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

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SUMMARY: Some university libraries and administrations think OA is all about journal affordability, digital preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI). Some OA publishers think OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.). Some copyright reformers think OA is all about reforming copyright law. And some traditional publishers lobby against Green OA mandates (and sometimes also against Gold OA) as a threat to their industry.
      There exists no recognized theme associated with Green OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group that is invited to represent Green OA at OA events. Richard Poynder, Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted the idea of a Green OA lobby. Creating such a lobby would be an excellent and timely idea and an appropriate reflection of the European and American petitions demonstrating the growing worldwide support for mandating Green OA..

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Four basic kinds of OA-related events keep being arranged periodically by various official organisations (librarians, universities, publishers, funders, government committees):

(1) Librarians and universities who think OA is all about journal affordability, preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI);

(2) OA Publishers for whom OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.);

(3) Copyright reformers who think OA is all about reforming copyright law.

(X) Anti-OA publishers whose interest is in lobbying against Green OA mandates (and sometimes also Gold OA) as a threat to their industry.

There is no recognized topic of (Green) OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group recognized or invited to any of these OA events.

So only two recourses are left to Green OA advocates: One is to do as we are doing, which is to keep on raising our voices on behalf of Green OA in writings and petitions and at the meetings we happen to be invited to.

The other possibility is the one Richard Poynder and Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted, which is a Green OA lobby.

Creating such an official Green OA lobby would be very timely and important (but it would have to be carefully protected against dilution by well-meaning but blinkered proponents of (1), (2) and (3), which would defeat both its focus and its purpose).

One good thing, though: The fact (sub specie aeternitatis) is that (1) - (X), are, respectively, (1) irrelevant, (2) premature, (3) premature, and (X) obsolete, and it is indeed Green OA and Green OA mandates that will win the day and usher in 100% OA, sooner or later.

Let us work to make it sooner, rather than later.

Open Access (OA) means free online access to the articles in the c. 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals published annually across all disciplines, countries and languages.

The purpose of OA is to maximise research usage and impact, and thereby maximise research productivity and progress, by making all research findings accessible to all their potential users webwide, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published.

There are two roads to 100% OA:

(1) The "Golden" Road to OA is to convert all journals from recovering their publishing costs, as they do now, out of user-institution subscription charges, per journal, to recovering their publishing costs instead out of author-institution publication charges, per article. (Gold OA is also called "BOAI-2" -- the second of the two roads to OA proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which first adopted the term "Open Access" in 2002 for the new movement it launched.)

(2) The "Green" Road to OA is to continue publishing in the existing subscription-based journals -- but with all authors making their own individual articles OA by self-archiving a supplementary copy of their peer-reviewed, final draft (the "postprint") in their own institution's OA Institutional Repository (IR). (Green OA is also called "BOAI-1" -- the first of the two roads to OA proposed by the BOAI)

Gold OA and Green OA are clearly complementary, but there is considerable disagreement over which one should be given priority. The current level of OA worldwide is about 25%, of which about 10% is Gold and 15% is Green. This is because about 10% of journals are Gold (though mostly not the top journals), and because only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously.

So what is needed is either to increase the proportion of Gold OA journals (and their uptake) to 100%, or to increase the promotion of Green OA self-archiving by authors to 100% (or both).

The critical difference in the probability of increasing OA to 100% via Gold versus Green is that Gold OA depends on two further factors: (i) converting journals to Gold and (ii) finding the money to pay authors' Gold OA publication fees (particularly while most journals are subscription-based, and hence most potential publication funds are still tied up in subscriptions).

Publishers are reluctant to convert to Gold, and authors are reluctant to pay for Gold OA charges at this time.

The situation with Green OA is very different, because it does not depend on converting publishers, and it is virtually cost-free. Most institutions already have Institutional Repositories (IRs). The only problem is that they are largely empty because, as noted, only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously -- even though a series of recent studies have demonstrated OA's dramatic benefits for all fields of scientific and scholarly research (doubled usage and citations).

There are, however, the two fundamental advantages of Green OA over Gold OA that were just noted: Gold OA requires (i) converting publishers to Gold OA publishing and it also requires (ii) finding the funds for authors to pay for it. Green OA merely requires authors' own institutions and funders to mandate that they self-archive their own postprints. And Green OA mandates have been repeatedly demonstrated to work.

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.

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

Moreover, if and when mandated 100% OA from Green self-archiving should ever go on to cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, thereby forcing journals to convert to Gold OA publishing, the cancellations themselves will release the institutional subscription funds that can then be used to pay for institutional authors' Gold OA publication charges.

So the pragmatics of the status quo and the goal would seem to indicate that mandating Green OA (by research funders and institutions) should be given priority, rather than focussing on trying to (i) convert journals to Gold OA and trying to (ii) find the funds to pay for it. Journal publishing is in the hands of publishers, but Green OA self-archiving is in the hands of authors and their institutions and funders.

Green OA self-archiving mandates are beginning to be adopted by funders and institutions, but not nearly quickly enough, even though they could easily be extended to 100% adoption worldwide. There are two reasons for the delay: (1) lobbying against Green OA mandates by the publishing industry and (2) distraction from mandating Green OA arising from the parallel efforts to promote Gold OA.

The pragmatics are clear, however: The research community (researchers, their employers and their funders) have no leverage over the publishing industry and its policies, only over their own employees, fundees and policies. OA is overwhelmingly in the best interests of the research community (as well as students, the vast R&D industry, the developing world, and the tax-paying public worldwide), and the research community itself is in a position to mandate 100% OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving. One cannot mandate Gold OA.

The only leverage that publishers have against Green OA mandates is (1) copyright, which they can try to invoke in order to embargo the provision of OA by their authors and (2) their claim that 100% Green OA would make subscriptions unsustainable.

As we have seen, (2) is not a valid deterrent to the research community, because if subscriptions did become unsustainable, this would merely mean a conversion to Gold OA publishing, which would be welcome.

As to (1) -- the use of copyright and embargoes by publishers to try to prevent Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates -- there is a very simple compromise that provides 100% almost-OA immediately (a vast immediate benefit to research usage, impact, productivity and progress) and that will also usher in 100% Green OA very soon thereafter: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate plus the "Fair Use" Button in Institutional Repositories.

Instead of trying to mandate both immediate deposit and immediate OA, funders and universities need merely mandate immediate deposit (of the postprint, immediately upon acceptance for publication). Sixty-two percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving, so access to at least 62% of these deposits can immediately be set to OA. For the remaining 38% of journals that have access embargoes, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access": The metadata (author, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are all openly accessible immediately, webwide, but the full-text of the article (postprint) is not.

Instead, for the 38% of deposited postprints that are published in an embargoed access journal (embargoes range from 6 months to 3 years or more!), the would-be user, who has reached the link to the deposited article, based on its visible metadata, reaches a "Fair Use" Button, provided by the software of each Institutional Repository: The user need merely cut-paste his email address in a box and click on the button. This automatically emails an immediate EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST to the article's author; the email conveys the request and provides a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automatic emailing of a single copy of the deposited postprint to the eprint-requester.

The difference between this compromise "almost-OA" and the current status quo is already the difference between night and day for all those would-be users worldwide who cannot afford access to the subscription version. It systematises and automatises email access to the author and the postprint, and it provides the required document almost immediately.

And it will very rapidly lead to 100% Green OA, as the universal benefits of OA became palpable to the entire research community.

So the research community's optimal strategy is to give priority to the adoption of Green OA mandates by universities and funders. An immediate-deposit, immediate-OA mandate is obviously optimal. But if that cannot be agreed upon immediately, adopting an ID/OA mandate is infinitely preferable to any further delay in adopting a mandate at all. To keep holding out instead for the successful adoption of a stronger Green OA mandate or to wait for a universal transition to Gold OA is merely to continue prolonging the loss in research access, usage and impact, needlessly and avoidably, to the detriment of research productivity and progress.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Springer Open Choice offers authors the choice of paying for Optional Gold OA: While all publication costs are still being paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors can pay Springer $3000 extra to make their article (Gold) OA for them.
   But there is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are still paying all publication costs. Researchers' institutions and funders should instead mandate that their researchers self-archive their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to make them (Green) OA.
   Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which the publishing industry should have no say whatsoever. The way to remove the publishing industry lobby from this research-community decision loop is the pro-tem compromise -- wherever there is any delay in adopting an OA self-archiving mandate -- of weakening the mandate into an immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA), so that it can be adopted without any further delay.
   (Such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate in all cases, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)

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Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their own article.

I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs.

Sixty-two percent of journals (including all 502 Springer journals) already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting self-archiving embargoes, or both.

In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research-community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers should have no say whatsoever.

The way to put an end to the publisher filibuster on Green OA self-archiving mandates is the pro-tem compromise of weakening the mandates into immediate-deposit/optional-access mandates (ID/OA), so that they can be adopted without any further delay. This immunizes them from any further attempts by publishers to prevent or delay adoption: Only deposit is mandated (immediately). Access to the immediate deposit can then either be set as Open Access immediately, or (in case of a publisher embargo), as Closed Access, provisionally, with almost-OA provided by the "Fair Use" Button during any embargo.

This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after.

(Note also that such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)

But Jan Velterop (JV) is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell:

JV: "It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: 'almost-OA'."

No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of delay by publishers.

What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is mandated is immediate deposit.

Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate, almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful, propagating benefits of universal OA.)

Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000 Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course, but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too:

JV: "This 'almost-OA', metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if their main goal is to achieve 'almost-OA' it rather seems a waste of time and money."

Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2) the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address: The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester.

That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all expenses are already covered).

No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100% OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all) for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open Choice Gold OA even less so.

OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more intent on more-pay than OA...

JV: "OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not 'almost-OA', but true and immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository, which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA publishers I am familiar with)."

Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it, yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions are still paying all the publishing costs.)

And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates, will very soon bring on 100% OA.

JV: "So my advice to authors who want secure, sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the OA choice."

And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Alexander Borbély, University of Zurich, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

I was astonished to read that depositing the final version of the manuscript is prohibited [for Blackwell's European Journal of Neuroscience]... Making available only the version originally submitted is not very useful if major modifications based on the referees' recommendation are made:

Blackwell Publishing PDF version of the Article

You may use the PDF in the following ways:

you may share print or electronic copies of the Article with colleagues;

you may use all or part of the Article and abstract, without revision or modification, in personal compilations or other publications of your own work;

you may use the Article within your employer's institution or company for educational or research purposes, including use in course packs.

Please note that you are not permitted to post the Blackwell Publishing PDF version of the Article online.

Self-Archiving of Author Manuscripts:

Submitted version: You may post the original manuscript of the Article, as submitted for publication in the Journal, on your own personal website, on your employer's website/repository and on free public servers in your subject area....

Accepted version: Twelve months after publication you may post the original manuscript of the Article, as originally submitted for publication in the Journal, and updated to include any amendments made after peer review, on your own personal website, on your employer's website/repository and on free public servers in your subject area..."

Are you familiar with these instructions and what is your opinion?

I am very familiar with these instructions. Blackwell's is a 12-month embargo publisher.

The solution is extremely simple: always deposit the postprint (i.e., the refereed, revised, accepted final draft) immediately upon acceptance for publication (definitely not 12 months later!) and set the access as "Closed Access" instead of "Open Access," if you wish, which means the metadata (author, title, journal, abstract) are openly accessible to anyone on the web immediately, but the full-text is not. In addition, as I wrote before, make sure to implement the "Fair Use" Button (in your university's repository, ZORA): EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST.

All searches will lead to the Closed Access Deposit, and that in turn has the Button, which will provide for all usage needs during the 1-year embargo, semi-automatically, almost immediately, via almost-OA.

Embargoes will all die (I promise!) a very quick death once all institutions mandate immediate deposit like this; but embargoes will win the day if institutions foolishly make the mandated deposit date contingent on the publisher embargo's say-so.

Several other points:

(1) Unlike Blackwell's journals, most journals (62%) already endorse immediate OA deposit.

(2) There is no reason whatsoever to hold out for the publisher's PDF: The author's postprint is just fine for all research purposes! The PDF is completely irrelevant, one way or the other.

(3) Although it must always be left as an individual judgment for the author to make in the case of each individual paper, it is also good scholarly practice, wherever possible, to also deposit, even earlier, the pre-refereeing preprint (especially if submitting to an embargo publisher): The repository will tag the preprint clearly as an unrefereed draft, with a prominent link to the refereed postprint (and from there to the "Fair Use" button); this will also allow search engines to pick up the full-text for full-text indexing in the case of a Closed Access deposit, leading to many more discoveries of both the preprint and the postprint.

I do not for one microsecond believe that any publisher's statement that "a corrected version of the preprint (i.e., the postprint) cannot be made OA immediately" has any legal validity; nor do I think such nonsense could ever be enforced, had it had any legal validity. But instead of wasting still more time to wait for people to at last realize this, and to set access to their immediately deposited postprints as OA immediately, the immediate-deposit/optional-access policy (plus the "Fair Use" button) are the best interim compromise solution.

Then nature can take its course. And meanwhile researcher access needs are taken care of, almost-immediately, through almost-OA, during any putative embargo period.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

EDINA, SHERPA and JISC have just announced DEPOT, which looks as if it will be a superb central service for the UK, and a model for all countries worldwide that wish to provide Open Access to their research output.

DEPOT is many things, but chiefly a mediator for UK Institutional Repositories (IRs):

(a) If your institution already has an IR, Depot will redirect your deposit there, while also registering it and tracking it centrally, to make sure the deposit is picked up by the major search engines.

(b) If your institution does not yet have an IR, you can deposit directly in Depot and Depot will provide access to your deposit until your institution has an IR, at which point it will transfer your deposit to your IR.

I have mostly only congratulations for the designers and implementers of Depot. It is the optimal synthesis: It reinforces the author's own IR as the canonical locus for OA content. It monitors and integrates all of the UK's IRs. And it provides a provisional locus for any researcher whose institution does not yet have an IR (or for researchers who are not affiliated with an institution).

I would, however, like to recommend three small but very important changes in the following:

(1) Currently, Depot states that only postprints can be deposited.

(The postprint is either the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication, or the published PDF itself.)

(2) Currently, Depot does not state when deposit should be done.

(3) Currently, Depot states that the deposit depends on the policy of the publisher.

(The depositor is referred to the Romeo directory of publisher policies on author self-archiving to ascertain whether and when he can deposit.)

These are the corresponding three small but crucial changes I would strongly urge:

(1') Do not restrict deposit to postprints: Include preprints too.

(Preprints are pre-peer-review versions of articles that are to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.)

(2') Make it clear that the deposit of the postprint should be done as soon as the article is accepted for publication.

(The preprint should be deposited even earlier, to be followed by the postprint as soon as it exists.) And most important of all:

(3') Make it clear that the deposit itself, and its timing, does not depend in any way on publisher policy: only the OA-access-setting date might.

The postprints of any articles for which the publisher has not yet endorsed immediate self-archiving can still be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, but the deposit can be provisionally set as Closed Access, instead of Open Access, if the author wishes, with only the metadata accessible to all.

Depot's FAQ is not quite clear on the relation between Depot and the many IRs. Presumably if the author's institution has an IR, Depot will redirect the deposit there. (In that case, excluding preprints is not a good idea, not only because they are crucial precursors of postprints, but because all IRs will welcome both preprints and postprints. It would be a very bad idea to try to draw a formal line between the two. Let peer review itself do that, and then the journal's name, both prominent metadata tags in EPrints as well as other IRs.)

Moreover, as it is stated that Depot itself will be based on the EPrints IR software, this means that Depot will have (i) the option for Closed Access deposit as well as (ii) the "Fair Use" Button -- REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT. With those features, almost-OA can be provided almost-immediately and semi-automatically for any Closed Access deposit:

Any would-be user webwide, led by the metadata to a deposit that turns out to be in Closed Access, can just copy/paste his email address into a box that is provided by the software, and then press the REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT button. This immediately sends the author an automated email eprint request, containing a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automated emailing of one copy of his eprint to the requester.

There is a vast difference between deferring deposit until the publisher endorses OA deposit, and doing an immediate CA deposit, deferring only the OA-setting. Depot should definitely facilitate the latter practice.

(Some clarification is also needed of the mechanism of transfer from Depot to the author's IR.)

But overall, the Depot service is near-perfect, and once optimised with these two small changes, it is worthy of not only admiration but emulation worldwide.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

From Driver News:

"After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories. This needs to be done at the latest one year after the publication date, to increase visibility and impact. More information on the conditions can be found in their general agreement for researchers."

This is indeed good news, but could easily be made even better by upgrading the mandate to Immediate Deposit (ID/OA): Setting access to the deposited article as Open Access can be delayed for up to a year (if FWO allows it and the author so chooses), but the deposit itself must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, so the article's metadata are immediately visible webwide.

(1) "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"
(2) "The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate"

(If the author chooses to delay setting Open Access (OA) to a deposit, access can be initially set as Closed Access (CA) until the chosen release date. Meanwhile, each Repository's "Fair-Use Button" can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to all would-be users webwide who see the deposit's metadata: Requesters need merely paste in their own email addresses and click, thereby sending an automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST to the author, who need merely click to authorize having one individual eprint of the deposit emailed to the requester.)

(3) "EPrints 'Request eprint' button"
(4) "Two Happy Accidents Demonstrate Power of "Eprint Request" Button"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Alma Swan's article "Open Access and the Progress of Science" has just appeared in American Scientist (the journal) May-June Issue 2007.

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You can join the American Scientist Open Access Forum, post discussion to the Forum, and view the complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion (1998-2007) on providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online.

As announced in Peter Suber's Open Access News, on 1 April 2007 two UK Research Councils, PPARC and CCLRC merged into a single Council: Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). PPARC had already mandated Green OA Self-Archiving; CCLRC had "strongly encouraged" it. STFC mandates it. That means that instead of 5 out of 8 UK Research Councils mandating OA, 5 out of 7 now mandate OA.

Worldwide, we have reached 23 Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates adopted (9 institutional, 3 departmental, 11 funder mandates, including the European Research Council, ERC) plus 6 more proposed (1 multi-institutional, 5 funder mandates), two of them (FRPAA in the US and EC A1 in Europe) big ones.

See Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)

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SUMMARY: The formula for distinguishing which of the scholarly and scientific societies are on the side of the angels will be simple to reckon. By Their Works Shall Ye Know Them: The societies that are Green on author self-archiving -- and are not lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates -- are practising what they preach, which is the promotion of science and scholarship. Those that oppose Green OA self-archiving mandates (in the name of their other "good works," such as funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) are not. Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director of the American Geophysical Union appears to be on the side of the angels, even though he seems to think the underlying issue is research preservation (rather than what it really is: research access, usage and impact, the productivity and progress of scholarship and science).

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On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, in response to "Mobilising Scholarly Society Membership Support for FRPAA and EC A1," Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director, American Geophysical Union, wrote, in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

"Were open access in the best interests of advancing science societies would be supporting it now."

The purpose of Open Access (OA) is to maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted.

"It is as hard for a society executive to know what to oppose as it is to know what we should be supporting on the OA side."

The American Geophysical Union is completely Green on author self-archiving. That means it is on the side of the angels -- except if it is also lobbying against Green OA Mandates such as FRPAA or EC A1.

"Please don't characterize us with the commercial publishers."

The Society publishers that are Green on author self-archiving and are not lobbying against the FRPAA Green OA mandate are certainly not like the publishers -- commercial or society -- that are.

"There is no other way those most interested in assuring that the record of a discipline is not lost can assure that will not happen except to do it themselves and that is why there are societies."

I hope there are more reasons for learned societies to exist than just preservation, because preservation can and will be taken care of in the digital era quite expeditiously. I would say that there are still other reasons for learned societies' existence, such as to implement peer review and certify its outcome (with their journal name), to host meetings, perhaps to fund scholarships, to lobby (but not to lobby against OA!) -- and possibly also to sell a paper edition of the journals as long as there is still a demand for it.

"government can not be trusted to do so."

Digital preservation need not be entrusted to government. Research institutions will preserve their own (published) article output, self-archived in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs). And for good measure (and backup) the distributed and mirrored IR contents can be harvested into various Central Repositories (CRs), including learned society repositories, if they wish.

But lest there be any misunderstanding, the purpose of the FRPAA Green OA mandate is not research preservation but research access and impact.

And the Green OA mandates that require direct central self-archiving in a CR (such as PubMed Central (PMC) or a funding agency CR) are not sensible or optimal. All self-archiving should systematically be done in the researcher's own institution's IR, the primary research provider. (The only exceptions should be unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have an IR; for them there are CRs to deposit in directly for the time being.)

CRs like PMC can then harvest from the IRs.

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

"Funding agencies of all kinds operate in their own interest... None have a primary mission in the protection of the knowledge base;"

The locus of deposit is a relatively minor issue; and, to repeat, OA self-archiving is not being mandated for the sake of preservation but for the sake of access and impact.

Public, tax-payer-funded funding agencies presumably act in the tax-paying public's interest.

"Academic institutions standing alone do not have the capacity to guarantee all knowledge."

No one institution (or society) can, but a distributed network of them, with back-up and redundancy certainly can.

"Societies are one vital resource, academic institutions are another... One without the other is the woof without the warp, a flop."

Agreed, but neither here nor there, insofar as the substantive issue under discussion is concerned, which is the passage of Green OA self-archiving mandates such as the FRPAA -- and overcoming publisher lobbying against them, whether from commercial or society publishers.

"Instead of shouting about the moral rectitude of OA and other irrelevant issues how about looking at the whole problem. The development and protection of the knowledge base needs to be optimized. Optimizing one aspect is likely to be deleterious in other parts of the system."

No one at all is shouting about moral rectitude. The purpose of OA is to maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted.

"Time, Price, Quality - Pick any two."

Yes indeed: And at the same time: Mandate self-archiving, and self-archive.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum