's move toward immediate conversion to Gold in particle physics: This premature and unnecessary "Gold Rush" is generating opposition to OA itself, of either hue, on the grounds that it would take money away from research.
(4) In reality, of course, 100% Green OA does not take a single penny away from research.
(5) But direct conversion to Gold now certainly does divert money from research, in a number of prominent cases (PLoS, BMC, plus all the hybrids like Springer Open Choice, etc.).
(6) It is repeatedly pointed out, by way of mitigating this, that most Gold journals don't charge publication fees -- but this is rather hollow reassurance, since most Gold journals -- other than the prominent ones, which do charge -- are more minor journals. And, more important, no one has the faintest idea whether not charging for Gold OA would scale, if most or all journals were Gold. (I would say it is virtually certain that not charging would not scale, and that publication fees would have to be charged.)
(7) It is not a bad idea to start thinking about how to prepare for that eventuality. (I myself think 100% Green OA will eventually lead to a conversion to 100% Gold OA.)
"The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition" (Started Sep 1998!)(8) However (and here is the crux of it), it is misleading in the extreme to think of and plan for the conversion to 100% Gold OA as a redirection of current research funds toward OA Gold publication charges.
Harnad, S. (2006) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition
(9) The "redirection" that needs to be planned is from the (vast) funds that are currently being used to pay for publication -- namely, institutional subscription/license fees! It is those funds that will need to be redirected toward Gold OA publication fees if/when subscriptions are cancelled, not today's research funds, which are already stretched to the limit. (I know that some research funds today already go toward library subscriptions: there the redirection will be direct and straighforward; but most institutional library subscription funds today do not explicitly come from a research pot.)
(10) Hence all this talk about OA costing more and taking money away from research is being generated by all the overhasty "Gold Fever" for direct, immediate conversion to Gold, rather than the rational, reachable intermediate step of "conversion" to 100% OA Green first, via the Green mandates for which so many are now petitioning the European community.
(11) For, once Green OA prevails, we have 100% OA already.
(12) Then, if and when Green OA should ever cause unsustainable subscription cancellations, that very eventuality will in and of itself generate the funds out of which to pay OA Gold publication costs without taking a penny from the current research pot. (And it will almost certainly generate substantial overall savings too.)
In short, the Gold Rush is premature, unnecessary, misleading, and counterproductive for OA at this time.
100% Green OA is not a funding issue today; it requires negligible resources, distributed across institutions. And preservation costs are not an issue either (even though preservation is of course being taken care of by Institutional Repositories [IRs]) as long as Green is merely a parallel supplement to subscription-based publishing, rather than a substitute for it. It is not Green self-archiving that bears the preservation burden for the journal literature at this time. And if/when there is a wholesale conversion to Gold, offloading all archiving and preservation functions onto the worldwide network of IRs, this will distribute the cost of archiving and preservation far more economically than it is distributed now (via subscriptions).
Once institutions are self-archiving 100% of their research output (thanks to Green mandates) instead of about 15%, as now, costs will not rise. (Just ask the (few) institutions that are already approaching 100%.) Green can manage on not much more than its negligible current budget for years to come.
We are not talking about "the cost of a new research dissemination system": we are talking about (mandating) 100% Green OA, which is merely a parallel supplement to the current "research dissemination system."
If and when there is indeed a transition to a new "research dissemination system," with all journal subscriptions cancelled, all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the Institutional Repositories, and all journals converted to recovering their remaining costs via the Gold OA publication-fee model, then the funds to pay those fees will indeed be drawn from one institutional pocket to the other, out of existing funds, namely, the windfall subscription cancellation savings.
But before we can get there, we first have to get to the 100% Green OA that will both generate the OA and (perhaps) generate the cancellations and their attendant savings. (If not, then we are speculating for nothing, and the system just continues in parallel.) But going instead for direct conversion to Gold right now, without journal cancellations first, of necessity draws on existing research funds that are far better used for funding research itself (whilst researchers are busy providing OA to their findings via OA Green self-archiving).
In summary, The Australian (and many others) have the wrong end of the OA stick. We should all get the Gold Dust out of our eyes and get our fingers moving, to perform the few keystrokes that are in reality the only barrier between us and 100% OA today.
(Arthur Sale has since submitted an excellent critique of the Lane article to The Australian, bringing out every salient point and correcting all the systematic misunderstandings. It has also been posted on the American Scientist Open Access Forum.)
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Sunday, January 21. 2007
The Open Access Citation Advantage: Quality Advantage Or Quality Bias?
Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"
This is a preview of some preliminary data (not yet refereed), collected by my doctoral student at UQaM, Chawki Hajjem. This study was done in part by way of response to Henk Moed's replies to my comments on Moed's (self-archived) preprint:
SUMMARY: Many studies have now reported the positive correlation between Open Access (OA) self-archiving and citation counts ("OA Advantage," OAA). But does this OAA occur because articles that are self-archived are more likely to be cited ("Quality Advantage": QA) or because articles that are more likely to be cited are more likely to be self-archived ("Quality Bias," QB)? The probable answer is both. Three studies [by Kurtz and co-workers in astrophysics, Moed in condensed matter physics, and Davis & Fromerth in mathematics] had attributed the OAA to QB [and to EA, the Early Advantage of self-archiving the preprint before publication] rather than QA. These three fields, however, happen to be among the minority of fields that (1) make heavy use of prepublication preprints and (2) have less of a postprint access problem than most other fields. Chawki Hajjem has now analyzed preliminary evidence based on over 100,000 articles from multiple fields, comparing self-selected self-archiving with mandated self-archiving to estimate the contributions of QB and QA to the OAA. Both factors contribute, and the contribution of QA is greater.
Moed, H. F. (2006) The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter SectionMoed's study is about the "Open Access Advantage" (OAA) -- the higher citation counts of self-archived articles -- observable across disciplines as well as across years as in the following graphs from Hajjem et al. 2005 (red bars are the OAA):
The focus of the present discussion is the factors underlying the OAA. There are at least five potential contributing factors, but only three of them are under consideration here: (1) Early Advantage (EA), (2) Quality Advantage (QA) and (3) Quality Bias (QB -- also called "Self-Selection Bias").FIGURE 1. Open Access Citation Advantage By Discipline and By Year.
Green bars are percentage of articles self-archived (%OA); red bars, percentage citation advantage (%OAA) for self-archived articles for 10 disciplines (upper chart) across 12 years (lower chart, 1992-2003). Gray curve indicates total articles by discipline and year.
Source: Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.
Preprints that are self-archived before publication have an Early Advantage (EA): they get read, used and cited earlier. This is uncontested.
Kurtz, Michael and Brody, Tim (2006) The impact loss to authors and research. In, Jacobs, Neil (ed.) Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects. Oxford, UK, Chandos Publishing.In addition, the proportion of articles self-archived at or after publication is higher in the higher "citation brackets": the more highly cited articles are also more likely to be the self-archived articles.
The question, then, is about causality: Are self-archived articles more likely to be cited because they are self-archived (QA)? Or are articles more likely to be self-archived because they are more likely to be cited (QB)?FIGURE 2. Correlation between Citedness and Ratio of Open Access (OA) to Non-Open Access (NOA) Ratios.
The (OAc/TotalOAc)/(NOAc/TotalNOAc) ratio (across all disciplines and years) increases as citation count (c) increases (r = .98, N=6, p<.005). The more cited an article, the more likely that it is OA. (Hajjem et al. 2005)
The most likely answer is that both factors, QA and QB, contribute to the OAA: the higher quality papers gain more from being made more accessible (QA: indeed the top 10% of articles tend to get 90% of the citations). But the higher quality papers are also more likely to be self-archived (QB).
As we will see, however, the evidence to date, because it has been based exclusively on self-selected (voluntary) self-archiving, is equally compatible with (i) an exclusive QA interpretation, (ii) an exclusive QB interpretation or (iii) the joint explanation that is probably the correct one.
The only way to estimate the independent contributions of QA and QB is to compare the OAA for self-selected (voluntary) self-archiving with the OAA for imposed (obligatory) self-archiving. We report some preliminary results for this comparison here, based on the (still small sample of) Institutional Repositories that already have self-archiving mandates (chiefly CERN, U. Southampton, QUT, U. Minho, and U. Tasmania).
FIGURE 3. Self-Selected Self-Archiving vs. Mandated Self-Archiving: Within-Journal Citation Ratios (for 2004, all fields).
S = citation counts for articles self-archived at institutions with (Sm) and without (Sn) a self-archiving mandate. N = citation counts for non-archived articles at institutions with (Nm) and without (Nn) mandate (i.e., Nm = articles not yet compliant with mandate). Grand average of (log) S/N ratios (106,203 articles; 279 journals) is the OA advantage (18%); this is about the same as for Sn/Nn (27972 articles, 48 journals, 18%) and Sn/N (17%); ratio is higher for Sm/N (34%), higher still for Sm/Nm (57%, 541 articles, 20 journals); and Sm/Sn = 27%, so self-selected self-archiving does not yield more citations than mandated; rather the reverse. (All six within-pair differences are significant: correlated sample t-tests.) (NB: preliminary, unrefereed results.)
Summary: These preliminary results suggest that both QA and QB contribute to OAA, and that the contribution of QA is greater than that of QB.
Discussion: On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Henk Moed [HM] wrote:
HM: "Below follow some replies to your comments on my preprint 'The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section'...The findings are definitely consistent for Astronomy and for Condensed Matter Physics. In both cases, most of the observed OAA came from the self-archiving of preprints before publication (EA).
"1. Early view effect. [EA] In my case study on 6 journals in the field of condensed matter physics, I concluded that the observed differences between the citation age distributions of deposited and non-deposited ArXiv papers can to a large extent - though not fully - be explained by the publication delay of about six months of non-deposited articles compared to papers deposited in ArXiv. This outcome provides evidence for an early view [EA] effect upon citation impact rates, and consequently upon ArXiv citation impact differentials (CID, my term) or Arxiv Advantage (AA, your term)."SH: "The basic question is this: Once the AA (Arxiv Advantage) has been adjusted for the "head-start" component of the EA (by comparing articles of equal age -- the age of Arxived articles being based on the date of deposit of the preprint rather than the date of publication of the postprint), how big is that adjusted AA, at each article age? For that is the AA without any head-start. Kurtz never thought the EA component was merely a head start, however, for the AA persists and keeps growing, and is present in cumulative citation counts for articles at every age since Arxiving began".HM: "Figure 2 in the interesting paper by Kurtz et al. (IPM, v. 41, p. 1395-1402, 2005) does indeed show an increase in the very short term average citation impact (my terminology; citations were counted during the first 5 months after publication date) of papers as a function of their publication date as from 1996. My interpretation of this figure is that it clearly shows that the principal component of the early view effect is the head-start: it reveals that the share of astronomy papers deposited in ArXiv (and other preprint servers) increased over time. More and more papers became available at the date of their submission to a journal, rather than on their formal publication date. I therefore conclude that their findings for astronomy are fully consistent with my outcomes for journals in the field of condensed matter physics."
Moreover, in Astronomy there is already 100% "OA" to all articles after publication, and this has been the case for years now (for the reasons Michael Kurtz and Peter Boyce have pointed out: all research-active astronomers have licensed access as well as free ADS access to all of the closed circle of core Astronomy journals: otherwise they simply cannot be research-active). This means that there is only room for EA in Astronomy's OAA. And that means that in Astronomy all the questions about QA vs QB (self-selection bias) apply only to the self-archiving of prepublication preprints, not to postpublication postprints, which are all effectively "OA."
To a lesser extent, something similar is true in Condensed-Matter Physics (CondMP): In general, research-active physicists have better access to their required journals via online licensing than other fields do (though one does wonder about the "non-research-active" physicists, and what they could/would do if they too had OA!). And CondMP too is a preprint self-archiving field, with most of the OAA differential again concentrated on the prepublication preprints (EA). Moreover, Moed's test for whether or not a paper was self-archived was based entirely on its presence/absence in ArXiv (as opposed to elsewhere on the Web, e.g., on the author's website or in the author's Institutional Repository).
Hence Astronomy and CondMP are fields that are "biassed" toward EA effects. It is not surprising, therefore, that the lion's share of the OAA turns out to be EA in these fields. It also means that the remaining variance available for testing QA vs. QB in these fields is much narrower than in fields that do not self-archive preprints only, or mostly.
Hence there is no disagreement (or surprise) about the fact that most of the OAA in Astronomy and CondMP is due to EA. (Less so in the slower-moving field of maths; see: "Early Citation Advantage?.")
I agree with all this: The probable quality of the article was estimated from the probable quality of the author, based on citations for non-OA articles. Now, although this correlation, too, goes both ways (are authors' non-OA articles more cited because their authors self-archive more or do they self-archive more because they are more cited?), I do agree that the correlation between self-archiving-counts and citation-counts for non-self-archived articles by the same author is more likely to be a QB effect. The question then, of course, is: What proportion of the OAA does this component account for?SH: "The fact that highly-cited articles (Kurtz) and articles by highly-cited authors (Moed) are more likely to be Arxived certainly does not settle the question of cause and effect: It is just as likely that better articles benefit more from Arxiving (QA) as that better authors/articles tend to Arxive/be-Arxived more (QB)."HM: "2. Quality bias. I am fully aware that in this research context one cannot assess whether authors publish [sic] their better papers in the ArXiv merely on the basis of comparing citation rates of archived and non-archived papers, and I mention this in my paper. Citation rates may be influenced both by the 'quality' of the papers and by the access modality (deposited versus non-deposited). This is why I estimated author prominence on the basis of the citation impact of their non-archived articles only. But even then I found evidence that prominent, influential authors (in the above sense) are overrepresented in papers deposited in ArXiv."
HM: "But I did more that that. I calculated Arxiv Citation Impact Differentials (CID, my term, or ArXiv Advantage, AA, your term) at the level of individual authors. Next, I calculated the median CID over authors publishing in a journal. How then do you explain my empirical finding that for some authors the citation impact differential (CID) or ArXiv Advantage is positive, for others it is negative, while the median CID over authors does not significantly differ from zero (according to a Sign test) for all journals studied in detail except Physical Review B, for which it is only 5 per cent? If there is a genuine 'OA advantage' at stake, why then does it for instance not lead to a significantly positive median CID over authors? Therefore, my conclusion is that, controlling for quality bias and early view effect, in the sample of 6 journals analysed in detail in my study, there is no sign of a general 'open access advantage' of papers deposited in ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section."My interpretation is that EA is the largest contributor to the OAA in this preprint-intensive field (i.e., most of the OAA comes from the prepublication component) and that there is considerable variability in the size of the (small) residual (non-EA) OAA. For a small sample, at the individual journal level, there is not enough variance left for a significant OAA, once one removes the QB component too. Perhaps this is all that Henk Moed wished to imply. But the bigger question for OA concerns all fields, not just those few that are preprint-intensive and that are relatively well-heeled for access to the published version. Indeed, the fundamental OA and OAA questions concern the postprint (not the preprint) and the many disciplines that do have access problems, not the happy few that do not!
The way to test the presence and size of both QB and QA in these non-EA fields is to impose the OA, preferably randomly, on half the sample, and then compare the size of the OAA for imposed ("mandated") self-archiving (Sm) with the size of the OAA for self-selected ("nonmandated") self-archiving (Sn), in particular by comparing their respective ratios to non-self-archived articles in the same journal and year: Sm/N vs. Sn/N).
If Sn/N > Sm/N then QB > QA, and vice versa. If Sn/N = 1, then QB is 0. And if Sm/N = 1 then QA is 0.
It is a first approximation to this comparison that has just been done (FIGURE 3) by my doctoral student, Chawki Hajjem, across fields, for self-archived articles in five Institutional Repositories (IRs) that have OA self-archiving mandates, for 106,203 articles published in 276 biomedical journal 2004, above.
The mandates are still very young and few, hence the sample is still small; and there are many potential artifacts, including selective noncompliance with the mandate as well as disciplinary bias. But the preliminary results so far suggest that (1) QA is indeed > 0, and (2) QA > QB.
[I am sure that we will now have a second round from die-hards who will want to argue for a selective-compliance effect, as a 2nd-order last gasp for the QB-only hypothesis, but of course that loses all credibility as IRs approach 100% compliance: We are analyzing our mandated IRs separately now, to see whether we can detect any trends correlated with an IR's %OA. But (except for the die-hards, who will never die), I think even this early sample already shows that the OA advantage is unlikely to be only or mostly a QB effect.]
HM: "3. Productive versus less productive authors. My analysis of differences in Citation Impact differentials between productive and less productive authors may seem "a little complicated". My point is that if one selects from a set of papers deposited in ArXiv a paper authored by a junior (or less productive) scientist, the probability that this paper is co-authored by a senior (or more productive) author is higher than it is for a paper authored by a junior scientist but not deposited in ArXiv. Next, I found that papers co-authored by both productive and less productive authors tend to have a higher citation impact than articles authored solely by less productive authors, regardless of whether these papers were deposited in ArXiv or not. These outcomes lead me to the conclusion that the observed higher CID for less productive authors compared to that of productive authors can be interpreted as a quality bias."It still sounds a bit complicated, but I think what you mean is that (1) mixed multi-author papers (ML, with M = More productive authors, L = less productive authors) are more likely to be cited than unmixed multi-author (LL) papers with the same number of authors, and that (2) such ML papers are also more likely to be self-archived. (Presumably MM papers are the most cited and most self-archived of multi-author papers.)
That still sounds to me like a variant on the citation/self-archiving correlation, and hence intepretable as either QA or QB or both. (Chawki Hajjem has also found that citation counts are positively correlated with the number of authors an article has: this could either be a self-citation bias or evidence that multi-authored paper tend to be better ones.)
HM: "4. General comments. In the citation analysis by Kurtz et al. (2005), both the citation and target universe contain a set of 7 core journals in astronomy. They explain their finding of no apparent OA effect in his study of these journals by postulating that "essentially all astronomers have access to the core journals through existing channels". In my study the target set consists of a limited number of core journals in condensed matter physics, but the citation universe is as large as the total Web of Science database, including also a number of more peripherical journals in the field. Therefore, my result is stronger than that obtained by Kurtz at al.: even in this much wider citation universe, I do not find evidence for an OA advantage effect."I agree that CondMP is less preprint-intensive, less accessible and less endogamous than Astrophysics, but it is still a good deal more preprint-intensive and accessible than most fields (and I don't yet know what role the exogamy/enodgamy factor plays in either citations or the OAA: it will be interesting to study, among many other candidate metrics, once the entire literature is OA).
HM: "I realize that my study is a case study, examining in detail 6 journals in one subfield. I fully agree with your warning that one should be cautious in generalizing conclusions from case studies, and that results for other fields may be different. But it is certainly not an unimportant case. It relates to a subfield in physics, a discipline that your pioneering and stimulating work (Harnad and Brody, D-Lib Mag., June 2004) has analysed as well at a more aggregate level. I hope that more case studies will be carried out in the near future, applying the methodologies I proposed in my paper."Your case study is very timely and useful. However, robot-based studies based on much larger samples of journals and articles have now confirmed the OAA in many more fields, most of them not preprint-based at all, and with access problems more severe than those of physics.
Conclusions
I would like to conclude with a summary of the "QB vs. QA" evidence to date, as I understand it:
(1) Many studies have reported the OA Advantage, across many fields.This will all be resolved soon, and the outcome of our QA vs. QB comparison for mandated vs. self-selected self-archiving already heralds this resolution. I am pretty confident that the empirical facts will turn out to have been the following: Yes, there is a QB component in the OA advantage (especially in the preprinting fields, such as astro, cond-mat and maths). But that QB component is neither the sole factor nor the largest factor in the OA advantage, particularly in the non-preprint fields with access problems -- and those fields constitute the vast majority. That will be the outcome that is demonstrated, and eventually not only the friends of OA but the foes of OA will have no choice but to acknowledge the new reality of OA, its benefits to research and researchers, and its immediate reachability through the prompt universal adoption of OA self-archiving mandates.
(2) Three studies have reported QB in preprint-intensive fields that have either no postprint access problem or markedly less than other fields (astrophysics, condensed matter, mathematics).
(3) The author of one of these three studies is pro-OA (Kurtz, who is also the one who drew my attention to the QA counterevidence); the author of the second is neutral (Moed); and the author of the third might (I think -- I'm not sure) be mildly anti-OA (Davis -- now collaborating with a publisher to do a 4-year [sic!] long-term study on QA vs QB).Henneken, E. A., Kurtz, M. J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Thompson, D., and Murray, S. S. (2006) Effect of E-printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics. Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 2006(4) So the overall research motivation for testing QB is not an anti-OA motivation.
Moed, H. F. (2006, preprint) The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section
Davis, P. M. and Fromerth, M. J. (2007) Does the arXiv lead to higher citations and reduced publisher downloads for mathematics articles? Scientometics, accepted for publication. See critiques: 1, 2
(5) On the other hand, the motivation on the part of some publishers to put a strong self-serving spin on these three QB findings is of course very anti-OA and especially, now, anti-OA-self-archiving-mandate. (That's quite understandable, and no problem at all.)
(6) In contrast to the three studies that have reported what they interpret as evidence of QB (Kurtz in astro, Moed in cond-mat and Davis in maths), there are the many other studies that report large OA citation (and download) advantages, across a large number of fields. Those who have interests that conflict with OA and OA self-archiving mandates are ignoring or discounting this large body of studies, and instead just spinning the three QB reports as their justification for ignoring the larger body of findings.
Stevan Harnad & Chawki Hajjem
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Wednesday, January 17. 2007
Citation Advantage For OA Self-Archiving Is Independent of Journal Impact Factor, Article Age, and Number of Co-Authors
Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"
In May 2006, Eysenbach published "Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles" in PLoS Biology, confirming -- by comparing OA vs. non-OA articles within one hybrid OA/non-OA journal -- the "OA Advantage" (higher citations for OA articles than for non-OA articles) that had previously been demonstrated by comparing OA (self-archived) vs. non-OA articles within non-OA journals.
SUMMARY: Eysenbach has suggested that the OA (Green) self-archiving advantage might just be an artifact of potential uncontrolled confounding factors such as article age (older articles may be both more cited and more likely to be self-archived), number of authors (articles with more authors might be more cited and more self-archived), subject matter (the subjects that are cited more, self-archive more), country (same thing), number of authors, citation counts of authors, etc.
Chawki Hajjem (doctoral candidate, UQaM) had already shown that the OA advantage was present in all cases when articles were analysed separately by age, subject matter or country. He has now done a multiple regression analysis jointly testing (1) article age, (2) journal impact factor, (3) number of authors, and (4) OA self-archiving as separate factors for 442,750 articles in 576 (biomedical) journals across 11 years, and has shown that each of the four factors contributes an independent, statistically significant increment to the citation counts. The OA-self-archiving advantage remains a robust, independent factor.
Having successfully responded to his challenge, we now challenge Eysenbach to demonstrate -- by testing a sufficiently broad and representative sample of journals at all levels of the journal quality, visibility and prestige hierarchy -- that his finding of a citation advantage for Gold OA articles (published OA on the high-profile website of the only journal he tested (PNAS) over Green OA articles in the same journal (self-archived on the author's website) was not just an artifact of having tested only one very high-profile journal.
This new PLoS study was based on a sample of 1492 articles (212 OA, 1280 non-OA) published June-December 2004 in one very high-impact (i.e., high average citation rate) journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings were useful because not only did they confirm the OA citation advantage, already demonstrated across millions of articles, thousands of journals, and over a dozen subject areas, but they showed that that advantage is already detectable as early as 4 months after publication.
The PLoS study also controlled for a large number of variables that could have contributed to a false OA advantage (for example, if more of the authors that chose to provide OA had happened to be in subject areas that happened to have higher citation counts). Eysenbach's logistic and multiple regression analyses confirmed that this was not the case for any of the potentially confounding variables tested, including the (i) country, (ii) publication count and (iii) citation count of the author and the (iv) subject area and (v) number of co-authors of the article.
However, both the Eysenbach article and the accompanying PLoS editorial, considerably overstated the significance of all the controls that were done, suggesting that (1) the pre-existing evidence, based mainly on OA self-archiving ("green OA") rather than OA publishing ("gold OA"), had not been "solid" but "limited" because it had not controlled for these potential "confounding effects." They also suggested that (2) the PLoS study's finding that gold OA generated more citations than green OA in PNAS pertained to OA in general rather than just to high-profile journals like PNAS (and that perhaps green OA is not even OA!):
Eysenbach (2006): "[T[he [prior] evidence on the “OA advantage” is controversial. Previous research has based claims of an OA citation advantage mainly on studies looking at the impact of self-archived articles... (which some have argued to be different from open access in the narrower sense)... All these previous studies are cross-sectional and are subject to numerous limitations... Limited or no evidence is available on the citation impact of articles originally published as OA that are not confounded by the various biases and additional advantages [?] of self-archiving or “being online” that contribute to the previously observed OA effects."When I pointed out in a reply that subject areas, countries and years had all been analyzed separately in prior within-journal comparisons based on far larger samples, always with the same outcome -- the OA citation advantage -- making it highly unlikely that any of the other potentially confounding factors singled out in the PLoS/PNAS study would change that consistent pattern, Eysenbach responded:
PLoS Editorial (MacCallum & Parthasarathy 2006): "We have long argued that papers freely available in a journal will be more often read and cited than those behind a subscription barrier. However, solid evidence to support or refute such a claim has been surprisingly hard to find. Since most open-access journals are new, comparisons of the effects of open access with established subscription-based journals are easily confounded by age and reputation... As far as we are aware, no other study has compared OA and non-OA articles from the same journal and controlled for so many potentially confounding factors... The results... are clear: in the 4 to 16 months following publication, OA articles gained a significant citation advantage over non-OA articles during the same period... [Eysenbach's] analysis [also] revealed that self-archived articles are... cited less often than OA [sic] articles from the same journal."
Eysenbach: "[T]o answer Harnad's question 'What confounding effects does Eysenbach expect from controlling for number of authors in a sample of over a million articles across a dozen disciplines and a dozen years all showing the very same, sizeable OA advantage? Does he seriously think that partialling out the variance in the number of authors would make a dent in that huge, consistent effect?' – the answer is “absolutely”.My doctoral student, Chawki Hajjem, has accordingly accepted Eysenbach's challenge, and done the requisite multiple regression analyses, testing not only (3) number of authors, but (1) number of years since publication, and (2) journal impact factor. The outcome is that (4) the OA self-archiving advantage (green OA) continues to be present as a robust, independent, statistically significant factor, alongside factors (1)-(3):
In order of size of contribution:Tested:
(1) number of years since publication (BLUE)
(2) journal impact factor (additional variable not tested by Eysenbach) (PURPLE)
(3) number of authors (RED)
(4) OA self-archiving (GREEN)
Already tested separately and confirmed:
(5) country (previously tested: OAA separately confirmed for all countries tested -- 1st author affiliation)
(6) subject area (previously tested: OAA separately confirmed in all subject areas tested)
Not tested:
(7) publication and citation counts for first and last authors (not tested, but see Moed 2006)
Irrelevant:
(8) article type (only relevant to PNAS sample)
(9) submission track (only relevant to PNAS sample)
(10) funding type (irrelevant)Independent effects of (1) Year of Publication (purple), (2) Journal Impact Factor (blue), (3) Number of Authors (red) and (4) OA Self-Archiving (green) on citation counts: Beta weights derived from multiple regression analyses of (column 1) raw distribution, (column 2) log normalized distribution, (columns 3-6) separate Journal Impact Factor Quartiles, and (columns 7-10) separate Year of Publication Quartiles. In every case, OA Self-Archiving makes an independent, statistically significant contribution (highest for the most highly cited articles, column 6 "Groupe Dri": i.e., the QA/QB effect). (Biology, 1992-2003; 576 journals; 442,750 articles). For more details see Chawki Hajjem's website.
Article age (1) is of course the biggest factor: Articles' total citation counts grow as time goes by.
Journal impact factor (2) is next: Articles in high-citation journals have higher citation counts: This is not just a circular effect of the fact that journal citation counts are just average journal-article citation counts: It is a true QB selection effect (nothing to do with OA!), namely, the higher quality articles tend to be submitted to and selected by the higher quality journals!.
The next contributor to citation counts is the number of authors (3): This could be because there are more self-citations when there are more authors; or it could indicate that multi-authored articles tend to be of higher quality.
But last, we have the contribution of OA self-archiving (4). It is the smallest of the four factors, but that is unsurprising, as surely article age and quality are the two biggest determinants of citations, whether the articles are OA or non-OA. (Perhaps self-citations are the third biggest contributor). But the OA citation advantage is present for those self-archived articles (and stronger for the higher quality ones, QA), refuting Eysenbach's claim that the green OA advantage is merely the result of "potential confounds" and that only the gold OA advantage is real.
I might add that the PLoS Editorial is quite right to say: "Since most open-access journals are new, comparisons of the effects of open access with established subscription-based journals are easily confounded by age and reputation": Comparability and confounding are indeed major problems for between-journal comparisons, comparing OA and non-OA journals (gold OA). Until Eysenbach's within-journal PNAS study, "solid evidence" (for gold OA) was indeed hard to find. But comparability and confounding are far less of a problem for the within-journal analyses of self-archiving (green OA), and with them, solid evidence abounds.
I might further add that the solid pre-existing evidence for the green OA advantage -- free of the limitations of between-journal comparisons -- is and always has been, by the same token, evidence for the gold OA advantage too, for it would be rather foolish and arbitrary to argue that free accessibility is only advantageous to self-archived articles, and not to articles published in OA journals!
Yet that is precisely the kind of generalization Eysenbach seems to want to make (in the opposite direction) in the special case of PNAS -- a very selective, high-profile, high-impact journal. PNAS articles that are freely accessible on the PNAS website were found to have a greater OA advantage than PNAS articles freely accessible only on the author's website. With just a little reflection, however, it is obvious that the most likely reason for this effect is the high profile of PNAS and its website: That effect is hence highly unlikely to scale to all, most, or even many journals; nor is it likely to scale in time, for as green OA grows, the green OA harvesters like OAIster (or even just Google Scholar) will become the natural way and place to search, not the journal's website.
Having taken up Eysenbach's challenge to test the independence of the OA self-archiving advantage from "potential confounds," we now challenge Eysenbach to test the generality of the PNAS gold/green advantage across the full quality hierarchy of journals, to show it is not merely a high-end effect.
Let me close by mentioning one variable that Eysenbach did not (and could not) control for, namely, author self-selection bias (Quality Bias, QB): His 212 OA authors were asked to rate the relative urgency, importance, and quality of their articles and there was no difference between their OA and non-OA articles in these self-ratings. But (although I myself am quite ready to agree that there was little or no Quality Bias involved in determining which PNAS authors chose which PNAS articles to make OA gold), unfortunately these self-ratings are not likely to be enough to convince the sceptics who interpret the OA advantage as a Quality Bias (a self-selective tendency to provide OA to higher quality articles) rather than a Quality Advantage (QA) that increases the citations of higher quality articles. Not even the prior evidence of a correlation between earlier downloads and later citations is enough. The positive result of a more objective test of Quality Bias (QB) vs. Quality Advantage (QA) (comparing self-selected vs. mandated self-archiving, and likewise conducted by Chawki Hajjem) is reported ) here.
REFERENCES
Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8) pp. 1060-1072.
Eysenbach G (2006) Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles. PLoS Biology 4(5) e157 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157
Hajjem, C., & Harnad, S. (2007) The Open Access Citation Advantage: Quality Advantage Or Quality Bias?
Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. & Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.
Harnad, S. (2006) PLoS, Pipe-Dreams and Peccadillos. PLoS Biology Responses.
MacCallum CJ & Parthasarathy H (2006) Open Access Increases Citation Rate. PLoS Biol 4(5): e176 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040176
Moed, H. F. (2006) The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section
Stevan Harnad & Chawki Hajjem
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Researchers of the World: Unite to Support European Commission Open Access Policy
The European Commission, the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) and the European Research Councils have each recently recommended adopting the policy of providing Open Access to research results.
(Very similar recommendations are also being made by governmental research organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia.)
There are powerful non-research interests lobbying vigorously against these policy recommendations, so a display of support by the research community is critically important at this time.
A petition in support of the European Commission recommendation is now being sponsored by a consortium of European organisations:JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK),The petition is to be presented to the European Commission February 15th in Brussels at its conference on "Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age."
SURF (Netherlands),
SPARC Europe,
DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany),
DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).
The petition's purpose is to demonstrate the broad-based support for the EC recommendations on the part of the European as well as the worldwide research community, particularlyRecommendation A1: "GUARANTEE PUBLIC ACCESS TO PUBLICLY-FUNDED RESEARCH RESULTS SHORTLY AFTER PUBLICATION"Signatures may be added by individual researchers or by universities and research institutions.
Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives
Institutional signatures, from Europe and worldwide, are fast approaching 1000, while individual signatures are nearing 20,000.
Researchers, lab directors, institutute directors, university research VPs and DVCs, learned society and scholarly/scientific academy presidents are all strongly urged to register your support.Stevan HarnadPlease sign the OA petition here.
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Tuesday, January 16. 2007
Arthur Sale's "Patchwork Mandate" Recommendation
As OA self-archiving mandates by research funders grow, here is Arthur Sale's timely and useful strategy to help accelerate the complementary growth of self-archiving mandates by universities and research institutions (if the whole institution is not yet ready, start bottom-up with mandates at the laboratory or departmental level): Excerpts [interpolations added]:Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February doi:10.1045/january2007-sale.
"This article is written mainly for repository managers who are at a loss as to what policies they (or their universities or research institutions) ought to deploy in order to ensure that most, if not all, of the institution's scholarly output is deposited in the institution's repository. In essence, there are only two pure policies:"Voluntary deposit policies are known to achieve no greater deposit rate of current research than 30% and more usually around 15%... The evidence for this can be produced and is absolutely clear...:requiring (mandating) researchers to deposit, and"A mandatory deposit policy will approach a capture rate of 100% of current research publications, though it will take a couple of years to achieve that goal. Figures of 60-90% can be expected in a short time. See... for some data on how mandates actually work...: Sale, A. The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.
relying on voluntary (spontaneous) participation, with or without
encouragement...
Sale, A. The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4)"This short article describes a third policy that provides a transitional path between the two.
Sale, A. Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.
"What is the patchwork mandate? Simply this:
"Knowing that you have been [as yet] unable to convince the senior executives, you nevertheless personally commit to having a mandate across your institution.
"You aim to pursue a strategy that will achieve an institutional mandate in the long term. (It is highly recommended that you register your intention to do this in ROARMAP so as to encourage other repository managers caught in the same dilemma.)
"Since you haven't been able to get an institutional mandate [yet], you work instead towards getting departmental (school/faculty) mandates one by one. Each departmental mandate will rapidly trend towards 100%, and little activism is needed to maintain this level....
"Conclusion
"I am convinced that the patchwork mandate strategy described in this article will work in most cases. It is being trialled in Australia, and although it won't achieve 100% deposit of content into the institutional repository instantly, it is a clear way to work towards that goal. You can even explain the patchwork mandate approach to your senior executives, and they probably won't stop you from trying it. They may even encourage you in your efforts.
"Just remember that voluntary persuasion of individuals is known not to work beyond a pitiful participation level. Self-archiving needs to be made part of the routine academic duty, and this requires a policy endorsement of mandatory deposit by someone."
Arthur Sale
Monday, January 15. 2007
EURAB's Proposed OA Mandate: Strongest of the 20 Adopted and 5 Proposed So Far
The ROARMAP Registry of University and Funder Self-Archiving Mandates keeps growing: 56 policies, 20 adopted mandates, and 5 proposed mandates so far, worldwide. But the latest mandate proposal from EURAB is the best of them all: So good that I don't have a single recommendation for improving it! It has all the essential ingredients: (1) Deposit of peer-reviewed postprint is requiredThat's it. It's not possible to design a better policy, or one that is surer to get the entire international research community to 100% OA more reliably, quickly or effectively. Here's the policy. Please emulate it at your university, research institution or funding agency and we'll reach the optimal and inevitable at long last.
(2) Deposit required immediately upon acceptance for publication (no exceptions, no delays)
(3) Deposit in Institutional or Central Repository
(4) Set access to deposit as Open Access as soon as possible, within 6 months at the latest.Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?
If your university, research institution, or research funding agency has adopted or proposes to adopt an OA self-archiving mandate, please register it in ROARMAP for others to emulate.
Recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB)
The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) has recommended that the European Commission should promote open access publication policies for all their publicly funded research. EURAB was invited by the Commission to examine the issue of scientific publication with particular reference to policy recommendations regarding open access for Framework Program 7 (FP7). It has recommended that a clear policy at European level is required which sets out a number of key high level principles. The Commission can play a role in three respects: as a funding body, as a policy body, as a supporting body.1. The publication policy should not compromise the freedom of scientists to publish wherever they feel is most appropriate.The Commission should strongly encourage all Member States to promote open access publication policies for all their publicly funded research.
2. The effect of the policy should be to increase the visibility of and improve access to the research funded by the Commission.
3. The policy should be based on recognized best practice
4. EURAB recommends that the Commission should consider mandating all researchers funded under FP7 to [deposit] their publications resulting from EC-funded research in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication, to be made openly accessible within 6 months at the latest.a. The repository may be a local institutional and/or a subject repository.5. Given the complexity of the issues involved, the Commission should consider implementation of this policy on a phased basis, starting with research funded by the European Research Council.
b. Authors should deposit post-prints (or publisher's version if permitted) plus metadata of articles accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings.
c. Deposit should be made upon acceptance by the journal/conference. Repositories should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to full text article to be applied as required. Open access should be made available as soon as practicable after the author-requested embargo, or six months, whichever comes first.
d. Suitable repositories should make provision for long-term preservation of, and free public access to, published research findings.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Friday, January 12. 2007
Cliff Lynch on Open Access
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:
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.Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Thread:
"Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives" (started Mar 2003)
Lynch: "1. Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?Unfortunately, it does not suffice to say that Open Access (OA) is just "increased elimination of barriers to the use of the scholarly literature."
"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..."
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:
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."Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?"
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:
Don't mention it! (In this context.)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."
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.)
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.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."
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
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The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.
The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)
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