Open Access Archivangelism

Below is a posting, with permission, of an offline exchange with Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice. I have labelled the dramatis personae and indented for chronology. (The title "Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice" is mine, not Jan's.)

Jan argues that paying for Open Choice Gold OA at this time, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing, would not be double-paying for OA.

I argue that it would be.

Jan argues that mandating Green OA -- as ERC, ARC, NHMRC, 5 RCUK research councils, and a growing number of universities have done, and as FRPAA, NIH, EC, CIHR and EURAB propose to do -- will destroy journals and peer review.

I argue that it will provide OA -- and that if it ever does cause subscription cancellation, then that will be the time to convert to Gold OA, paying the institutional Gold OA publishing costs out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings themselves, rather than pre-emptively double-paying, as we would be doing if we did it now, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing.

(I will let Jan have the last word in this posting and will reply separately to a few of his points in my next posting. My surmise is that the careful reader of this exchange will not need my subsequent reply -- though this surmise could be wrong.)

Stevan Harnad

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From: Jan Velterop (VELTEROP)
To: Stevan Harnad (HARNAD)

HARNAD: Jan, may I post this? I've removed the nonsubstantive parts that do not need not be aired in public. Chrs, S

VELTEROP: Stevan, If you include my further comments, you may post. Best, Jan

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On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:

HARNAD: The main substantive points are: (1) Paying for optional OA Gold today is double-paying...

VELTEROP: Answer: Nonsense. Paying for access to content is not the same as paying for having your article published with OA. At no point is the same article paid for twice.

HARNAD: Can we count this up, slowly:

(a) A journal sells subscriptions.

(b) Subscriptions cover publication costs plus profits. Let's say $3000 per article published.

(c) That same journal now begins to offer Open Choice: $1500 to make your article free online, instead of having it accessible only to those with a paid subscription.

In what sense is the publication of that article not being double-paid for?

VELTEROP: That's clear to anyone who understands how journals work: The open access articles are simply not part of the subscription. As if they were published in a 'parallel' journal with the same editor and editorial board. This doesn't only happen to open acces articles, but publishing history is strewn with sponsored supplementary material that, whilst carrying a journal's mark, was made available for free and not part of a subscription.

HARNAD: (Please don't reply that the author is not paying twice. I of course meant the publisher is being paid twice.)

VELTEROP: Of course authors are not paying twice. Authors, and readers for that matter, are rarely paying at all. That's all done vicariously by the institution, mostly the library. And the publisher is not paid twice for the same thing, however much you twist it.

HARNAD: And recall that this is all being rehearsed in the context of the claim that Green self-archiving would destroy journals because it would destroy their subscription base and no longer make it possible to pay the costs of publishing.

To which my reply has always been that subscriptions pay the cost of publishing, and if and when subscriptions are cancelled, hence no longer paying the cost of publishing, then the cancellation savings can be redirected to pay for the cost of publishing. Before that, publishing is being double-paid for.

VELTEROP: I know that your reply has always been thus. That doesn't make it correct. I'm not denying that there may be a cost of transition from subscriptions to gold OA. That's been highlighted many times before, notably by PLoS before they even were publishers themselves. Your method has a cost as well. A much greater one. You favour, by implication, although you refuse to see it that way, the demise of journals, and with that the destruction of a system and infrastructure of peer-reviewed publishing. Of course that can be built up again after the existing journals have gone out of business. But it will take a very long time. The benefits of OA are substantial, but that price, making the transition of one phase to the next via a phase of destruction, is too high in my view. That's why I favour a transition without such drastic drawbacks.

HARNAD: Hence authors should self-archive (Green), not pay for Gold, now (for a hybrid Open Choice journal: if they wish to publish in a pure Gold journal, like BMC or PLoS, they are not double-paying).

VELTEROP: In what way is Open Choice different from 'pure' gold? Have you forgotten that 'open access' was explicitly declared a property of an article, not of a journal or a publisher? (look here if you need to refresh your memory). Why not pay for gold? Why are you making such an issue of that? Are you the guardian angel of university administrators and research funders now, too? How would paying for gold threaten your cherished self-archiving? Did it escape your attention that gold is green plus a lot more? When your campaign for self-archiving was just that, it at least had the benefit of an intellectually honest quest. Now that you are showing a keen interest in making any transition impossible unless via destruction, using financial arguments, you've lost your focus, and, in my view, your credibility. For the avoidance of doubt: I'm not against green. What I think is not a good idea is mandates for self-archiving. If they are successful (and why else would they be proposed), they carry too high a price, as I explained above.

VELTEROP: Consider this analogy: you take a subscription to a newspaper and subsequently you wish to place an ad in it. You'll be asked to pay for the placement of the ad. In your reasoning this would mean that you'd be double-paying. You may be paying more than you did before, but you'd be paying for different things. To call it double-paying is misleading.

HARNAD: I'm afraid I don't see the analogy at all. The crucial difference is that my own article is my ad, and I am saying that that ad's author (me) should be mandated (by his employer/funder) to put a supplementary copy of his own ads online for free, not pay their publishers to do it, while their publishers are still being fully paid by their subscribers. They don't need more money from me, to do what they are doing already, plus what I can do for myself, for free (without "destroying the newspaper").

VELTEROP: As I indicated, analogies are not perfect. In the case of an article (your 'ad'), it gains quite a lot by being published in the journal. What you are doing, is taking that 'gain', without bothering to care how that gain is acquired and paid for (other than throwing the ball into the librarian's court and say: "you paid for it in the past and you shall keep paying for it in the future, and if not, there will be some 'deus ex machina' salvaging any ailing journal"), and attach it to your self-archived copy. You can, at any time, publish your article online. When you need the journal 'label' to give it professional credibility is when you go to a publisher. Not giving him your article, mind you, but asking for a service. Performing that service costs money and subscriptions are a poor way of providing that money. Article processing charges are much better because they remove any need to restrict access in any way.

VELTEROP: Analogies, as always, are not perfect. Unlike the newspaper analogy, and for Academia as a whole, any 'extra' payment is temporary.

HARNAD: It sounds here as if you are conceding, after all, that there is double-payment being received...

VELTEROP: Of course there is a cost of transition, as I said above. But that's a cost of transition, not paying twice for the same thing. The cost of transition your method incurs, destruction of the journal infrastructure, is much greater.

VELTEROP: This is unfortunate, but a consequence of a drawn-out transition in which not all libraries in one go switch from subscriptions to article charges as a way of sustaining peer-reviewed journals.

HARNAD: We are not talking about changing the ways subscribing libraries sustain peer-reviewed journals. We are talking about supplementing subscription access with author-provided free online access, today. If there is indeed one day to be a transition to Gold OA, let that transition be driven by cancellations, and funded by the cancellation savings, not pre-empted now, by double-payment (and at a price that may well be a good deal higher than it will be if the transition is preceded and driven by Green OA).

VELTEROP: Who is 'we' here? I am indeed talking about changing ways of sustaining peer-reviewed journals. Your idea of having any transition funded by cancellation savings is predicated (without realising it, I suspect) on the completely unrealistic premise that all journals are being published by this one 'Ueber-publisher'. Any librarian who thinks he's double paying, can just cancel whatever he feels he can afford to cancel and re-use the funds for OA publishing. Any funder who thinks there is a risk of double payment can stipulate that out of the 58% of overheads typically taken off research grants, OA publishing is paid in the form of article processing charges, instead of non-OA publishing in the form of subscriptions.

VELTEROP: At our initiative, we are in active discussion with a number of library consortia and some major research and funding institutions to find proper ways of avoiding any double payment, if and where it might occur. I'll announce them as soon as the ink is dry.

HARNAD: If institutional libraries are foolish enough to prepay the asking price for Gold now, by redirecting all their subscription budgets, there will not be a single murmur of protest from me if both the publishers support and the libraries' institutions adopt a Green OA mandate.

But if this absurd bargain is made in place of a Green OA mandate, I shall certainly do my level best to make all parties see the folly of their ways.

VELTEROP: What's 'absurd' about working on a sustainable way to make the transition from subscriptions without OA, to OA publishing?

HARNAD: (2) For a Gold (or hybrid Gold) OA publisher to oppose Green OA mandates is, at best, to oppose OA...

VELTEROP: Answer: This is weird reasoning, Stevan, and repeating it doesn't make it any better. We're gold, we're green (and by the way, gold includes green - not the other way around), and we feel that mandates should not be employed in the innately liberal world of science.

HARNAD: If Springer were (as it is) Green (i.e., endorses immediate Green self-archiving) and did not at the same time try to oppose Green OA mandates (as Springer does), then we would be in the scenario I described above, and Springer would not be blame-worthy (for trying to make an extra buck): only the institutions who took Springer up on it without mandating Green OA would be balmy.

VELTEROP: Feel free to keep on calling institutions and funders 'balmy', authors 'stupid' or 'ignorant', publishers 'blame-worthy', et cetera, but don't expect to be taken seriously.

VELTEROP: If a cultural norm emerges, like is the case with having to publish with peer-review, then fine. And if, and only if, a mandate is deemed justifiable, then it should be a mandate for open access, not a mandate for open access by such or such a means.

HARNAD: Researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals. That's a given. Journals recover their peer-review costs from subscriptions. That's a current fact. Alongside that, and (until/unless there are unsustainable cancellations as a result), mandating Green OA self-archiving is a completely independent matter, a matter that is entirely between an author and his institution or funder. Publishers should have no say in it whatsoever. (And, a fortiori, no say in the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate [ID/OA], which doesn't even notionally need the publisher's blessing or endorsement for the deposit.)

VELTEROP: Much of the added value of a journal is concentrated in its 'trademark' attached to the article. This trademark, and therefore its added value, is easily pilfered. This is a problem for publishers, of course. And a lot of thinking goes into how to deal with that. If you were to argue for a self-archiving mandate for articles without indicating where and when they were published, in other words without appropriating the 'gain' while not taking responsibility for supporting the way this gain is generated, then that would be fine.

PS. Where not explicitly stated that I do speak for Springer, I speak for myself.

Jan Velterop

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VELTEROP: I didn't argue for mandating direct deposit in a CR

HARNAD: (Sorry: When you singled out IRs as one of my "orthodoxies" I thought you were defending direct deposit in CRs (as BMC does). I withdraw those points.)

VELTEROP: You should feel free to post this

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

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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.

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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.

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SUMMARY: Cornell University's Institutional Repository (IR) so far houses only a very small percentage of its own annual research output, even though this output is the target content for Open Access (OA) IRs. As such, Cornell's IR is no different from all other IRs worldwide except those that have already adopted a "Green OA" deposit mandate. Alma Swan's international, multidisciplinary surveys have found that most researchers report they will not deposit without a mandate but will comply willingly if deposit is mandated by their institutions and/or their funders. Arthur Sale's comparative analyses of mandated and unmandated IRs have confirmed this in actual practise. Cornell's IR too has confirmed this with high deposit rates for the few subcollections that are mandated. IRs with Green OA mandates approach 100% OA within about 2 years. The worldwide baseline for unmandated self-archiving is about 15%.
    Davis & Connolly's 2007 D-Lib article takes no cognizance of this prior published information. It surveys a sample of Cornell researchers for their attitudes to self-archiving and finds the usual series of uninformed misunderstandings, already long-catalogued and answered in published FAQs. The article then draws some incorrect conclusions derived entirely from incorrect assumptions it first makes, among them the following:

    (1) The purpose of Green OA self-archiving is to compete with journals? (No, the purpose is to supplement subscription access by depositing the author's final draft online, free for all users who cannot access the subscription-based version.)
    (2) IRs should instead store the "grey literature"? (No, OA's target content is peer-reviewed research.)
    (3) IRs are for preservation? (No, they are for research access-provision.)
    (4) Some disciplines may not benefit from Green OA self-archiving? (The only disciplines that would not benefit would be those that do not benefit from maximizing the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed journal article output.)

    The only thing Cornell needs to do if it wants its IR filled with Cornell's own research output is to mandate it.

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Critique of:

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. Davis, P.M. & Connolly, M.J.L. D-Lib Magazine 13(3/4) March/April 2007

D & C: "Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the development and implementation of Institutional Repositories [IRs], there has been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards [sic] to faculty participation."

On the contrary; little has been done to develop IRs apart from creating them; moreover, many surveys and analyses have evaluated faculty non-participation and identified how and why to remedy it: By mandating deposit. (See Sale and Swan references at the end of this posting.)

D & C: "Results: Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty."

This is most decidedly true! The reason is that Cornell researchers are being given equivocal advice instead of an unequivocal mandate. (See: Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver)

(I note that, unlike Harvard, Cornell is not one of the 132 Universities that have signed in support of the US Federal Green OA Mandate, the FRPAA; this may be a sign of equivocation, but in Cornell's defense, none of the 132 have yet practised what they petitioned (by adopting locally the global mandate they are urging federally). European, Australian and Asian Universities have been faster off the mark.

D & C: "[The only] steady growth [is in] collections in which [Cornell] university has made an administrative investment, such [as] requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace."

This passage states the problem (empty IRs) as well as the solution (mandating deposit) -- but the article itself then proceeds to ignore this obvious and already known outcome, and instead goes on and on about the many groundless (and easily answered) reasons faculty cite for not depositing unless it is mandated.

The D & C article also wrongly imagines that the primary purpose of IRs is to preserve digital content, rather than to maximise research usage and access by supplementing paid journal access with free access to the author's final draft: (See: Against Conflating OA Self-Archiving With Preservation-Archiving )

D & C: "Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace."

Correct. And in that respect Cornell faculty are exactly like faculty at all other universities worldwide that have IRs but no deposit mandate:

    Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.

D & C: "Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories"

If all or most faculty were indeed spontaneously despositing their peer-reviewed articles on their personal Web pages or in central disciplinary repositories (CRs) (like Arxiv), there would be no problem: 100% Open Access (OA) would already be upon us, for IRs could easily fill themselves by simply harvesting their faculty's output from their web-pages and CRs.

The trouble is that -- except where mandated -- most faculty are not depositing their articles on their Web pages today, and only a few sub-disciplines are depositing in CRs. Hence OA is only at about 15% today.

D & C: "[CRs] are perceived to have higher community salience than one's affiliate institution."

Right now, the only two CRs with any appreciable content -- Arxiv and PubMed Central -- certainly do have "higher community salience" than IRs, since most IRs are mostly empty. But institutions need merely mandate depositing and the "salience" of their IRs will sail, along with the size of their contents.

(Moreover, the true success rate of a repository -- whether IR or CR -- is the percentage of its total annual target content that it is currently capturing. By that proportionate measure, central disciplinary CRs are in fact doing just as badly as unmandated IRs and the real champions are (unsurprisingly) the harvesters like Citeseer, OAIster and Google Scholar that trawl their contents from the distributed IRs and CRs.)

All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Researchers' institutions cover all of research output space. Hence researchers' own IRs are the natural and optimal locus for direct deposit. Institutions also have a proprietary interest in showcasing, monitoring, evaluating and storing their own research output -- as well as in maximizing its research impact. Hence both funders and institutions should mandate direct deposit in the researcher's own IR. (CRs can then harvest therefrom, if they wish.) (See: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?)

D & C: "Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information"

There is no "redundancy" with OA's target content: peer-reviewed journal articles. Those users who can afford paid access, have paid access. Those who do not, have no access. The purpose of OA self-archiving in IRs is to supplement the existing paid access, providing free access to the author's final draft, self-archived online, for those would-be users who do not have paid access to the journal's proprietary version.

(The authors of this article, D & C, as we shall see, draw precisely the conclusions from their article that they have themselves put into it, in the form of assumptions, often incorrect ones. Apart from that, all the do is amplify the volume of the faculty misunderstandings they sample, instead of correcting them.)

The purpose of maximizing research access is to maximise research impact (download, usage, applications, citations, productivity, progress).

D & C: "the learning curve [for depositing articles online]"

A non-problem, cured by a few moments of instruction, plus a mandate:

    Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving)

D & C: "confusion with copyright"

A non-problem, already completely mooted by the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate: (See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA))

Only the depositing itself is mandated; setting access to the deposit as Open Access versus Closed Access is recommended but optional.

D & C: "fear of plagiarism"

An old canard, cured by referring to Self-Archiving FAQ.

D & C: "having one's work scooped"

Another old canard.

D & C: "associating one's work with inconsistent quality"

Yet another old canard.

D & C: "concerns about whether posting a manuscript constitutes 'publishing'."

One of the oldest canards of them all.

D & C: "Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue."

Librarians' journal affordability problems helped draw attention to the research accessibility problem, but the affordability and accessibility problems are not the same, nor are their solutions.

Cornell faculty are right to regard the affordability problem as not their problem. The accessibility problem, however, is their problem, both from the point of view of Cornell researchers' own lost access to the work of researchers at other institutions (in journals that even Cornell cannot afford to subscribe to) and -- even more important (as most researchers at other institutions are not sitting as pretty as Cornell for subscriptions) -- from the point of view of Cornell researchers' lost research impact (owing to the access problems of would-be users at other institutions).

D & C: "Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity."

The target content of OA IRs is peer-reviewed journal articles. If there are any disciplines that do not care about maximising the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed journal article output, then there are indeed reasons to examine discipline differences. If not, then what is needed is not discipline-difference studies but pandisciplinary deposit mandates.

D & C: "most faculty host their digital objects on a personal website, where their long-term preservation is not secure. If institutions truly value the content created by their faculty, they must take some responsibility for the long-term curation of this content."

OA IRs are for supplementary access-provision and usage-maximisation, not for preservation. (What needs preservation is the journal published version, not the author's OA draft.) (See: Against Conflating OA Self-Archiving With Preservation-Archiving)

But of course IRs can and will preserve their contents, to make sure their supplementary access provision perdures.

D & C: "There are two opposing philosophical camps among those who work to justify institutional repositories: one that views IRs as competition for traditional publishing, the other that sees IRs as a supplement to traditional publishing."

There are indeed two opposing views of what IRs are for, but the opposition is certainly not about whether IRs compete with or supplement traditional publishing. It is about whether IRs are primarily for OA content (i.e., peer-reviewed research) or for other kinds of content (e.g., "grey literature"). (There is also some related confusion about whether IRs are primarily for supplementing access or for digital preservation.)

Among OA advocates there is no divergence whatsoever on the fact that OA IRs (Green OA) supplement journal publishing; they are not a substitute for it, nor a competitor to it.

(There is competition between subscription-based publishing and Gold OA publishing, but that is an entirely different matter, having nothing to do with IRs or Green OA.)

Here is a core example of how the authors of this article first make incorrect assumptions, and then simply proceed to derive their inevitably incorrect consequences:

D & C: "In 1994, Stevan Harnad wrote his Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, in which he argued that all academics should make their research articles publicly available through open repositories. This collective effort would help to reduce the power wielded by publishers who have built economic barriers to limit scholars' access to the literature."

(1) From the very outset, the Subversive Proposal was to supplement traditional publishing with (what we have since come to call) Green OA self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft. Self-archiving was never proposed as a substitute for peer-reviewed journal publication -- as a google search on "harnad supplement substitute" will repeatedly confirm!

Latent in the Subversive Proposal -- a Green OA supplement proposal -- was, of course, the possibility of an eventual transition to Gold OA publishing. But that is and always was treated as a hypothetical possibility, whereas Green OA self-archiving (which eventually led to the first OA IR software, EPrints, and eventually to the OA IR movement) was proposed as a concrete, practical action, within reach of all researchers -- a practical action that has since been widely tried, tested, and confirmed empirically to work, and to deliver the enhanced research usage and impact for which it was intended.

(2) Davis & Connolly have also completely conflated the explicitly stated purpose of the Subversive Proposal -- which was to maximize research access and usage -- with the library community's struggle with the journal affordability problem. Green OA self-archiving is not about "reducing publisher power" nor about changing economics. It is just about maximizing research access.

D & C: "In opposition, Clifford Lynch views IRs as supplements, not primary venues for scholarly publishing, and warns against assuming the role of certification in the scholarly publishing process."

All OA IR advocates view IRs as supplements: a way to provide free access to the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication by the "primary venue" (the journal) -- not as a substitute form of peer review or certification or publication.

D & C: "[Lynch] argues that "the institutional repository isn't a journal, or a collection of journals, and should not be managed like one""

Preaching to the choir: No one thinks IRs are journals.

D & C: "Lynch fears that viewing IRs as instruments for undermining the economics of the current publishing system discounts their importance and reduces their ability to promote a broader spectrum of scholarly communication."

IRs are not "instruments for undermining the economics of the current publishing system" they are instruments for maximizing the access and impact of currently published research articles.

D & C: "Institutional repositories may better serve to disseminate the so-called "grey literature": documents such as pamphlets, bulletins, visual conference presentations, and other materials that are typically ignored by traditional publishers."

The idea that IRs should focus on the grey (unpublished) literature instead of the OA Green literature remains just as off-the-mark and wrong-headed today as on the day it was first mooted: (See: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives)

D & C: "DSpace was not conceived as competition to commercial publishers, but as a resource to capture, preserve and communicate the diversity of intellectual output of an institution's faculty and researchers It was designed specifically to deal with a wide range of content types including research articles, grey literature, theses, cultural materials, scientific datasets, institutional records, and educational materials, among others."

More's the pity that DSpace does not now, nor did it ever, have its priorities straight. The #1 priority for IRs is and always has been (or ought to have been!) OA. (See: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?)

D & C: "On May 1st, 2005, a policy was enacted that recommended, not required, that all researchers receiving grant monies from the National Institutes of Heath deposit final copies of their manuscripts in PubMed Central (PMC), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PMC offers many valuable services to authors, such as indexing in Medline (the primary literature index for the biomedical and life sciences), as well as dynamic links to the published version of their article. After eight months, the participation rate remained a dismal 3.8%. Lack of awareness of the policy was not cited as contributing to the low compliance rate. On December 14th, 2005, Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced the CURES Act (S.2104), which would require (not recommend) mandatory deposit of final manuscripts"

The NIH Public Access Policy failed for three reasons (in order of priority):

(1) because it was not a mandate, but merely a request,

(2) because it allowed deposit to be delayed (up to a year) rather than immediate,

(3) and because it insisted upon central deposit, in PMC, instead of local deposit (in the fundee's own IR, harvestable by PMC).

The remedy for this was pointed out in advance to NIH (but went unheeded): "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy")

The remedy -- the ID/OA mandate -- has since been taken on board in the European Research Advisory Board's policy recommendation.

ID/OA has just been adopted by University of Liege -- the first, let's hope, of many adopters, including the US's omnibus Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). (See: How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate)

D & C: "Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Its complex organization is seen at comparable institutions, but may discourage contributions to DSpace by making it appear empty. In addition, faculty have little knowledge of and no motivation to use DSpace."

The only thing Cornell's DSpace is missing is the ID/OA mandate. That mandate needs to replace or at least complement Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver.

D & C: "Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and inertia. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, IRs will need to address this cultural diversity."

No, the remedy is not to delve into disciplinary diversity. It is to promote what all disciplines (indeed all of research) have in common, which is the need to maximize the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed research findings -- by mandating Green OA.

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Open Access self-archiving. An author study. Published by JISC.

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).

Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February

Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).

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 Publishing (Oxford) Limited. .

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Jan Velterop recommends, without any supporting argument, that at a time when publication costs are still being fully covered by subscriptions, research funders and institutions should not mandate Green OA self-archiving, because that would (according to Jan) be merely a "cheap palliative," not a "full cure".
    A full cure would be to double-pay for Gold OA (double, because publication costs are still being covered by subscriptions) until publishers voluntarily pass on their excess revenues by gradually discounting and eventually phasing out subscriptions.
    Our disease, it appears, is not our lack of OA (for mandating Green OA would provide 100% OA); our disease is our paying for publication in the wrong way (via subscriptions rather than publication charges). And the reason the "cheap palliative" of mandating Green OA is a bad idea (according to Jan) is that it might cause subscriptions to be cancelled.
    What Jan does not explain is why not-paying for publication in the right way is our disease, rather than not-having research access -- for it is access to research that the OA movement is all about, and 100% research access -- not something else -- that OA is meant to provide.
    Nor does Jan explain why 100% Green OA is not a cure for this lack of research access: Either the 100% OA generated by the Green OA mandates will eventually cause subscriptions to be cancelled so they no longer cover publication costs or it will not. If it does not, then Green OA mandates will merely have generated 100% OA. If it does, then Green OA mandates will also have generated a transition to Gold OA, along with releasing the money (the windfall subscription savings) out of which to pay the Gold OA publication charges without having to find the extra money to double-pay (for publication charges on top of subscriptions). It is not at all clear why Jan regards this as "cheap palliative care" rather than a "full cure," either way.
    If, that is, Jan is really for OA, rather than something else.

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On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice, wrote in liblicense:

JV: "The Howard Hughes (HHMI-Elsevier) deal is not a setback for open access, even if it is not the greatest imaginable step forwards perhaps."

It is not a setback for the minuscule number of articles for which HHMI will finance paid (Gold) OA. It is a setback for all the other articles that could be made (Green) OA through mandated author self-archiving, for free, while subscriptions are still continuing to pay the publication costs.

It is not only a waste of money, but it plays into the hands of those who are trying to delay or derail Green self-archiving mandates at all costs.

JV: "To knock the HHMI for getting into this deal is short-sighted."

It is HHMI that is being short-sighted (and gullible). HHMI ought instead simply to mandate Green OA self-archiving, and to leave it at that.

JV: "And subject lines like 'Trojan Horse' with their insidious negativity raise the suspicion that the agenda of some list participants is not really 'open access', but a desire to get rid of publishers or of the notion that publishing, including open access publishing, actually costs money."

Nonsense. Open Choice is a Trojan Horse if it is taken as a pretext for paying for Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA. No one is trying to get rid of publishers. We are trying to get rid of access-barriers. Green OA does just that. And while subscriptions are still being (amply) paid for, no one is unaware of the fact that publishing costs money. What is urgently needed today is not money to pay for Gold OA, but mandates to provide Green OA.

JV: "It's a delusion that one can get open access by self-archiving mandates that imply having to rely on librarians to keep paying for subscriptions to keep journals alive."

Institutions are paying for subscriptions today. That is no delusion.

There is little OA today. That is no delusion.

Green self-archiving mandates will generate 100% OA. That is no delusion.

What happens to subscriptions after that is speculation, not delusion.

JV: "Or is the idea that librarians keep paying for journals of which the articles are available with open access part of the proposed mandates?"

Institutions are paying for librarians today. That is not proposed; that is already going on.

What is not already going on is OA self-archiving.

That is what the Green mandates are for.

Whether and when institutions will cancel subscriptions because of mandated Green OA is a purely speculative matter, today. What is not speculative is that if and when institutions ever do cancel subscriptions, that money will then be freed to pay for Gold OA costs; not before. Nor is it speculation that Green OA will already have provided 100% OA by then.

JV: "Authors can self-publish easily these days and provide open access to their articles to their hearts' content."

Why is Jan telling us this? OA is not -- and never has been -- about self-publishing; nor is it about unpublished articles. It is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed, published articles.

JV: "Once they involve a publisher, though, they don't do that out of altruistic motives."

No. Nor does the publisher. But publishers are being paid in full, today, by subscriptions, whereas Open Access is not being provided, today. And consequently research impact is needlessly being lost today.

It would not just be altruism but profligacy to double-pay for Gold OA today. And it would be (and is) not altruistic but foolhardy in the extreme to continue doing without OA, and with the attendant daily loss in research impact and progress, for failure to mandate Green OA.

(Foolhardy for the research community, and the public that funds it, I mean: Not necessarily foolhardy for the publishing community!)

JV: "They don't 'give' their articles to publishers. They come to ask for a 'label', a 'mark', an official journal reference that makes their article from a piece of text, perhaps interesting, but not recognised by the academic community, into a formally peer-reviewed and published article. It's not the publishers that compel them to do that."

I don't know why we are being regaled with all this rhetorical complexity: Researchers submit their papers to journals for two reasons:

(1) to get them peer-reviewed and

(2) to provide access to them.

That is what subscriptions are already paying for. OA is for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the subscription version.

It is not authors who seek or get the revenues from subscriptions, it is publishers. No altruism on either side. And the only thing missing, in the online age, is OA. And Green OA mandates will provide that.

JV: "And publishers cannot provide those services, on the scale they are needed, on a philanthropic basis."

No one is asking them to: Subscriptions are paying, amply. OA is about those users who cannot afford access to the subscription version.

JV: "This may be possible for a number of small journals, and where it is possible it deserves to be done that way and probably is already."

Jan (and the publishing community) keep talking about journals and journal cost-recovery models. Fine.

The research community is talking about OA, and impact-loss-recovery methods.

The only tried, tested, successful method of impact-loss-recovery within immediate reach is mandating OA self-archiving. That has nothing to do with journal cost-recovery models. Jan is talking at cross-purposes with OA, with his fixation on payment models (when there is no non-payment problem today, whereas there is a no-access problem today).

In thus talking at cross-purposes, Jan (and those of the same persuasion) are standing in the way of a tried, tested, successful, and immediately reachable means of solving the access problem. They are instead promoting a Trojan Horse.

JV: "But the worldwide scientific enterprise needs sustainable large-scale industrial-strength publishing to deal with the publication of more than a million new articles a year (and in terms of submissions a multiple of that, given that most papers are rejected at least once)."

Can we transfer the problem of the "sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" to another venue than discussions of OA?

OA is an immediate, pressing, and immediately solvable problem for research and researchers. Its solution is for research institutions and funders to mandate Green OA, as a few have already begun doing, others have proposed to do, and researchers and institutions have petitioned them to do.

The quest for a solution to the "the problem of the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" can proceed in parallel with the quest for OA, but it should not be conflated with it, or get in the way of it.

To oppose Green OA mandates and urge "Open Choice" in their stead is precisely the Trojan Horse against which I am warning.

JV: "The HHMI deal is a very positive step towards sustainable open access and should be recognised for that. The 'cure' of OA publishing is to be preferred to the 'palliative' of self-archiving. The derision that funding agencies suffer who put open access first, and not cost reduction, is uncalled-for."

Who on earth is talking about cost-reduction?

The disease is needless, ongoing, online research access/impact loss. The cure is OA. Green OA is OA. It might be merely a "palliative" for "the problem of the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" but it is a cure for the disease of research access/impact loss.

What deserves exposure and derision is the attempt to deter and devalue and deride a sure and reachable immediate cure for the disease of research/impact loss in the name of some other uncured "disease" that has next to nothing to do with the research community's immediate, pressing, and solvable access/impact needs today.

JV: "If a full, safe cure for a disease is possible, though not necessarily cheaper than lifelong symptom-management and the real possibility of a much shorter life, is it better to go for cheap palliative care than for this full cure?"

As usual, we are talking about two different "diseases." One -- "the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" -- is a long-term, hypothetical money-matter with which the publishing community is concerned; the other -- research access/impact loss -- is an immediate, urgent, ongoing practical research-matter with which the research community is concerned -- and it has an immediate, practical solution: Mandated Green OA.

To deter, defer or derail the research community's solution to the research community's problem, by portraying the publishing community's industrial long-term sustainability problem as if it were the same problem as the research community's immediate access/impact problem is simply false and misleading.

To oppose the research community's immediately reachable solution to its access/impact problem (mandated Green OA) in favour of paying for Gold OA today is nothing more nor less than what I have called it: The promotion of a Trojan Horse.

Caveat Emptor.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum