Open Access Archivangelism

Klaus Graf writes:

"1. time of free access (the embargo-question): This is the only question Stevan Harnad is interested in. If we can call the OA-FREE journals of DOAJ 'OA' we should also... call [self-archived articles that are] freely accessible articles after an embargo 'OA'."

This is incorrect. OA means immediate, permanent, free, full-text access online to published journal articles, webwide. ("Immediate" means immediately upon acceptance for publication.) Hence embargoed access means embargoed access, not OA.

I am interested in OA but it has become quite evident across the past 13 years that not nearly enough authors make their articles OA spontaneously, of their own accord (only about 15% do), despite its demonstrated benefits. It is also quite evident that the only real barrier to 100% OA is the keystrokes that it takes to deposit the article and its metadata into the author's Institutional Repository.

It is for this reason that my own focus is currently on (1) institutional (and research funder) mandates that ensure that those keystrokes are executed as a matter of institutional/funder policy and on (2) developing the OA metrics that will quantify and reward those benefits. Administrative deposit mandates of course only ensure deposit, not OA. But the benefits of OA themselves will ensure that all those deposits will be made free as worldwide deposits approach 100%, and new deposits will not long thereafter be OA ab ovo.

And during the brief life of embargos, Institutional Repositories will provide "almost OA" via their "Fair Use" Button, allowing would-be users to request -- and authors to provide -- an email version almost instantly, with a click from the requester and then a click from the author.

American Scientist Open Access Forum

We are simply repeating ourselves, at greater and greater length, so my reply to Peter Murray-Rust's latest will just be a brief recap: Green Open Access (OA) (free online access) to journal articles is fully within reach: The only thing authors need to do is self-archive and the only thing their universities and funders need to do is mandate that they self-archive (and some are at long last starting to do it). Peter Murray-Rust wants more, and so he wants to complicate the definition of OA as well as the means of attaining it. He wants us to do something more complicated and not immediately attainable (reform copyright/licensing, reform publishing) when we are not yet doing the simple thing that is immediately attainable (because many already find even that too complicated!). I say we should put all our efforts behind simply attaining the immediately attainable. The rest will come soon enough, with the OA territory. Otherwise we are merely compounding our already unconscionable delay in reaching the optimal and inevitable, at long last.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There is no problem at all with the visibility -- to their would-be users webwide -- of the 15% of articles that are already being self-archived in IRs. But there definitely is a problem with the visibility of that visibility and usage -- to the authors of those articles -- and especially to the authors of the other 85% of articles, the ones that have not yet been self-archived (as well as to their institutions and funders, who have not yet mandated that they be self-archived, to make them Open Access [OA]).
   Hence OA metrics -- the visible, quantitative indicators of the enhanced visibility and usage vouchsafed by OA -- have to be made directly visible to all, immediately and continuously (rather than just being published in the occasional study); and not only absolute metrics but comparative ones. That will make the greater visibility of the self-archived contents visible, thereby providing an immediate, continuous and palpable incentive to self-archive, and to mandate self-archiving.
   These are the kinds of visibility metrics that Arthur Sale at U. Tasmania, Les Carr at Southampton, Leo Waaijers at SURF/DARE and Tim Brody's citebase have been working on providing. The biggest showcase and testbed for all these new metrics of productivity and prestige, and of OA's visible effects on them, will be the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise. Then universities and research funders will have a palpable sense of how much visibility, usage, impact and income they are losing (absolutely, and to their competitors), the longer they delay mandating OA self-archiving.

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On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, my colleague Steve Hitchcock wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

Hitchcock: Yes, of course, mandates and content are the no. 1 priority. But that doesn't mean we should ignore anything else that might help facilitate more of both. We have enough content in IRs [Institutional Repositories] now for improved visibility to be an issue, and it's an issue that will become more acute as content continues to grow.

We don't, unfortunately, have enough content in IRs now! And for what we do have, google provides more than enough visibility. What's needed, urgently, is increased content, not improved visibility.

Yes, mandates are the no. 1 priority; but the reason they are still so slow in coming is because we keep getting distracted and diverted to priority no. 2, 3, 4... instead.

Harnad: IRs do not need "to do more to be highly visible." Their problem is not their invisibility, it is their emptiness. And Steve Hitchcock ought to know this, because his own department's IR is anything but invisible -- for the simple reason that it has content. And it has content because self-archiving is mandated!

Hitchcock: My point is not about one single IR, or any single IR, but about services that reveal IRs collectively. It's services that allow us to have effective IRs - OAI and interoperability and all that. And I didn't say they are invisible, but that they could and should be more visible. It's not just about search, it's about awareness and currency as well. Arxiv has that, IRs as a whole do not.

What Arxiv has is content (in one field); IRs as a whole do not (in any field).

The IRs' problem is not the visibility of what little they have, but how little they have.

If we keep on distracting the attention (of what I am increasingly coming to believe is a research community suffering from Attention-Deficit-Disorder!) toward the non-problem of the day -- this time the "discoverability/visibility" problem -- instead of staying focused on the only real, persistent problem -- which is providing that missing OA content -- then we are simply compounding our persistent failure to reach for what is already long within our grasp.

It is not sufficient to say that mandates are the no. 1 priority. We have to actually make them the no. 1 priority, until they are actually adopted. Then we can move on to our other pet peeves. Right now the ill-informedness, noise and confusion levels are still far too high to justify indulging still more distractions.

Hitchcock: I'm not arguing for central repositories, but others are. Critically, some mandates require them, e.g. Wellcome, while the RCUK mandates are more open. So the best we can say is that the most important mandates so far are ambivalent about [whether to deposit in central] subject [CRs] vs IRs. In that case some authors affected by the mandates have a choice, and this is a challenge to IRs now in which IRs can help their cause with better services.

Mandating CR deposit instead of IR deposit is simply a fundamental strategic and practical error, and can and should be dealt with as such, not as a fait-accompli motivating a detour into yet another irrelevancy ("discoverability").

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

And there is no point touting nascent IR functionalities that purport to remedy IRs' non-existent "visibility" problem when IRs' only real problem is their non-existent content -- for which mandates, not IR visibility-enhancements, are the solution. We don't solve -- or even contribute to the grasp of -- a real problem by diverting attention to a non-problem and its solution, as if it were all or part of the solution to the real problem. (There has already been far too much of that sort of wheel-spinning in OA for 13 years now and we need to resist another spell of still more of the same.)

There is, however, something that we can do that is not only complementary to mandates, but an incentive for adopting them -- and it just might serve to redirect this useless fuss about "visibility" in a more useful direction:

No, there is no problem with the visibility -- to their would-be users webwide -- of the 15% of articles that are already being deposited in IRs; but there definitely is a problem with the visibility of that visibility and of that usage to the authors of those articles -- and especially to the authors of the 85% of articles that have not yet been deposited (and to the institutions and funders of those authors who have not mandated that they be deposited).

I am speaking, of course, of OA metrics -- the visible, quantitative indicators of the enhanced visibility and usage vouchsafed by OA. It is not enough for a few of these metrics to be plumbed, and then published in journal articles and postings -- as admirably indexed by Steve Hitchcock's very useful bibliography of the effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact.

We have to go on to make those metrics directly visible to self-archivers and
non-self-archivers alike, immediately and continuously, rather than just in the occasional published study -- and not only absolute metrics but comparative ones. That will make the greater visibility of the self-archived contents visible, thereby providing an immediate, continuous and palpable incentive to self-archive, and to mandate self-archiving.

Those are the kinds of visibility metrics that Arthur Sale at U. Tasmania, Les Carr at Southampton, and Leo Waaijers at SURF/DARE have been working on providing.

And the biggest showcase and testbed for all those new metrics of productivity and prestige, and of OA's visible effects on them, will be the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise (although I rather hope OA will not wait that long!). Then universities and research funders (worldwide, not just in the UK) will have a palpable sense of how much visibility, usage, impact and income they are losing (and losing to their competitors), the longer they delay mandating OA self-archiving...

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.

Some of the absolute visibility metrics are already implemented in U. Southampton's EPrints IRs:
as well as U. Tasmania's Eprints IRs.

A clever adaptation of Tim Brody's citebase, across IRs, could provide the comparative picture too.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

From Peter Suber's Open Access News:

"The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, on the appropriations bill establishing an OA mandate at the NIH.

Sec. 217: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication...

"The section creating the OA mandate (ß217) was read. The amendment window opened briefly and then closed. No amendments were offered.
   "This victory reflects the groundswell of public support for OA at the NIH. House members definitely heard the message.
  "The House vote is in a few days, and then the Senate vote, which is still unscheduled. Then a Presidential signature."
        Peter Suber, Open Access News

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But let us not forget that the proposed NIH policy, though much better than the previous one -- because it is at last the mandate that it ought to have been, rather than just a request -- is still flawed in that it requires deposit in a central repository (PubMed Central) instead of an Institutional Repository. Let us hope this will still be remedied in the implementation, and that the deposit will be required to be immediate (with the embargo, if any, applicable only to the date at which access to the deposit is set as Open Access.)

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) did not "sell out" to Elsevier in agreeing to pay for Open Access publication charges in exchange for compliance with their (very welcome and timely) Open Access mandate. They (and the Wellcome Trust) simply made a strategic mistake -- but a mistake that no one at HHMI (or Wellcome) as yet seems ready to re-think and remedy:

What HHMI should have done was to mandate that all HHMI fundees must deposit the final, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints") of all their published articles in their own institution's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Instead, they uncritically followed the (somewhat incoherent) "e-biomed" model, and mandated that it must be deposited directly in PubMed Central, a central, 3rd-party repository, within 6 months of publication.

The reason this was a mistake (and the reason it is silly to keep harping on HHMI's "selling out") is that all Elsevier journals, including Cell Press, are already "Green" on immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR: It is only 3rd-party archiving that they object to (as rival publication).

But there is no reason whatsoever to hold out (or pay) for direct deposit in a central repository: All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Hence any central repository can harvest their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.) and simply link it to the full-text in the author's own IR. (Oaister, Scirus, Scopus, Google, Google Scholar, etc. can of course also harvest and link for search and retrieval).

So in exchange for their unnecessary and arbitrary insistence on having the full-text deposited directly in PubMed Central within six months of publication, HHMI (and Wellcome, and other followers of this flawed model) have agreed instead to pay arbitrary, inflated, and unnecessary "Gold" OA publication charges. That would in itself be fine, and simply a waste of money, if it did not set an extremely bad example for other research funders and institutions, who are also looking to mandate OA self-archiving, but do not have the spare change to pay for such extravagant and gratuitous expenses.

Below is Cell Press's Self-Archiving policy:

Authors' rights (Cell Press):

"As an author you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:

"...Post a revised personal version of the final text (including illustrations and tables) of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or your institutional website or server, with a link (through the relevant DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not for commercial purposes..."

See also:

Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The following re-posting from Peter Suber's OA News reconfirms that Elsevier is squarely on the side of the angels insofar as OA is concerned: Elsevier is and remains solidly Green on author self-archiving. So if there is any finger of blame to be pointed, it is to be pointed straight at the research community itself, not at Elsevier. If researchers desire Open Access, and fail to provide it by self-archiving their own articles, it is entirely their own fault, certainly not Elsevier's.
   And if researchers' institutions and funders are aggrieved that their researchers are not providing OA, yet they have failed to mandate that they do so, there is again no one else to fault but themselves.
  Read on. And then if you are a researcher and minded to complain about the absence of OA, please don't waste keystrokes demonizing publishers like Elsevier, or signing pious declarations, statements, manifestos, or boycott-threats: Direct your keystrokes instead toward the self-archiving of your own articles in your own Institutional Repository!

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Elsevier restates its self-archiving policy

Ways to Use Journal Articles Published by Elsevier: A Practical Guide, Elsevier, Version 1.0, June 2007. (Thanks to Rea Devakos.)

Elsevier compiled this guide for its journal editors, but it may also be useful for authors and readers.

Excerpt:

Elsevier believes it is important to communicate clearly about our policies regarding the use of articles we publish....However, this guide does not amend, replace or cancel any part of an existing license with Elsevier....

Authors publishing in Elsevier journals retain wide rights to continue to use their works to support scientific advancement, teaching and scholarly communication. An author can, without asking permission, do the following after publication of the author's article in an Elsevier-published journal:

Make copies (print or electronic) of the author's article for personal use or the author's own classroom teaching.

Make copies of the article and distribute them (including via email) to known research colleagues for their personal use but not for commercial purposes as described below [PS: omitted here].

Present the article at a meeting or conference and distribute copies of the article to attendees.

Allow the author's employer to use the article in full or in part for other intracompany use (e.g., training).

Retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article.

Include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation.

Use the article in full or in part in a printed compilation of the author's, such as collected writings and lecture notes.

Use the article in full or in part to prepare other derivative works, including expanding the article to book-length form, with each such work to include full acknowledgment of the article's original publication in the Elsevier journal.

Post, as described below, the article to certain websites or servers.... Web posting of articles

Elsevier understands researchers want widespread distribution of their work and supports authors by enabling such distribution within the context of orderly peer review and publication.

Most journals published by Elsevier will consider (for peer review and publication) papers already posted in pre-publication versions to the Web. Pre-publication posting is common practice in, for example, physics and mathematics. However, some Elsevier clinical and biomedical journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals, follow the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and do not consider for publication papers that have already been posted publicly. Anyone with a question regarding pre-publication posting and subsequent submission of a paper to an Elsevier journal should consult that journal's instructions to authors or contact the editor.

An author can, without asking permission, do the following with the author's article that has been or will be published in an Elsevier journal:

Post a pre-print version of the article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and retain indefinitely this version on such servers or sites (unless prohibited in a specific Elsevier journal's instructions to authors).

Post a personal manuscript version of the article on the author's personal or institutional website or server, provided each such posting includes a link to the article's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and includes a complete citation for the article. This means an author can update a personal manuscript version (e.g., in Word or TeX format) of the article to reflect changes made during the peer-review and editing process. Note such posting may not be for commercial purposes and may not be to any external, third-party website.

Elsevier-published authors employed by corporations may post their revised personal manuscript versions of their final articles to their corporate intranets if they are secure and do not allow public access.

This policy permitting open posting of revised personal manuscript versions applies to authors publishing articles in any Elsevier journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals.

If an article has multiple authors, each author has the same posting rights.

To preserve the integrity of the official record of publication, the final published version of an article as it appears (in PDF or HTML) in an Elsevier journal will continue to be available only on an Elsevier site....

Peter Suber, OA News

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Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
"Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving"

Cf: "Poisoned Apple"

"A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2007
Microsoft Conference Center, Redmond, Washington, July 16 2007

eScience: Data Capture to Scholarly Publication
Tony Hey, Microsoft Research (Chair)

Research Communication, Navigation, Evaluation, and Impact in the Open Access Era
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton

The global research community is moving toward the optimal and inevitable outcome in the online age: All research articles as well as the data on which they are based will be openly accessible for free for all on the web, deposited in researchers' own OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories, and mandated by their institutions and funders. Research users, funders, evaluators, and analysts, as well as teachers, and the general public will have an unprecedented capacity not only to read, assess and use research findings, but to comment upon them, entering into the global knowledge growth process. Prepublication preprints, published postprints, data, analytic tools and commentary will all be fully and navigably interlinked. Scientometrics will generate powerful new ways to navigate, analyze, rank, and evaluate this Open Access corpus, its past history, and its future trajectory. A vast potential for providing services that mine and manage this rich global research database will be open both to the academic community as well as to enterprising industries. [See: "Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics," forthcoming in CTWatch]

The Digital Data Universe
Chris Greer, National Science Foundation

CyberInfrastructure to Support Scientific Exploration and Collaboration
Dennis Gannon, Indiana University

Funding for experimental and computational science has undergone a dramatic shift from having been dominated by single investigator research projects to large, distributed, and multidisciplinary collaborations tied together by powerful information technologies. Because cutting-dge science now requires access to vast data resources, extremely high-powered computation, and state-of-the-art tools, the individual researcher with a great idea or insight is at a serious disadvantage compared to large, well-financed groups. However, just as the Web is now able to provide most of humanity with access to nearly unlimited data, theory, and knowledge, a transformation is also underway that can broaden participation in basic scientific discovery and empower entirely new communities with the tools needed to bring about a paradigm shift in basic research techniques.
   The roots of this transformation can be seen in the emergence of on-demand supercomputing and vast data storage available from companies like Amazon and the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid Science Gateways program, which takes the concept of a Web portal and turns it into an access point for state-of-the-art data archives and scientific applications that run on back-end supercomputers. However, this transformation is far from complete. What we are now seeing emerge is a redefinition of “computational experiment” from simple reporting of the results from simulations or data analysis to a documented and repeatable workflow in which every derived data product has an automatically generated provenance record. This talk extrapolates these ideas to the broader domain of scholarly workflow and scientific publication, and qualitative as well as quantitative data, and ponders the possible impact of multicore, ubiquitous gigabyte bandwidth and personal exabyte storage.

Slides for the presentation (in Portuguese and English)

Acesso livre:
Que? Por quê? Como? Onde? Quando?
Métricas e mandatos

at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science -- Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC) -- session on Publicar ou Perecer: Acesso Livre é Sobreviver ("Publish or Perish: Open Access and Survive") Belém, Brazil, 8-10 July 2007, are available as:

PDF or PPT

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SUMMARY: Professor Imboden's excellent essay in Research Europe points out that the defeat of the EC's proposed Green Open Access self-archiving mandate by the publishing lobby in Brussels in March is likely to prove to have been only a temporary triumph. The mandate, recommended in 2004 by the UK Select Committee and in 2005 by Berlin 3 in Southampton, has already been adopted by about 30 institutions and funders; counter-lobbying against the publisher lobby is growing -- in the UK, Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia and Asia -- to embolden institutions and funders to adopt the mandate; and the clamour just keeps getting louder.
   Professor Imboden also recommends that research funders should not buy into hybrid Gold OA at this time. They should only mandate Green OA self-archiving. Research funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's cautions about pre-emptive Gold OA, and about the need carefully to think things through, for both scalability and sustainability. And meanwhile, full speed ahead on mandating Green OA!

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These are (belated) comments on a very timely and important paper by Dieter Imboden (President, Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation) that appeared in Research Europe at the end of March. These comments appear as a letter in Research Europe 12 July 2007:

Publishers Divide and Rule on Open Access
Dieter Imboden, Research Europe, 29 March 2007

Professor Imboden's piece is excellent: Exactly on target, it raises all the crucial issues, and is still very timely. (It appeared in March when the EC meeting took place.)

..."a paradox over access to that knowledge, which has defeated even the Commission, at least for the moment, judging by its communication last month on open access publishing..."

Professor Imboden is quite right to point out this defeat of the EC's proposed Green Open Access self-archiving mandate by the publishing lobby. There is reason for hope, however, that that defeat will prove only to have been a temporary one.

"The clamour of the research community for open access publishing..."

The clamour is actually for Open Access (not necessarily for Open Access Publishing (Gold OA), which is only one of the two ways to provide Open Access -- and not the surest or fastest way, which is Open Access Self-Archiving (Green OA), as Professor Imboden himself later notes in his essay).

"open access means 'free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles'. Obviously, this would bring the traditional reader-paid publication system to an end."

That outcome is perhaps likely, but it not obvious: No one knows how long there will still be a demand for the print edition, nor whether and when Green OA self-archiving would make subscriptions unsustainable. The only sure and obvious thing is that 100% Green OA self-archiving will provide 100% OA (and that 100% OA is a huge benefit to research that is already fully within reach: all that needs to be done is to mandate it).

"When libraries began to cancel journal subscriptions for financial reasons, funders saw an important pillar of their research policy dwindling. As a result, many signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003."

Many may have signed the Berlin Declaration because of journal unaffordability, but many others have signed because of research inaccessibility. OA is not primarily about journal economics but about research access.

"The declaration requires researchers to deposit their manuscripts in an open-access repository or to make sure that papers published in traditional journals are accessible free of charge after not more than 6 to 12 months."

Alas, the Berlin Declaration itself does not require this, and hence the many signatories have not committed themselves to this. However, the UK Select Committee (2004) and Berlin 3 (Southampton 2005) do recommend requiring this, and ROARMAP lists the c. 30 institutions and funders that have already adopted such a requirement, and several more that have proposed it.

"In reality, however, still only a very small fraction of authors fully exploit the potential of the traditional system."

Yes, and this is because only about 30 institutions and funders have as yet required the Berlin 3 Policy recommendation. Counter-lobbying against the publisher lobby is growing -- in the UK, Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia and Asia -- to embolden institutions and funders to adopt the mandate; and the clamour just keeps getting louder.

"[S]ome (mostly private) research funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute... ask their grantees to publish exclusively in pure or hybrid open-access journals, with free online access to author-paid articles."

Strictly speaking, Wellcome and HHMI merely require that their authors make their articles OA, whether the Green or the Gold way.

"If a library pays for online access, it means access to articles supported by HHMI or the Wellcome Trust is paid for twice. Thus, at least during a transition time, the well-intended initiative of some funders will pump even more money into the commercial publishing system."

This is absolutely correct, and points out a deep strategic error or shortsight on the part of HHMI and Wellcome. Funders should not pay for hybrid Gold OA at this time. They should only mandate Green OA self-archiving. (If they have funds to spare, let them spend them on supporting more research!)

"...changing to a total open-access world would shift the financial burden from institutions to funders [and] the research system as a whole... the distribution of public money for research (whether national or European) would have to change accordingly -- either by reducing support to institutions or by increasing the budgets of funders."

This shift would only happen if we agreed to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA now. If we instead only mandate Green OA, and let time and the market decide whether and when subscriptions become unsustainable, then, if and when subscriptions do become unsustainable (a portion of) the resulting institutional windfall subscription cancellation savings themselves can be redirected to pay for Gold OA, without the need to divert any new research or institutional funds. There is already more than enough money "in the system" (as Peter Suber puts it) now to pay all publishing costs. Gold OA will not cost more -- indeed it will cost a good deal less (only the cost of peer review, with Institutional Repositories taking over the distributed burden of archiving and access-provision).

"If every funder, small or large, weak or powerful, has to negotiate individually with the various publishers, we will be back where we began -- in a publishing world where economic power dictates the deals between libraries and publishers. Was not the feeling that scientists and libraries were at the mercy of big publishing companies one reason for the open-access initiative in the first place? It would be a tremendous mistake just to replace one victim by another -- that is to free the institutions at the expense of the funders. What can we do instead?

"Remember: the main issue is not to save money, but to provide fairer access to scientific information."

Hear, Hear! Pre-emptive payment for hybrid Gold OA is a Trojan Horse, and funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's words.

Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor

"So, funders and institutions should proceed together on the route to open access. The green route is easy and without major problems, but a good and just strategy for the golden route is still missing. Even if the intentions are good, we should not rush into unknown territory without considering the consequences."

Again, research funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's cautions about pre-emptive Gold OA, and the need carefully to think things through, for both scalability and sustainability. But meanwhile, full speed ahead on mandating Green OA!

"Not all the funders have the same opportunities. Not all the disciplines are as powerful as particle physics, which, according to CERN director Robert Aymar, can easily finance the transition of the few journals in the field to complete open access."

Not all physicists are so sanguine about CERN's pre-emptive move toward Gold OA:

Harnad, John (and others) (2007) Debating the future of physics publishing. Physics World 29 (3): 22

"Let us -- scientists, funders, institutions, libraries and publishers -- talk together, before too many new boundary conditions make a rational solution difficult."

Indeed. And meanwhile, full speed ahead with Green OA mandates!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

If you are put off by the endless jeremiads of your weary archivangelist then please do listen to the gentler, ecumenical voice of the Prophet Peter!

Here is Peter Suber's comment in Open Access News on the University of Illinois Provost Linda Katehi's letter to UI faculty that encouraged them to use the CIC author addendum [on retaining copyright] as recommended by the CIC Statement on Publishing Agreements and an Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors.

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Peter's Comment:

"The U of I is right to encourage faculty to use the CIC author addendum.

"But in the June SOAN, I hoped that CIC institutions would go further:

"...[I]t's not clear what form the encouragement will take. Will it be limited to the abstract encouragement of passing a resolution in the Faculty Senate? Or will there also be some case-by-case encouragement? ...In a standoff between a publisher and faculty member, what will universities do to support their faculty member?

"Here's the bigger question: What else will these universities do to encourage OA archiving? If they take the step of adopting an author addendum, they should also adopt a policy to require OA archiving. If permission is not a problem (because publishers already give it or because an addendum worked), what will these institutions do to insure that faculty postprints are actually archived? ...

"The permission problem is worth solving, but we have to remember that solving it is only a means to the end of OA. Universities adopting an author addendum are moving in the right direction, but they must keep moving. Permission for OA isn't yet OA itself...."

-- Peter Suber, OA News

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Now, for the historically minded, here are some of the past unminded jeremiads on this very point from the American Scientist Open Access Forum, starting as early as 1998, to the effect that while copyright retention is desirable, it is not a prerequisite for OA or OA self-archiving, and hence that university self-archiving policy should not be contingent on retaining copyright. It is much harder to get authors to agree to and comply with a mandate to retain copyright (because it [appears to] put their choice of journal at risk) than it is to get authors to agree to and comply with a mandate to deposit their accepted final drafts in their institutional repositories (the ID/OA mandate). Therefore the weaker mandate should be adopted first, rather than the stronger one. (Copyright retention can wait: OA should not.)

"Copyright retention is not a prerequisite for self-archiving" + 1, 2, 3.

"What Provosts Need to Mandate" + 1, 2.

"Optimizing MIT's Open Access Policy" + 1, 2.

"Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver"

"How to Word Institutional Self-Archiving Policy" + 1, 2, 3.

"US University OA Resolutions Omit Most Important Component"

"Well-Meaning Supporters of "OA + X" Inadvertently Opposing OA"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum