Self-Archiving Mandates

Friday, March 30. 2007

Mobilising Scholarly Society Membership Support for FRPAA and EC A1

SUMMARY: Some Scholarly Society officers are adopting the very same stance as commercial publishers -- opposing the Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates that are being adopted and proposed worldwide -- but they are opposing them in the name of protecting the society's publishing revenue streams for the sake of funding the society's "good works" (funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) -- and they are doing so on behalf of their memberships, without consultation, disclosure, or answerability.
The memberships have to be informed of this, and that renouncing OA to guarantee their society's publishing revenue streams so they can subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying would amount to members agreeing to subsidise these things with their own lost daily research impact and income. Members will be shocked once their societies' publishing revenue books are opened and they see how small a proportion of their society's publishing profits is actually being used for these good works rather than to increase their publishing division's size, staff and perquisites, exactly as with any commercial publisher.
Scholarly society meetings, scholarships and lobbying should sustain themselves in other ways in the OA era, rather than by reducing members' research impact. Reducing research access is the exact opposite of the purpose of a scholarly society. Raising the registration fee for meetings, and adjusting membership fees to the level agreed upon for the funding of scholarships and lobbying makes the system far more open and answerable to the real needs of the membership.

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Andrew A. Adams wrote:

"On the subject of Scholarly Society Publishers, you agree that it is likely that the heads of scholarly societies will be lining up alongside the commercial publishers in lobbying against OA mandates in the US. Since most scholarly societies are semi-democratic bodies, we need to try to mobilise OA advocates to use those democratic avenues to transform the Scholarly Societies into lobbyists for instead of lobbyists against, OA. Of course, as always, this requires the time of OA advocates.

"I will have a think about how we can support each other in these efforts (your slides on OA are one example of how we can support each other and by sharing, reduce the burden on each of us), and then possibly put a message on the general list with suggestions, the first of which is noting that "decisions are made by those who turn up" and suggesting that at minimum OA advocates need to make the time to attend their scholarly societies' AGMs, and preferably to stand for election as officers of the societies on a platform of OA advocacy (and business change to secure the future of the societies IF Green OA were to undermine their publishing income)."

You are right that scholarly society members need to be specially mobilised by OA advocates now, to get them aware and on-side. I think David Prosser and Fred Friend in the UK and Heather Joseph and Peter Suber in the US are in the best position to guide a systematic campaign to mobilise support for EC A1 and FRPAA from the society memberships. Many of the societies have signed the EU or US petitions (although obviously the most important membership targets are those whose officers have not signed).

The specific goal would be to inform members about the great likelihood that their own officers will be actively lobbying against Green OA mandates (FRPAA and EC A1), and hence the need to make the will of the grassroots membership known, heard and felt.

The core issue is that Scholarly Society officers are taking exactly the same stance as commercial publishers (either opposing OA altogether, or opposing the OA Green Mandates that are designed to reach OA), but they are doing so in the name of protecting the society's publishing revenue streams for the sake of the society's "good works" (which consist of funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) -- and they are doing so in the name of their memberships, without consultation, disclosure, or answerability.

Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor

Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

Open Letter from Fellows of the Royal Society

A real tragedy

The memberships have to be very clearly informed of this, and of the fact that renouncing OA in favour of protecting their society's publishing revenue streams in order to ensure that they can continue to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying would amount to the individual members themselves agreeing to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying with their own lost daily research impact and income, lost because would-be users of their work are being denied access to their work because their institutions cannot afford subscription access to it (the supplementary access that the Green OA Mandates are specifically meant to provide).

The findings on the way self-archiving doubles research usage and impact in all fields should be made very clearly known to the membership, so they fully understand and appreciate the central causal contingency that is actually at issue in all of this: Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact Advantage

Houghton, J. & Sheehan, P. (2006) The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings. Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University

Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).
The solution is very simple: Scholarly society meetings, scholarships and lobbying should sustain themselves in other ways in the OA era, rather than by reducing members' research impact. Reducing research access is the exact opposite of the purpose of a scholarly society. Raising the registration fee for meetings, and adjusting membership fees to the level agreed upon for the funding of scholarships and lobbying makes the system far more open and answerable to the real needs of the membership.

(I am certain that members will be appalled once the publishing books are opened and they see how small a proportion of their society's publishing profits is actually being used for these good works: The books will show that those scholarly societies that have any sizeable publishing profits to speak of tend to use them, like all other publishers, to increase their publishing division's size, staff and perquisites, not to fund "good works." The American Chemical Society is the prime example of this. Publishing has become a state-within-a-state in the profitable societies, and that is why they sound so much like commercial publishers, differing only in the fact that they can add a specious note of self-righteousness to their resistance to OA, citing their "good works." The remedy, of course, is to remind the membership of the actual mandate of scholarly societies, which is to promote the scholarship, not to profit from limiting it.)

Moreover, a long period of peaceful coexistence between subscription revenues and Green OA self-archiving mandates is still ahead of us, because it takes time for the mandates to take effect, with OA growing anarchically across all journals, not individually, journal by journal. Even in fields that have had 100% Green OA for years now -- notably the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, which have both attested to this publicly -- Green OA self-archiving has not yet produced any detectable decline in subscription revenues. Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 13:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, March 27. 2007

Australian Productivity Commission Report: Trojan Horse-Play

Once again, the reader would probably do better to read Peter Suber's incisive but gentle critique of the stunningly "confused and confusing" report of the Australian government's Productivity Commission on Public Support for Science and Innovation. My own uncharitable rant, from when I first laid eyes on it yesterday, follows below:

What a word salad is the Australian government Productivity Commission report on Public Support for Science and Innovation. All that jabber, a lot of it incoherent, but what it amounts to is a total confusion about Green and Gold, OA self-archiving and OA publishing, institutional repositories and central repositories, embargoes, and what needs to be mandated and how (and why). A perfect entry-way for the Trojan Horse of paying the asking price for pre-emptive Gold OA instead of just mandating Green OA. (Doesn't even seem to realize that combining payment with embargoes is adding insult to injury!)

A mess. They should take it back and try (seriously this time) to think it through, clearly, and reduce it to the few sentences it merits. And those sentences are already known:

Mandate Green OA self-archiving of all published articles in Institutional Repositories (deposit required immediately upon publication, even if provisionally in Closed Access). Fund Gold OA only if you really have the spare change; otherwise, wait until it's needed: If/when institutional subscriptions are unsustainably cancelled, use (part of) the institutional savings to pay for the Gold OA publication charges for institutional research output. Not before!

That's all that's needed. The rest is all confusion and folly.

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 16:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, March 25. 2007

The European Commission has already mandated Green OA!

I append below another brilliant suggestion from the redoubtable N. Miradon (who may be retired but hardly retiring -- and tireless!) in the form of a proposed letter to European MPs and MEPs about the forthcoming EC deliberations on Open Access policy.

If I have not misunderstand, N. Miradon has drawn to our attention here an existing EU/EC policy under which it would be possible to implement an ID/OA mandate for EU research funding with no further legislative or consultative changes required at all!

(See comments further below: It looks to me as if pointing this out to the EC would be the shortest and easiest route to the adoption of the EC A1 recommendation -- since strongly supported by the Brussels Open Access Petition -- to implement Green OA self-archiving, for, in effect, it is already mandated! The only thing that still needs to be specified is trivial and noncontroversial: the locus and mode of submission and storage of the already mandated publication. Currently it needs to be sent in by email; the only change needed is to require it to be deposited in a Closed Access URL in an Institutional Repository! More about this below.)

A few suggestions are added below concerning the all-important locus of deposit of the published research documents.

It is very important (in order to generate a coherent, systematic, universally scaleable solution) that the default locus of deposit should be specified as the researcher's own (OAI-compliant) Institutional Repository (IR). Other loci are possible if the researcher's institution does not yet have an IR: there are numerous possible Central Repositories (CRs), national and international, and the EU could perhaps also provide one of its own; but the preferred locus should be the researcher's own IR. The EU policy will also help encourage research institutions to create their own IRs if they have not done so already, and to fill them also with their non-EU-funded research output. That will complement the funded research and make all European peer-reviewed research output OA, maximising its usage and impact:
   Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
   "Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)
   "Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
   "France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories" (started Oct 2006)
   Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

A few comments and suggestions on N. Miradon's text:

On Sat, 24 Mar 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

This is about the forthcoming parliamentary discussions of "Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation".

I have drafted a letter to my MP and to my MEP. Copy of my draft letter below the fold.

I would be v grateful if you could read my letter for errors and omissions, and send corrections to me off list (or post them here).

And if you have 2 minutes to spare, perhaps you could send something like this to your own deputé/ member of parliament.

N. Miradon

Dear Member of Parliament/Member of the European Parliament:

I understand that Parliament has received a Communication from the European Commission "On Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation". There is an accompanying "Staff Working Paper" - details in footnotes [1] and [2] below.

The reason for this letter is to ask you to pursue some questions which are relevant to "Access, Dissemination and Preservation" of scientific information; but which the Commission papers do not seem to mention.

I am a retired research scientist. I have always found that the European Research programmes are well structured at the start, but that it is difficult to find the results at the end. The problem is that the scientific information that is produced by each EU research project is dispersed through publications in a multitude of books, journals, pamphlets and Commission and other web pages.

I would add here that depositing them in an interoperable OAI-compliant repository would be optimal, preferably the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR).

So I would like to ask why all published results from EU-supported research projects cannot be grouped together and made available via one well-organised EU web page or 'portal'.

The web page or portal can be harvested from the EU researchers' IRs, or it can consist of a list of the projects, or the papers resulting from the projects, together with a link to their URL in the IR in which they are deposited.

I think that it is reasonable to ask the Commission to do this. The three necessary constituents of a 'portal' are -
(i) the published research documents,
(ii) a web site,
(iii) a data standard for classifying and linking the documents.

The OAI protocol is the standard for making the IRs interoperable. There may need to be some further tag for specifically selecting EU funded publications.

The European Commission already possesses (i) and (ii) and (iii);

(i) The Commission's "Seventh Framework Programme Grant Agreement" already requires that every research contract funded under the Seventh Framework Programme should send to the Commission an electronic copy of every publication produced, and that the Commission shall, with appropriate safeguards, be authorised to publish every document sent to it - see footnote [3].

This existing EU/EC policy is already a godsend, as it already provides the basis for the EU to adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate (ID/OA) (also called the "dual deposit/release strategy") without any further need of legislation or consultation:

As the EU already requires (i.e., mandates) both (1) the electronic copy of the publication, and (2) the right to make it OA (if and when the copyright agreement with the publisher allows it), the only thing left to stipulate is how "send[ing] to the commission an electronic copy" should be done, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the form of depositing it in the researcher's own IR (preferably, or in a OAI-compliant CR otherwise), in immediate Open Access if possible, otherwise in Closed Access -- and merely sending the commission the URL for the (Closed Access) deposit!

The EU can harvest the document if it wishes, or link it in a portal. The only change involved here is a specification of the mode of submission for what has already been mandated by the EC.
   "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"
   "Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)"
   Dual Deposit/Release Strategy
   A National Open Access Policy

(The NIH had a similar opportunity to do this in 2004, but failed to take notice.)
   "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy(Oct 2004)"

(ii) The Commission already has numerous web pages from earlier Framework Programmes, each showing the reports of its particular research projects - some examples are listed in [4].

(iii) The Commission has already developed a "Common European Research Information Format". The Commission has also sent it to the member states as a formal recommendation - see [5].

However the Commission has not yet managed to join up (i) + (ii) + (iii) So, for the results of EU research projects, "Access, Dissemination and Preservation" are substandard. I have sketched some of the current rather untidy situation in footnote [4].

It is of course understandable that a large bureaucracy should sometimes fail to join up the various elements under its control.

It is also understandable that bureaucracies should not draw attention to internal problems in their published Papers.

However I trust that you and your colleagues will investigate the matter when you discuss "On Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation".

It should not be too difficult or expensive for the Commission to ensure that the publications that are sent to the Commission, are made available on the websites that the Commission runs, using the information format which the Commission itself recommends.

And through links to the researcher's own IR.

If this is done, then all published documents from the research that is funded in the Seventh Framework Programme will become available over the web. Industry, research workers and citizens will all benefit - and they should be grateful to the Commission and to you.

Yours sincerely
N. Miradon

Footnotes

1. "Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation {SEC(2007)181}" / COM/2007/0056 final /
in English, French and German.

2. "Commission staff working document - Document accompanying the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation {COM(2007) 56 final}" / SEC/2007/0181 final /"

3. "FP7 Grant Agreement - Annex II General Conditions Version 20.12.06 ISC clean 3."

Article II.30 (Dissemination) says - "... Furthermore, an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission at the same time for the purpose set out in Article II.12(2) if this does not infringe any rights of third parties."

And Article II.12. (Information and communication) says - "... 2. The Commission shall be authorised to publish, in whatever form and on or by whatever medium, the following information: ... the details/references and the abstracts of scientific publications relating to foreground and, where provided pursuant to Article II.30, the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication; ..."

Compare the above to the ID/OA Mandate (or "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy"):

"Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication... but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author..."

4. The "Fifth framework programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (1998 - 2002)" was divided into thematic programmes and horizontal programmes (TP and HP).

Programmes TP and HP were divided into sub programmes, and each sub programme was further divided into key actions (KA).

Here are the starter web pages of TP1
TP 1 Quality of life and management of living resources
TP 1, KA 1
TP 1, KA 2: ?
TP 1, KA 3
TP 1, KA 4
TP 1, KA 5
TP 1, KA 6
TP 1, KA 7:

Note that each of these pages has a different design, and that none of them has a search engine.

If you are looking for particular information, you may also need to look through the rest of the structure (web pages not listed here)
1 Thematic programmes
TP 2 User friendly information society
TP 3 Competitive and sustainable growth
TP 4 Energy, environment and sustainable development
2 Horizontal programmes
HP 1 Confirming the international role of community research
HP 2 Promotion of innovation and encouragement of participation of SMEs
HP 3 Improving human research potential and the socio-economic knowledge base

5. CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) was developed with the support of the EC (European Commission) in two major phases: 1987-1990 and 1997-1999. It is an European Union Recommendation to member states.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 00:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, March 19. 2007

What Students Can Do To Support OA

Peter Suber's OA News reports that Emory University student Brian Pitts has blogged a student resolution (modelled on the University of Florida student resolution) in support of the Federal research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Green OA mandate. Below is a letter to Brian and other students suggesting that they can help OA even more by also lobbying in support of a Green OA Mandate at their own university, rather than just waiting for the passage of the FRPAA mandate:
Dear Brian:

Student support for FRPAA is a terrific idea. Could I make a few suggestions?

(1) The FRPAA is basically a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. That means it requires researchers funded by the agencies to make their articles OA by depositing them in their Institutional Repository (IR). (Here are some of the IRs of Georgia and Florida universities.)

(2) Charity (and OA!) begins at home.

(3) 132 university provosts have signed in support of FRPAA (not Emory or U. Fla. yet!)

(4) Universities need not wait for FRPAA to be adopted in order to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own.

(5) Students could be even more effective if they lobbied their own universities not only to (i) support FRPAA but to (ii) mandate Green OA for their own university.

(6) Your case for OA will be the strongest if you cite all the reasons OA is so important: (i) peer to peer access, so researchers can use, apply, and build upon one another's research findings, for the benefit of the tax-payers who funded the research; (ii) student access, so the next generation of researchers and users can be trained on current research findings; (iii) developing world access, so poorer countries can access and build on US research findings; (iv) public access, so tax-payers can access the research findings they have paid for.

("Green OA", by the way, means making research freely accessible by depositing it in an OA repository; "Gold OA" means publishing it in an OA journal. Green OA needs to come before Gold OA, and that is what the FRPAA Green OA mandate is for.)

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 11:50 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, March 18. 2007

Forging An OA Alliance With R&D Industries and Mobilizing University Mandates

Napoleon Miradon has written a very insightful and informative commentary on Richard Poynder's powerful and timely article about the Brussels EU Conference and Petition: "Open Access: The War in Europe". Poynder analyzed the dynamics of the interaction between the Open Access (OA) movement, the European Commission, and the publishing industry lobby. Miradon suggested ways in which the OA movement could lobby legislators more successfully. Here, I suggest how (1) a strategic alliance with the R&D Industry (on behalf of maximising research uptake, usage and applications) as well as (2) direct action by universities (by adopting local Green OA mandates for their own research output) will help further accelerate global OA progress.
Many thanks for M. Miradon's remarkable analysis and valuable advice in his commentary on Richard Poynder's rousing article about the struggle for Open Access to European Research.

(M. Miradon, I do not know who you are, but I infer you are a present or formal EC official with a great deal of experience with EU politics and a certain sympathy for OA. The OA movement is indeed indebted to you for your insights and insider information.)

The "OA movement" is really just a loose federation of mostly academics. It is not skilled or experienced in the area of political lobbying, alas. Some sectors (SPARC US and Europe, perhaps) might be in a position to become more sophisticated in lobbying, but the individual OA activists, being employed academics -- researchers first and activists only second -- are not.

The lobbying wings of industries are paid professionals. We have none of those. There is a hope, though, namely, a strategic alliance (perhaps mediated by EURAB) between the academic-researcher OA activists and the vast R&D industry that applies the fruits of research. The R&D industries are far bigger than the publishing industry. They need to be explicitly mobilized to our side (because they too have a strong interest in open access to research, not for themselves directly [which they can easily afford to pay] but for all researchers worldwide [who cannot]: It is researcher-to-researcher access and collaborative/cumulative research progress that supplies R&D industries with the research findings for their R&D applications.

But let me make a parallel point: OA is (fortunately) not doomed to wait for legislation, and for lobbying and convincing legislators, in order to prevail. Let us not forget for a minute that if researchers themselves had any sense, we would already have 100% OA, for we would simply self-archive spontaneously. We are too sluggish, busy and confused. Fine, so we need mandates from our research funders and institutions (who are merely busy and confused). Part of their confusion is that they cannot mandate (Green) OA because of something or other having to do with the publishing industry. (It is as vague as that!)

So the problem falls into the laps of legislators, who must mandate the researchers' funders and institutions to mandate the researchers to move their fingers. But legislators have not only laps, but bottoms, which they must protect -- from the many lobbying interests to which they are vulnerable.

So lobbying becomes the name of the game, for the legislative route.

But there is a parallel route, and it has already been engaged in the UK (first) and to an extent also in Europe and Australia: This is the research funding councils (RCUK, ERC, ARC), who can take a cue from the inclinations and interests of the research community, and proceed with a Green OA mandate even if the legislators are deadlocked. And they have begun. And so have individual universities and research institutions. See ROARMAP. And in that sector OA activists can be effective (and have been) without having to learn to navigate the corridors of legislative power.

So, in my view, the Brussels meeting was a way to display the will of the research community: the EC petition did that, and now it has given birth to a US petition too. Petitions, of course, will not generate mandates either. But they will help the OA movement "lobby" funders and universities directly, to mandate. Indeed, funders, universities, research institutions, academies and societies, and R&D industries are signing the petitions, officially, as organisations. There remains but a small step to point out that these organisations need not petition the legislators to mandate them to mandate: They can mandate directly themselves!

That is the next step: There was already a logical gap in 2002, between researchers (34,000) signing the PLoS petition to publishers, demanding OA, yet not moving their fingers to deposit their own papers. There is now a second logical gap in research funders and institutions signing the EU and US petitions to legislators to mandate Green OA globally, while they do not go ahead individually and mandate OA locally, for their own funding body or their own university!

The gap between fingers signing petitions, fingers adopting mandates and fingers depositing papers will be bridged now. It has become too glaringly obvious to be ignored, with all these somber OA declarations, initiatives and manifestos, signed, but no practical action taken!

We will keep pursuing the indirect legislative route for global mandates, yes, but we will also publicise and accelerate the direct research-community route of divide and conquer: Local mandates are fully within our own hands, especially at the university level.

See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) (also known as the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

PS The request to present the petition to the commissioner in public at the Brussels meeting was denied, but it was nevertheless presented (in private), the presentation was photographed (by Leslie Chan) and the photos were presented at the last session of the meeting, publicly, in Alma Swan's stirring Powerpoint series.

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 16:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, March 15. 2007

Don't Count Your (Golden) Chickens Before Your (Green) Eggs Are Laid

SUMMARY: Michael Kurtz writes:
   Research is growing. (True, but that is independent of OA.)
   Publication costs are not a large percentage of total research costs. (True, but publication costs are already being paid in full, today, by subscription fees; any new publication charges today hence mean additional funds redirected from research -- or from elsewhere -- to double-pay, unless the existing subscription fees are redirected toward paying the publication charges.)
  OA enhances research progress. (True)
  Author publication charges are not new (in some fields). (True, but new OA publication charges, today, would be new, and additional, unless their payment was redirected from subscription savings.)
   Mandated Green OA could cause subscription collapse. (Possibly, but if it did, that would simultaneously release the subscription savings to be redirected to pay for Gold OA publication charges [probably reduced to just the cost of peer review]; and meanwhile we would already have 100% [Green] OA, either way.)
  In some fields, Central Repositories (CRs) like Arxiv have a larger Green OA percentage of total research output than Institutional Repositories (IRs). (A few fields do provide Green OA, unmandated, today, but most don't; that's why we need mandates; IRs that mandate Green reach 100% OA within about two years; institutions and funders mandate; "fields" do not; institutions wish to record, showcase, and maximize the impact of their own research output; "fields" do not; CRs can harvest from IRs; the locus of deposit for mandates should be researchers' own IRs.)

I would dearly love to adhere to my dictum "Hypotheses non Fingo," but with hypotheses being finged willy-nilly by others -- at the cost of neglecting or even discouraging tried-and-tested practical (and a-theoretical) action (i.e., Green OA mandates) -- I am left with little choice but to resort to counter-hypothesizing:

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Michael Kurtz [MK] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
MK: "(A) THE CURRENT SITUATION. The quantity of scientific research has been increasing exponentially for several generations. This increase, roughly an order of magnitude during my lifetime (~4% per year, essentially the same as the growth in the global economy), has been mediated and enabled by the existing system for scientific communication, namely toll access journals and libraries."
Correct.

And another thing has happened in the past generation or so: The birth of the Net and Web, making it possible to supplement toll-access with author-provided free online access (Green OA).

That development has next to nothing to do with the growth in the number of articles, nor with the price of journals. It has to do with the possibility of supplementing toll access with free online access.
MK: "(B) THE CURRENT COSTS. Direct costs for journals are remarkably small, about 1% of the total research and development budget (1). This compares with other costs involved such as (2) unpaid refereeing and editing 1% and the non-acquisition costs of a library, 2%. Possible changes to the direct cost of journals, up or down, are likely to be smaller than the error in estimating the yearly inflation adjustments."
Correct, but irrelevant to the question of providing free online access for would-be users who cannot afford toll access.

Yes, if the money currently being spent on user-institution access-tolls were instead redirected to pay for author-institution publication charges, no more or less money would be spent, and online access would be free (Gold OA). But that is happening far too slowly, and does not depend only on the researcher community. Supplementing toll access with free online access (Green OA) is entirely in the hands of the research community.

Providing supplementary online access for free can be accelerated to 100% within a year or two through the adoption of research funder and university Green OA self-archiving mandates. That too is in the hands of the research community. Until it is done, research usage and impact continues to be lost, needlessly, daily.
MK: "(C) THE POSSIBLE BENEFIT OF OPEN ACCESS. The purpose of OA is to increase the amount and quality of research. The growth rate of research is currently ~4%; if OA is a massive success, it could perhaps increase this growth rate by 10%, which would be a yearly increment of 0.4% of total research. It may be expected that the greatest effect of OA would be in cross-disciplinary research, such as Nanotechnology."
(The quantitative estimates are still rather speculative. [Here are some more.] But let us agree that providing OA will indeed increase research productivity and progress.)
MK: "(D) THE RISK OF OPEN ACCESS. By substantially changing the economics of journal publishing OA risks the catastrophic financial collapse of some publishers. This is especially true for the mandated 100% green OA path."
If and when mandated 100% Green OA does cause subscriptions to be cancelled to unsustainable levels, the resultant user-institution subscription savings can be redirected to pay instead for author-institution publication charges (Gold OA).

Green OA mandates, by research institutions and funders are possible (indeed actual), and can grow institution by institution and funder by funder.

If Gold OA (with its attendant redirection of subscription funds) can be mandated at all, it certainly cannot be done institution by institution and funder by funder (with 24,000 journals, 10,000 institutions, and hundreds of public funders worldwide). Redirection, if it is to occur at all, has to be driven by Green OA mandates.

Pre-emptive redirection of funds (by an institution or a funder) toward Gold OA, without being preceded by 100% Green OA, is a waste of money, effort and time, today. (After 100% Green OA it is fine, as long as there is no double-paying, through redirection of research money instead of subscription money.)
MK: "(E) CURRENT GREEN MODELS. There are basically two types of Green repository: centralized, such as arXiv, and distributed, as the institutional repositories. Only arXiv has much of a track record. After more than 15 years arXiv only has more than half the refereed articles in the two subfields of High Energy Physics and Astrophysics; only HEP has more than 90%. It does not appear that there is any subfield of science where the existing institutional repositories contain more than half of the refereed literature."
It is completely irrelevant where the free online articles are located. (The IRs and CRs are all OAI-interoperable.) What matters is that 100% of articles should be free online. Spontaneous central archiving has not reached 100% in 15 years (where it is being done at all). The natural and optimal place for institutions to mandate the deposit of their own article output is in their own IRs. That covers all of research output space. Mandated IRs fill within two years. Research funder mandates should reinforce the institutional mandates. If CRs are desired, they can harvest from the IRs.
MK: "(F) CURRENT GOLD MODELS. Page charges have existed for decades as a method of financing journals; while their use has been in decline for some time several venerable titles use them, in whole or in part, and there are several new, page charge funded, OA journals. Direct subsidies, by scholarly organizations and funding agencies, have long been used to support scientific publishing. Nearly all technical reports series are funded in this manner."
Publication charges are currently being fully covered by subscriptions, but access is not open to all would-be users, hence research usage and impact (productivity and progress) are being needlessly lost.

There is no realistic way (nor is there a will) to redirect the subscription money currently being spent by 10,000 user-institutions worldwide for various subsets of 24,000 journals toward instead paying author-institution Gold OA publication charges. Hence the only money that can be redirected to pay for Gold OA today (by institutions or funders) is money that is currently being spent on research or other expenses, thereby effectively double-paying for publication (and at a time when subscription costs are already inflated).

Hence if the goal is 100% OA, the way to reach it is through institutions and funders mandating Green OA.

After that, redirect toward Gold OA to your heart's content. But to do so before that, or instead of that, is pure folly.

P.S. The journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem are not the same problem. Green OA mandates will solve the research accessibility problem for sure. They may or may not cause unsustainable cancellations, but either way they will ease, though not solve, the journal affordability problem (by making the decision about which journal subscriptions to purchase from a limited serials budget into less of a life-or-death question, given that 100% Green OA is there as a safety net for accessing whatever an institutions cannot afford). Green OA, if it causes cancellations, will also cause cost-cutting and downsizing (the IRs can take over the access-provision and archiving load, leaving the journals with peer-review management as their only service), making (post-Green) Gold OA more affordable than it would be today (pre-Green).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 11:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, March 14. 2007

US and EU Both Have Petitions for OA Mandates

The US Alliance for Tax-Payer Access and other sponsors have just launched a US counterpart to the highly successful and still-growing EU Petition calling for Open Access to be mandated by research funders and institutions.
US Petition
EU Petition
The EU Petition already has over 23,000 signatories, including over 1000 organisations (universities, research funders, academies of sciences, scholarly societies, research and development industries, publishers).

If you are officially signing for an organisation, please don't just sign the petition! Do locally what you are petitioning for: Adopt an OA self-archiving mandate at your institution, as the Rector of the University of Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier has just done (see below) and register your mandate in ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies).

Liege's is the latest of 9 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, and 11 research funder mandates already adopted worldwide, plus 5 funder mandates and 1 multi-institution mandate proposed.

Not only has Universite de Liege adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate, but it has adopted the ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate recommended by EURAB and specifically designed to immunise the policy from all the permissions problems (imagined and real) and embargoes that have been delaying adoption of Green OA mandates or have led to the adoption of sub-optimal mandates (that allowed deposit to be delayed or not done at all, depending on publisher policy).
Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)

EURAB's Proposed OA Mandate: Strongest of the 20 Adopted and 5 Proposed So Far
The key to the ID/OA mandate's success and power is that it separates the mandatory component (deposit of the final peer-reviewed draft immediately upon acceptance for publication -- no delays, no exceptions) from the access-setting component. (Immediate setting of access to the deposit as Open Access is strongly recommended, but not mandatory: provisionally setting access as Closed Access is an allowable option where judged necessary.)
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:35:15 -0400
From: Bernard Rentier
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: The University of Liege (Belgium) adopts ID/OA mandate

The University of Liege (ULg), Belgium, has now adopted mandatory institutional deposit of all its publications.

1. Every publication (article in a journal) by a ULg member must now be posted in the Institutional Repository ("La Digitheque"). By publication it is meant the author's version of the article after peer review and acceptance for publication by the editor (either in a print journal or/and in an electronic version, either in a Gold or Green Open access journal or in a non-OA journal).

2. Access to the IR is closed by default, unless opening up is authorised by the publisher. If the access is closed, it remains available to the author(s) only.

3. Metadata of the article are immediately available and they constitute a showcase of the University productivity. The accepted version deposited in the IR can be delivered via the e-mail e-print request button of the IR.

4. As soon as conditions are fulfilled, the author will open access to his accepted version.

The mandate will start as soon as the technical set up will be ready.

B. Rentier
Rector, ULg
It is to be hoped now that the ULg policy will first spread to the other francophone universities of Belgium, then to the rest of Belgium, Europe, and worldwide. University OA self-archiving mandates are an essential complement to the researcher funder OA self-archiving mandates. University mandates cover unfunded as well as funded research, and provide the all-important locus for the deposit (whether mandated by the funder or the university): the researcher's own university's Institutional Repository.
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 02:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, March 13. 2007

Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Leslie Chan wrote:
"I see the Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI-Elsevier deal [in which HHMI pays for for "gold" OA publishing of its funded research] as a major set back for institutional self-archiving as it muddies the green landscape, which I am sure is one of the underlying intents of Elsevier and other publishers in the STM group. I suspect more publishers may follow suit and reverse their stand on green if they think there is money to be made. Something needs to happen quickly. The Trojan Horse has proved to work, unfortunately. What should we do?"
I know exactly what needs to be done, and it has been obvious all along: The mandates have to be taken completely out of the hands of publishers and out of the reach of embargoes, and there is a sure-fire way to do it:

The mandates must be Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandates.

Let the access to the deposit be provisionally set as Closed Access wherever there is the slightest doubt. That way publishers have no say whatsoever in whether or when the deposit itself is done. Then let the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button -- and human nature, and the optimality of OA -- take care of the rest of its own accord, as it will. If only we have the sense to rally behind ID/OA.
Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)
It is as simple as that. But we have to unite behind ID/OA, and give a clear consistent message (and for that we have to first clearly understand ID/OA!)

If we keep flirting with embargoes and Gold and publishing reform and funding instead of univocally rallying behind the ID/OA mandate that will immunise us from publisher policies and further embargoes, we will get nowhere, and indeed we will lose ground.

It is as simple as that.

(P.S. HHMI got into this because of another legacy of folly, not originating with HHMI: The irrational insistence on central deposit in PubMed Central instead of local deposit in each researcher's own Institutional Repository. A Central Repository can -- on a far-fetched construal -- be argued to be a rival 3rd party re-publisher. Not so the author's own institution, archiving its own research.)
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 02:19 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, March 8. 2007

Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor

ACS Press Release: "The American Chemical Society’s Publications Division now offers an important publishing option in support of the Society’s journal authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles. The ACS AuthorChoice option, first launched in October 2006, provides a fee-based mechanism for individual authors or their research funding agencies to sponsor the open availability of their articles on the Web at the time of online publication. Under this policy, the ACS as copyright holder enables unrestricted Web access to a contributing author’s publication from the Society’s website, in exchange for a fixed payment from the sponsoring author. ACS AuthorChoice also enables such authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal websites and institutional repositories for non-commercial scholarly purposes.
      The base fee for the ACS AuthorChoice option is set at $3,000 through 2007, with significant discounts applied for contributing authors who are members of the American Chemical Society and/or who are affiliated with an ACS subscribing institution..."
Dear colleagues,

I urge you to beware of the American Chemical Society's cynical, self-serving "AuthorChoice" Option.

This is an "offer" to "allow" authors to pay, not just in order to provide Gold OA -- which is what hybrid Gold/Green publishers like Springer ("Open Choice") and Cambridge University Press ("Open Option") offer -- but in order to provide Green OA! (Virtually all other hybrid-Gold publishers are Green on author self-archiving, and do not presume to charge for it.)

In other words, ACS is proposing to charge authors for the right to deposit their own papers in their own Institutional Repositories. This ploy was bound to be tried, but I urge you not to fall for it!

You already have an unassailable right to deposit your peer-reviewed, accepted final drafts (postprints) of your ACS articles in your Institutional Repository. If you don't feel you can make them Open Access just yet, make them Closed Access for now, but deposit them, immediately upon acceptance for publication (the preprint even earlier). (The "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) " policy.)

OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and universities, with time-limits on embargoes, are now being proposed and adopted to ensure that your deposits are not left in Closed Access for long. But on no account should you pay ACS a penny for the right to deposit.

If you feel your deposit needs to be placed under a provisional Closed Access Embargo, "almost-OA" is immediately available via the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST Button that is being implemented by more and more Institutional Repositories. Direct individual user-to-author eprint requests and their fulfillment online are Fair Use, as they have always been, even when authors mailed paper reprints to individual requesters.

To pay for Gold OA today out of scarce research funds -- while all publication costs are still being fully paid for by subscriptions -- is already irrational.

But to pay for Green OA would border on the absurd.

Caveat Emptor!

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Adam Chesler (American Chemical Society) wrote (to the American Scientist Open Access Forum):
"Recent posts to the listserv have contributed to a misunderstanding about the ACS AuthorChoice program to provide open article access... The ACS Author Choice option is for authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles. It allows immediate open web access to the final published article as delivered from the ACS web site, in exchange for a fixed fee paid by the author or author's sponsor... ACS AuthorChoice also licenses authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal websites... for scholarly purposes..."
Does ACS endorse the posting of authors' peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional website for scholarly purpose without fee? In other words, is ACS now "Green" on author self-archiving, as the following American Learned Societies are?
American Anthropological Association
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Astronomical Society
American College of Sports Medicine
American Dairy Science Association
American Diabetes Association
American Economic Association
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Institute of Physics
American Library Association
American Mathematical Society
American Meteorological Society
American Physical Society
American Psychological Association
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
American Society for Cell Biology
American Society for Clinical Investigation
American Society for Microbiology
American Society of Hematology
American Society of Limnology and Oceanography
American Vacuum Society
Acoustical Society of America
Ecological Society of America
Optical Society of America
That is the only point at issue. The understanding is that ACS authors are instead asked to pay ACS to do this: Is this the case?

(If I have indeed misunderstood, a profound and sincere apology is in order.)
"ACS permits within the first 12 months of publication up to 50 complimentary article downloads to interested readers who are not already ACS subscribers; at 12 months and thereafter, reader access via these author-directed links is unlimited."
My question is about the 51st to the Nth would-be user request during the first 12 months from the date of acceptance for publication, not just about the first 50. However, the draft in question need not be the official ACS PDF: just the author's final accepted version:

Does ACS endorse the posting of authors' peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites for scholarly purposes without fee?
Reply from Adam Chesler (American Chemical Society), on American Scientist Open Access Forum:

"The answer is: No, such posting is not endorsed or allowed. By the ACS Articles on Request program, authors may post a link that directs the user to the final published article on the ACS web site. Many ACS authors have taken advantage of this free option, to good effect."

Adam Chesler
Assistant Director, Sales and Library Relations
American Chemical Society
1155 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036
Office Telephone: (202) 872-6183
Mobile Telephone: (617) 230-3201
Fax: (202) 872-6005
http://pubs.acs.org
I don't doubt that these free adverstisements serve ACS (and the first 50 would-be users) well during the 12-month embargo.

I would urge all ACS authors to also deposit their postprints in their own Institutional Repositories, provisionally setting access as "Closed Access", if they wish. (This makes only the metadata visible and accessible to all.) During the embargo, this makes "almost-OA" immediately available for all would-be users webwide via the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST Button that is being implemented by more and more Institutional Repositories.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 22:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, March 3. 2007

CETERUM CENSEO...

I like my friend Jan Velterop's good-natured replies (even though, I cannot, of course, agree with most of what he says). I am also more than happy for Jan to invoke my "ceterum censeo" to anticipate my likely response, that being precisely what I myself have been calling it for years!

But let us cut to the quick, because this is all in reality exceedingly simple, once shorn of the ideology, wishful thinking and non-sequiturs:
(1) Jan is for OA; so am I.

(2) 100% OA can be had by (i) converting journals from subscriptions to publication charges, with (ii) author/institutions paying the publication charges, and (iii) the journals providing the OA (Gold OA).

(3) Or 100% OA can be had by (i) leaving journals as they are, (ii) with user/institution subscriptions paying the publication costs, and (iii) the author/institutions providing the OA (Green OA), by self-archiving their published articles.

(4) If and when Green OA ever makes subscriptions unsustainable, then the journals can convert to Gold and institutions can redirect their subscription savings to pay for their author' publication charges.

(5) But Green-driven conversion to Gold requires Green first.

(6) Neither Gold OA nor Green OA is happening spontaneously fast enough, despite their substantial demonstrated benefits to research.

(6) Green OA can be (and is being) accelerated by research funder/employer self-archiving mandates that are already being adopted, proposed and petitioned for.

(7) These Green OA mandates are being delayed by lobbying from some publishers.

(8) One would have expected Green OA mandates to be opposed by (some) non-OA publishers, but supported by all OA advocates, including (all) Gold OA (and hybrid Green/Gold) publishers.

(9) So the anomaly is the failure of (some) Gold OA or hybrid Green/Gold publishers to support the Green OA mandates, in some cases even actively opposing them.
Jan "challenges" me, in return, to say whether as an OA advocate I would support a Gold OA mandate that would forbid fundee institutions to use research funds for subscriptions, allowing them to be used only to pay OA publishing costs.

I can answer quite explicitly: If such a Gold OA mandate were also coupled with a Green OA mandate, and were ensured of wide, quick adoption, whereas a simple Green mandate alone was not, then I would definitely support the Green/Gold mandate.

But that is not the reality at all. The reality is that not even stand-alone Green OA mandates are being adopted sufficiently widely and quickly yet (although there are grounds for optimism), and that the two reasons they are not being adopted widely and quickly enough are (a) publisher opposition and (b) worries about whether, at the current (arbitrary) asking price, Gold OA would be viable and affordable.

I think simple Green OA mandates alone will be able to overcome the opposition and delays, whereas burdening the efforts to get an OA mandate adopted at all with still further handicaps (such as complicated and unnecessary constraints on funding budget overheads, uncertain interactions with library budgets, and uncertainty about the current viability -- or even the necessity -- of Gold OA publishing) would simply increase resistance and delay or derail adoption of any OA mandate at all.

So I support and promote simple Green OA mandates, not Green OA mandates with budgetary constraints pre-emptively redirecting research funds that are currently used for subscriptions toward paying instead for Gold OA publishing charges. I don't think that is necessary or even makes sense now, though it might eventually make sense if and when it is needed, i.e., if and when Green OA is ever exerting significant cancellation pressure on subscriptions.

What we need right now is OA -- and mandating Green OA is the fastest, surest way to generate 100% OA.

Ceterum censeo...

Cato the Elder
Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 19:15 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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