Open Access Archivangelism

On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 Andrew Albanese, Associate Editor, Library Journal, wrote:

"[J]ust writing to see if you have any thoughts on the UKPMC [UK PubMed Central] statement on re-use...seems a little unnecessary to me. Stating the obvious? Rather than say "copyright still applies," would it not have been more useful to issue guidelines on, say, how to craft a copyright clause that facilitates open access? Do these broad statements help anyone?"

I agree that the UKPMC re-use statement is unnecessary and stating the obvious. (Even advice on amending copyright clauses to facilitate Green OA self-archiving is not necessary as a precondition for self-archiving, or for mandating self-archiving, although it is a good idea to try to amend copyright agreements where feasible and desired -- hence good advice is always welcome.)

(1) To begin with, the UKPMC statement is about paid Gold OA, and (for reasons I have adduced many times before) I believe that -- except for those researchers and funders who are so well off that money is no object -- paying for Gold OA at this time is unnecessary and a waste of money (until and unless most or all of the institutional money that is currently being spent on subscriptions is released to pay for Gold OA).

(2) Successfully establishing a credible, high-quality fleet of paid Gold OA journals was definitely useful in order to demonstrate the principle of paid Gold OA as a feasible one (especially under the current financially straitened circumstance in which most of the potential Gold OA funds are still tied up in institutional journal subscriptions); but that does not change the fact that Gold OA is far from being either the fastest or surest way to scale up to 100% OA today.

(3) The fastest and surest way to provide 100% OA today is for authors to self-archive their (published) articles in their own Institutional Repositories [IRs] (not in Central Repositories [CRs] like PubMed Central or UKPMC: CRs should harvest from IRs) -- and for authors' institutions and funders to mandate that they self-archive.

(4) This Green OA self-archiving does not require the description or assertion of any new "re-use rights": All the requisite uses already come with the Green OA territory itself (i.e., with the full text being made freely accessible to all on the web).

So this is a lot of fuss and fanfare about nothing: details peculiar to paid Gold OA and to direct deposit in 3rd-party CRs like UKPMC. Not what the research community urgently needs today (100% OA), nor what will get us there.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum