Open Access Archivangelism

---

SUMMARY: AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint. Nature started out being Green, but then back-slid to pale-Green in 2005, introducing a 6-month embargo on self-archiving. But the ACS (American Chemical Society) is Gray. Rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM, ACS is the only Gray publisher to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green!
    Chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. The surest and fastest antidote for ACS's grayness, however, is for universities and research funders to adopt the Immediate-Deposit (ID/OA) Mandate, which allows a Closed Access Embargo, but requires deposit of the postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication (allowing the Institutional Repository's semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" or "Fair Use" Button to provide almost-OA almost-immediately, to tide over any embargo period).

---

[Identity Deleted]: "At the AAAS 2007 meeting held in San Francisco, Tony Hey, in his presentation to a panel chaired by Christine Borgman, made the point that some form of open access to text and data would be the norm in about ten years from now. Ironically, AAAS [along with ACS] is among the few leading professional societies which opposes open access tooth and nail! What can we do to convince the AAAS management (as well as the ACS management) to see the point that is obvious to us? Some believe that AAAS opposes OA while commercial publishers such as Nature Group supports OA in some form..."

AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint; hence there is nothing we need to convince AAAS of!

(Indeed, it is Nature that back-slid to pale-Green in 2005: Nature started out being Green, but then introduced a 6-month embargo on self-archiving coinciding with the announcement that the NIH agreed had agreed to embargoes.)

But it is ACS (American Chemical Society) that is Gray.

And although it is a good idea to keep trying to convince them, my own guess is that ACS will be among the very last of the publishers to go Green. ACS was rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM. (The other two were rumored to be Elsevier, which is fully Green, and Wiley, which is Pale-Green).

ACS is the Learned Society with the biggest and most remunerative publishing operation. With Chemical Abstracts they make a lot more money than the American Physical Society (APS), which was the very first of the Green publishers, and which set the standard for all the rest.

The strongest weapon against the ACS's Gray policy is the movement for data-archiving. (The two strongest contingents of the movement for data-archiving are in Biology and in Chemistry; I have branched this to Peter Murray-Rust, Jeremy Frey, and Michael Hursthouse.)

The chemical research community, accustomed to the status quo, with Chemical Abstracts and the other ACS products and services, is one of the most quiescent on the movement to provide OA to journal articles, but they can be roused on the subject of data-archiving.

And, ironically, ACS is also the most vulnerable there: Other publishers, since they do not publish data, have no big stake in data-archiving, one way or another. But for ACS, data-archiving (just like article-archiving) represents (or appears to them to represent) a risk to their revenue-streams.

So chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. And in chemistry, of all fields, the two are very closely coupled, since many chemical publications (e.g. in crystallography) consist of just the description of a new molecule. See:

(1) Southampton Crystal Structure Report Archive/EPSRC
(2) Mineralogical Society of America/NSF
(3) RRUF/NSF
(4) NCL in Pune (theses)
(5) Elsevier's somewhat half-hearted (because ambivalent) "Chemistry Preprint Server"

So NSF is a potential ally in influencing the ACS. So too would be NIH (if it weren't the victim of ACS's successful anti-OA lobbying at the moment); and the UK's EPSRC (which is obviously conflicted on this issue, being the last of the UK funding councils to still hold out as non-Green!)

One last point: Please do not confuse a publisher's stand on Gold OA (publishing) with their stand on Green OA (self-archiving). Gold OA is welcome, but it is Green OA that is urgently needed. In this regard, AAAS (Green) is fully on the side of the Angels, whereas Nature (Pale-Green) is not.

The only two differences between AAAS and Nature are that (1) AAAS is still (nominally) supporting the "Ingelfinger Rule" on prepublication preprints (but that is not a legal matter, and those authors who wish to ignore the unjustified and unenforceable Ingelfinger Rule can ignore it). and (2) Nature has begun to experiment with Gold. This experimentation can be cynical and self-serving, but it is not, I think, in the case of Nature.

In the case of ACS, however, which has begun to "experiment" with the Trojan Horse of "AuthorChoice," it has become the only Gray publisher, as far as I know, to have the temerity to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green!

In my opinion, there is nothing to reproach AAAS with. I'd be somewhat more inclined to shame Nature, with its 6-month embargo, but the best solution for that is to adopt the Immediate-Deposit Mandate (ID/OA), which allows a Closed Access Embargo, but requires deposit of the postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication (allowing the Institutional Repository's semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" or "Fair Use" Button to provide almost-OA almost-immediately, to tide over any embargo period).

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Alma Swan replied:

Alma Swan: "There is no need to shame Nature because those who think self-archiving is worth doing, do it despite Nature's embargo, as I showed by my little study on Nature Physics: see "Author compliance with publisher open access embargoes: a study of the journal Nature Physics."
"The important action point is what it always has been - get through to authors and their bosses and persuade them of the benefits and rationale for OA. Turn them all into physicists, in other words."

I agree completely with Alma: It is, and always has been, perfectly possibly -- and practised -- to go ahead and self-archive with impunity, sensibly ignoring all the formal nonsense about only being allowed to post on "a Windows-based personal website on Tuesdays if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle"! Those who elect to self-archive spontaneously are sensible enough to know that the "permissions barriers" are in reality all just so much unenforceable Wizard-of-Ozzery.

But the fact remains that only about 15% of researchers elect to self-archive spontaneously! That is why the mandates are needed. And whereas rightly dismissing the posturing of publishers as mere Wizard-of-Ozzery is an easy option for individual authors, already inclined to self-archive spontaneously (as generations of Green self-archiving computer-scientists and physicists and others have by now amply demonstrated), it is not an easy option for most institutions and funding agencies contemplating the adoption of formal self-archiving mandates. They must adopt a policy that is not only practically feasible, but also formally legal. (Even there, I don't think the institutions are at any real risk, but they are at a perceived risk.)

That is why -- despite being in possession of her strong, welcome, and compelling evidence on how many Nature authors do self-archive immediately indifferent to Nature's shameful 6-month embargo -- Alma is a co-author of the optimal institutional (and funder) self-archiving policy, which recommends (if you cannot agree on the stronger version, which is to require immediate deposit and immediate, unembargoed Open Access) a weaker compromise, namely, the ID/OA mandate: require immediate deposit, but merely encourage immediate OA -- allowing the option of a Closed Access embargo period for the likes of Nature authors):

"[drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement]"

So, yes, the embargoes are a paper tiger, but we still have to offer a formal policy option that treats their appearance of being real as if it were really real, and can be adopted universally without any worry about illegality, or even the appearance of illegality)!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

    On her own blog,

    OptimalScholarship,

    Alma Swan

    has blogged the historic U. Liège OA meeting

    that launched EurOpenScholar

---

Photo by and (c) 2007 Derek Ramsey

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only as published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "Text of the GNU Free Documentation License."