Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: This is a reply to Matt Hodgkinson's posting in his journalology blog:
(1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates, by making publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot. It is not a substitute for OA but an accelerator toward OA.
(2) There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) . The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited.
(3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep perseverating with Gold OA and costs while usage and impact continue to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can already put an immediate end to that loss, once and for all, right now.
(4) CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields.
(5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs.
(6) I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), especially mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs.
(7) I have no wish to vye for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art.
(8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it.

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Bill Hooker has already corrected the two main misunderstandings in Matt Hodgkinson's posting:

(1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks that have been delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates for several years now, by making the issue of publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot if they are holding up the adoption of a full Green OA mandate. Green OA is still Green OA (immediate, direct, full access) but an ID/OA compromise mandate now is infinitely preferable to no self-archiving mandate at all. And together with the "Fair-Use" Button, ID/OA provides almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period. (And, yes, I do add the speculation that ID/OA, once universally adopted, will very soon lead to the welcome death of embargoes, and hence to 100% Green OA; but nothing hangs on this speculation: It is an ID/OA mandate that should be adopted if there is deadlock or delay in agreeing on the adoption of a Green OA mandate.)

(2) All articles deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) will be harvested and indexed by OAIster, Google Scholar, and many other harvesters and search engines. There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited. The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited (i.e., 85% of the annual peer-reviewed journal literature) and the solution is to mandate Green OA -- or, failing that, to mandate ID/OA. Hence 100% Green OA will indeed have delivered OA's goal, irrespective of whether and when it goes on to lead to Gold OA.

A few other points:

(3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep fussing about Gold OA and costs while daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact continues to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can put an end to it. My objection to Gold fever is a matter of immediate priorities. It is not only putting the Golden cart before the Green horse (or counting the Golden chickens before the Green eggs are laid), but it is leaving us year in and year out at a near-standstill, whereas self-archiving mandates have been demonstrated to fast-forward universities toward 100% OA for their output within two years. (See Arthur Sale's splendid studies.)

(4) I criticise the CERN Gold OA initiative for much the same reason: CERN could have done so much more. CERN has a successful Green OA mandate (not even the ID/OA compromise) and CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields. (Saving subscription costs is utterly irrelevant once you have 100% Green OA: Journal subscriptions then become optional luxury items instead of basic necessities, as now.)

(5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal like Springer's Open Choice is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs, and hence doubly foolish. (Rationalizing that it can be corrected by "adjustments" in the subscription price is not only credulous in the extreme, but it blithely countenances locking in current asking-prices in a way that makes the "Big Deal" look like chump change.) Paying for Gold OA in a pure-Gold journal (like the BMC and PLoS journals) -- when one can simply publish in any journal and self-archive to provide OA -- is merely foolish (except for those with a lot of spare change). (At this time: not if and when 100% Green OA causes unsustainable institutional subscription cancellations, thereby releasing the funds to pay for institutional Gold OA publishing costs. (But -- speculation again -- it is likely that journals will have to cut costs and downsize in converting to Gold OA, so the asking price for Gold OA will not be what it is now.)

(6) I do not criticise depositing in Central Repositories (CRs) per se (though I do think it is foolish): I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), and I especially criticise mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs. Institutions are the primary research providers. IRs tile all of OA output space. Institutions and their researchers have a shared interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own research output. Institutions can mandate, monitor (and even monetarize) self-archiving in their own IRs (and funders can reinforce those mandates); CRs cannot. And CRs can harvest from IRs if they wish. Mandating self-archiving in researchers' own IRs is the systematic and scaleable -- hence optimal -- solution for generating 100% OA, not a panoply of arbitrary CRs criss-crossing research space.

(7) I have no interest in vying for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art. I don't doubt that the descriptor "open access" can be googled before the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative decided (quite consciously, after surveying several alternatives) to adopt OA for the movement to which it subsequently gave rise. Before the BOAI, there was no OA movement, just a lot of notions in the air, among them: free online access, self-archiving, and journals funded by means other than the subscription model.

(8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it, at the current rate. Green OA, in contrast, can be accelerated to reach 100% within two years, if we just go ahead and mandate it, instead of continuing to fuss about Gold OA!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The interest and commitment of some of the supporters of Open Access (OA) is derived from and motivated by the importance of making health-related research accessible to those who need it: patients, family, researchers.

This is certainly an important component of OA, and perhaps the aspect that most directly touches our lives. But if OA is seen or portrayed as being mainly a health-related matter, it not only leaves out the vast majority of OA's target content-- which is all research in all research areas, from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences and the humanities -- but it even under-serves OA's potential benefits to health research itself.

Even the "tax-payer access" aspect of OA, though important, is not quite representative, because the primary benefit of OA to the tax-payer who pays for the research is not that it makes the research freely accessible to the tax-payer (although it does indeed do that too!), but that it makes the research freely accessible to the researchers for whom it was mostly written, but many of whom cannot afford access to it -- so that they can use, apply and build upon that research, in their own research -- to the benefit of the tax-payers who funded it and for whose sake the research is conducted. Again, a focus on the need for direct public access to health-related research leaves out the vast majority of research that is not health-related and that the public has no particular interest in reading -- but a great interest in making accessible to those who can use and build on it so as to increase research progress, which may in its turn eventually lead to applications that benefit the public.

Paradoxically, it is in recognizing and supporting OA's much more general research enhancing mission that we can also best support its health-related potential.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum