Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: Green OA self-archiving removes not just "most" but all the "permission barriers" pertinent to research use.
   If "naked" (unlicensed) content on the web were really a barrier to use, we would be hearing about an urgent need to license all web content (e.g. advertisements, blogs). But the de facto default assumption since the advent of the web has been that if something is freely accessible online then you can download, print, store and otherwise "re-use" it.
   Far from perceiving themselves as being stuck behind "permission barriers" when they surf the web except when explicitly licensed to do otherwise, web users usually (wrongly) assume that they have even more rights than what comes with the free online territory: They will, for example, not only read, download, store, and print-off copyrighted web images, but also re-post them online, identically or in "derivative works," and sometimes even re-publish them in print publications. (You actually have to have shrill "You may NOT" notices to try to discourage users from going overboard like that!)
   Hence the "problem", if any, is precisely the reverse of what is being imagined by those who think that self-archived OA content risks not being used beyond on-screen reading unless it provides a formal permissive license over and above just being there, free for all on the web.
   The right to re-publish the verbatim text, online or on-paper, is not part of OA and never was, just as plagiarism or re-publishing a corrupted "derivative" version of the text is not and never was a part of OA, online or on-paper. OA's "unprecedented public good" is: free online access to what used to require paid on-paper access. This does not license re-publication or "derivative works" (collected or cut-pasted from the verbatim text), online or on paper (any more than it licenses the re-publication of copyrighted images). But the remarkable property of the new technology is that, for OA, such rights are not needed! For anyone, anywhere, can access (and print off) the online text, any time. Re-publication is not licensed, it is mooted by the properties of the new medium.
   What is left is (1) harvesting, (2) data-mining and (3) "derivative works." Harvesting likewise comes with the territory. (Google did not have to be licensed to harvest the rest of the web, hence needs no special license for OA content.) The same is true for other forms of data-mining by harvesting robots. For the publication of "derivative works," the rule is much the same as for copyrighted web images: Re-publication of verbatim OA texts, online or on paper, is not allowed without permission -- but it is not needed either, because a collection of URLs pointing to the OA URL serves the same function as re-publication.
   Corrupted, improved or otherwise altered versions of the OA texts? Apart from attributed fair-use excerpts, that is not allowed without the author's permission either. But what would ever have made anyone think that the invention of a new technology that would allow free and unlimited access to authors' give-away texts would mean that authors would all want to license that those texts, besides being freely accessible to all users, should be alterable or corruptible, ad lib? Surely we are happier with requiring specific case-by-case permission for such further uses, rather than a blanket license under the guise of "OA"?
   "Fair use" (like "copying") was a paper-based notion. In the case of the online medium, "fair use" quite naturally, indeed unavoidably, expands to include everything else that comes with the freely accessible online territory -- but that only means access and personal use, not re-posting (online), re-publishing (on paper), or perturbing that freely accessible content (online or on paper) without the author's permission -- apart from freely re-distributing its URL.

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In Open Access News, Peter Suber wrote (by way of reply to my posting):

PS: "Comments. I hope no one minds if I reprint my comments from June 12 2007 in which I responded in detail to a very similar post by Stevan:

"Stevan isn't saying that OA doesn't or shouldn't remove permission barriers. He's saying that removing price barriers (making work accessible online free of charge) already does most or all of the work of removing permission barriers and therefore that no extra steps are needed."

So far this is exactly correct -- except I would definitely say that Green OA self-archiving removes not just "most" but all the "permission barriers" pertinent to research use, which is what OA is all about. Remember that there is also a "permission barrier" to re-publishing in print, but OA is not and never was intended to address that!

PS: "The chief problem with this view is the law. If a work is online without a special license or permission statement, then either it stands or appears to stand under an all-rights-reserved copyright. The only assured rights for users are those collected under fair use or fair dealing. These rights are far fewer and less adequate than OA contemplates, and in any case the boundaries of fair use and fair dealing are vague and contestable."

If "naked" (unlicensed) content on the web is really a barrier to use, how come we are not hearing about the need to license all web content (e.g. advertisements, blogs) because people are otherwise afraid to download, print, store and otherwise "re-use" them? (Answer: Because people are doing all those things, without hesitation.)

I think the truth is the exact opposite! That the default option, if something is freely accessible on the web, is that it's fine to do all those other things that come with it, and then some. (You can't even view web content without downloading and "storing" at least for long enough to read, yet that downloading and storing are not explicitly licensed!)

Far from perceiving themselves as being stuck behind "permission barriers" when they surf the web except when explicitly license to do otherwise, web users usually (wrongly) assume that they have even more rights than what comes with the territory: They will, for example, not only read, download, store, and print copyrighted web images, but also re-post them online, identically or in "derivative" form, and sometimes even re-publish them in print publications, identically or in "derivative" form. You actually have to have shrill "you may not" notices to try to discourage them from going overboard like that!

Now I have no particular interest in these excesses one way or the other (either to cultivate them or to curb them). But I think that they clearly illustrate that the "problem", if any, is precisely the reverse of what is being imagined by those who think that self-archived OA content needs a formal permissive license over and above just being there, free for all on the web, otherwise it risks not being used beyond on-screen reading! All seven individual uses I described in my earlier posting (as well as the two robotic ones) can be and are being fully exercised for all Green OA content today -- and there just aren't any further uses to which OA can justifiably lay claim (as OA).

PS: "This legal problem leads to a practical problem: conscientious users will feel obliged to err on the side of asking permission and sometimes even paying permission fees (hurdles that OA is designed to remove) or to err on the side of non-use (further damaging research and scholarship). Either that, or conscientious users will feel pressure to become less conscientious. This may be happening, but it cannot be a strategy for a movement which claims that its central practices are lawful."

Paying permission fees for Green OA content? Paying whom?

I honestly cannot imagine who or what you have in mind here, Peter! I am conscientious about not re-using web-accessible images in re-postings or publications unless I know they are public domain or I have permission. But I (and every other researcher on the planet) don't give a second thought as to whether I may read, download, store, print-off, and re-use the contents -- but not re-post or re-publish the verbatim text (which is like the image) -- of journal articles we can access freely on the web.

I am not feigning puzzlement: I am truly baffled about why, when the reality is the exact opposite, OA advocates, of all people, would worry that web users might be too coy (or "conscientious") to do with OA texts exactly the same things that we all do with all other free web content -- and too coy or "conscientious" to do so specifically in the case OA texts, of all things, because they lack a formal license to do it (exactly as virtually all other web content lacks such a license!).

[Could it be, Peter, that when you think of "unlicensed OA content" you are thinking of hybrid Gray/Gold publishers, who take an author's money, but don't adopt the full Creative Commons License that that money has surely paid for? I would probably agree with you on such cases, but my paradigmatic case is not paid Gray/Gold OA but Green OA, where it does not matter what copyright transfer agreement an author has signed as long the journal endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving, as 62% already do. All the rest comes with the Green OA territory.]

I think part of the problem is that (some) OA advocates may indeed be over-reaching in what they are taking to be licensed by "OA". I make absolutely no bones about the fact that the right to re-publish the verbatim text, online or on-paper, is not part of OA and never was, just as plagiarism or re-publishing a corrupted "derivative" version of the text is not and never was a part of OA, online or on-paper. OA is a new capability opened up by a new medium. I quote your own stirring words:

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds."

The unprecedented public good is free online access to what used to require paid on-paper access. This does not license re-publication or "derivative works" (cut-pasted from the verbatim text), online or on paper, but the remarkable property of the new technology is that it does not need to! For one of the other things that "comes with the [Green OA] territory" is that anyone, anywhere, can access (and print off) the online text, any time. Re-publication is not licensed, it is mooted. There is simply no need for it. (The worriers about licensing content for "course-packs" are still thinking the old way: OA content does not need a license to be put in a course-pack: The text does not need to be put in a course-pack! Only its URL does.)

So, having disposed of the red herring of a special license that is supposedly needed to allow downloading, storing, and printing-off of freely available web content, we now see that there is no need to license re-publishing either, either online or on paper. What is left? Harvesting, data-mining and derivative works. Harvesting, as noted, likewise comes with the territory. If google did not have to be licensed to harvest the rest of the web, why on earth would we imagine that it needed to be licensed to harvest OA content, of all things? Ditto for the data-mining by harvesting robots. (Individual data-mining on your downloaded copy is not even at issue.)

Now what about "derivative works"? Let's be specific: re-publication of verbatim OA texts, online or on paper? That is not allowed without permission -- but nor is it needed, because a collection of URLs does the trick just as well.

Altered or corrupted versions of the OA texts? Apart from attributed fair-use excerpts, that is not allowed without permission either. But what would ever have made anyone think that the invention of a new technology that would allow unlimited access to authors' give-away texts would mean that authors would all want to license that those texts, besides being accessible, should be alterable or corruptible, ad lib? Surely we are happier with requiring specific case-by-case permission for such further uses, rather than a blanket license under the guise of "OA"?

What uses are left that research or researchers could possibly want, as a general rule: Harvestability into a commercial, pay-to-use database? It seems to me that that is no longer an OA matter. Indeed, authors might prefer to license their content to free database providers in preference to commercial ones. But either way, that is not part of OA, which was about "completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds." Nothing there about commercial interests.

PS: "This doesn't mean that articles in OA repositories without special licenses or permission statements may not be read or used. It means that users have access free of charge (a significant breakthrough) but are limited to fair use."

"Fair use" was a paper-based notion. In the case of the online medium, "fair use" quite naturally, indeed unavoidably, expands to include everything else that comes with the online territory. In the case of freely accessible web documents, that "fair use" simply includes downloadability, storeability, printability, and data-minability, for individuals; and, for harvesters: robotic harvestability, data-minability, and certain derivative services (though I would not venture to specify which, though they certainly include free boolean searchability). With the Green OA territory comes also the accessibility online to everyone everywhere, mooting forever all need for collections, course-packs, re-publications, or other such "derivative works," online or on paper. For individual "derivative works," some form of "fair use" criterion still has to apply to determine how much verbatim content is permissible without the original author's permission.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]

SUMMARY: Not one, not two, but three of my valued OA comrades-at-arms have so far publicly registered their disagreement with my position on "re-use" rights. Here is my summary of the points at issue: Judicet Lector.
   Individual re-use capabilities: If a document's full-text is freely accessible online (OA), that means any individual can (1) access it, (2) read it, (3) download it, (4) store it (for personal use), (5) print it off (for personal use), (6) "data-mine" it and (7) re-use the results of the data-mining in further research publications (but they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself: "derivative works" must instead link to its URL).
   Robotic harvestability: In addition, (8*) robotic harvesters like Google can harvest and index the freely available Web-based text, making it boolean full-text searchable. (9*) Robotic data-miners can also harvest the full-text, machine-analyse it, and re-use the results for research purposes (but they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself: "derivative works" must instead link to its URL).
   OA is about access and use, not re-publication or re-sale: Online re-publishing or re-sale rights were never part of OA, any more than on-paper re-publishing or re-sale rights were; nor do they need to be, because of all the capabilities that come with the free online territory.
   The Green OA territory: Capabilities (1)-(9*) all come automatically with the Green OA territory. Hence there is no need to pay for Gold OA to have these capabilities, nor any need for further re-use rights beyond those already inherent in Green OA. Sixty-two percent of journals today already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving.
   Gold OA includes Green OA: If you do elect to pay a publisher for Gold OA, you also get the right to deposit your refereed final draft ["postprint"] in your own OA Institutional Repository. Hence even here there is no need for further "re-use rights." (If you pay for "Gold OA" without also getting this Green OA, you have done something exceedingly foolish.)
   "Harvesting rights"? If authors self-archive their articles on the web, accessible freely (Green OA), then robots like Google can and do harvest and data-mine them, and have been doing so without exception or challenge, for years now.
   What about Gray publishers? With Gray publishers (i.e., neither Green nor Gold) the interim solution today is (i) Immediate Deposit (IDOA) Mandates, (ii) Closed Access deposit for Gray articles, and (iii) reliance on the semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" ("Fair Use") Button to provide for individual researchers' usage and re-usage needs for these Gray articles during any Closed Access embargo interval (but note that the Fair Use Button cannot provide for robotic harvesting and data-mining of these embargoed full-texts).
   Extra Gold OA rights? For those articles published in the 38% of journals that are still non-Green today, I think that to rely on (i)-(iii) above is a far better interim strategy for attaining 100% OA globally than to pay hybrid Gray/Gold publishers for Gold OA today. But regardless of whether you agree that (i)-(iii) is the better strategy in such cases, what is not at issue either way is whether Gold OA itself requires or provides "re-use" rights over and above those capabilities already inherent in Green OA -- hence whether in paying for Gold OA one is indeed paying for something further that is needed for research, yet not already vouchsafed by Green OA.

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As not one, not two, but no fewer than three of my valued OA comrades-at-arms have so far publicly registered their disagreement with my position on one (possibly two) points of detail concerning "re-use" rights, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a closer look at these points to see exactly what is and is not at issue:

Individual re-use capabilities. The concern is about "re-use rights," but I prefer to speak of "re-use capabilities." My OA comrades suggest that these consist of more than just the ability to read, and they are certainly right about that: If a document is OA -- i.e., if its full-text is freely accessible online, immediately and permanently, webwide -- then that means that any individual, webwide, can (1) access the document online, (2) read it, (3) download it, (4) store it (for personal use), (5) print it off (for personal use), (6) "data-mine" it and (7) re-use the results of the data-crunching in further research and research publications (however, they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it).

Robotic harvestability. In addition to the individual re-use capabilities (1-7), there are the following: (8*) Robotic harvesters like Google can harvest the freely available Web-based text (exactly as they harvest all other texts that are freely available on the Web) and inverse-index it, thereby making it searchable by boolean full-text search in their search engines. (9*) Robotic data-miners can also harvest the text, machine-analyse it, and re-use the results of their data-crunching for research purposes in further research and research publications (however, they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it).

The Green OA territory. All the above -- (1)-(7) plus (8*)-(9*) -- already come automatically with the (Green) OA territory when a full-text is made freely accessible online, immediately and permanently, webwide. It is for this reason that I continue to insist -- and this is the fundamental point of disagreement with my three OA comrades -- that there is no need whatsoever for any further re-use rights beyond what already comes automatically with the Green OA territory. In particular, there is no need to pay extra for Gold OA, in order to "purchase" these "extra" re-use rights. Nor is there any need to add any further re-use rights to Gold OA copyright agreements (although formalizing the rights is always fine, and a good idea).

Gold OA includes Green OA. If you have paid a publisher for Gold OA, you have, among other things, certainly paid for the right to deposit your refereed final draft ["postprint"] in your own OA Institutional Repository (along with any XML tagging you may wish to add to facilitate usage, search, harvesting and data-mining): hence you already have (1)-(9*). Hence what you are paying for, if you elect to pay for Gold OA, is not extra re-use rights, but simply Gold OA, which already includes Green OA, which in turn already provides all the requisite re-use capabilities.

Gold OA without Green OA? If any author (or funder) were ever to pay for "Gold OA" without thereby also getting the publisher's blessing to deposit the refereed final draft (postprint) in the author's own Institutional OA Repository (Green OA), then that author (or funder) would be doing something exceedingly foolish. (I know of no "Gold OA" today that does not automatically include Green OA.) But, apart from that, paying for Gold OA is still an unnecessary expenditure today for all except those to whom money is no object and who consider paid Gold OA to be worth the cost because it helps promote Gold OA, reinforcing the fact that it is a potentially viable cost-recovery model. Gold OA itself is certainly not necessary for any re-use needs that are purportedly not fulfillable through Green OA alone.

Pay for Green OA rights? The second possible point of disagreement with my three OA comrades, a more minor one, would be about whether it is worth paying for Gold OA to a hybrid Gray/Gold publisher who does not endorse Green OA self-archiving except if paid for Gold OA: I'm inclined to say that Closed Access self-archiving in your Institutional Repository (IR), along with the IR's "Email Eprint Request" Button, is a much better strategy than paying such a hybrid Gray/Gold publisher for Gold OA in such cases, because it facilitates exception-free IDOA Deposit Mandates. But this is a less important point of disagreement than the logical, practical point about whether paid Gold OA is indeed needed for certain re-use rights.

"Harvesting rights"? I will close on the sole potentially substantive matter on which my three OA comrades do have at least a theoretical point -- but, I will argue, a point that has no practical import: The reason I put an asterisk after 8* and 9* is that it can be argued that whereas the individual uses (1) - (7) do indeed come with the territory if one makes a document freely accessible on the web, this does not necessarily cover robotic uses such as harvesting.

"Could?" is trumped by "Does." I will give a very simple and pragmatic answer: "Can," "could," "cannot" and "could not" are all trumped here by "does." My OA comrades are needlessly reasoning hypothetically in this case, when the objective evidence is already in: "If authors were to self-archive their articles on the web, freely accessibly (Green OA), as described above, could robots like Google harvest and data-mine them?" The answer is a resounding "yes": they could, and can, as demonstrated by that fact that they already do, without exception or challenge, and have been doing so for years now!

Articles vs. books. We are not talking here about the full-texts of books, ambivalently provided to Google by their publishers (and authors), or scanned directly by Google, with certain conditions imposed by their publishers and authors on their re-use. We are talking about authors' final drafts (postprints) of their peer-reviewed journal articles, self-archived free for all by their authors in order to maximize their accessibility, usage and impact. In the case of books, there can be and have been contentious harvesting issues. But in the case of self-archiving, not a single article's harvestability has been contested, and we already have a decade and a half of precedent and practice behind us in this. So those who are worrying about the need to formally guarantee Google's (and other harvesters') "right" to do what they are already doing, without exception or challenge, since the advent of the Web, are worrying about a notional obstacle, not a real one.

OA is not about or for re-publication or re-sale, online or in print; OA is about access and use. Before replying to insist that I am wrong about about "re-use" being a nonproblem for self-archived postprints, may I ask my readers please to recall (i) the parentheticals I carefully inserted earlier, concerning both individual users and harvesters: "(though they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it)". None of that is part of OA, nor has it ever been ("BBB" Declarations to the contrary notwithstanding). OA is a brand new possibility, opened up by a brand new medium: the Web. "Online re-publishing or re-sale rights" were never part of OA, any more than on-paper re-publishing or re-sale rights were -- nor do they need to be, because of everything that comes with the OA territory (i.e., with being freely accessible to one and all online).

What about Gray publishers? Recall also that (ii) Gold OA already includes Green OA (as part of what you are paying for) and that (iii) with Gray publishers (i.e., those that are neither Green nor Gold) the interim solution for now is Immediate Deposit mandates plus the semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" (or "Fair Use") Button for any Closed Access deposits. That does provide for individual researchers' uses and re-uses even for this "Gray" literature (meaning non-Green, non-Gold journal articles) -- although it does not provide for robotic harvesting and data-mining of the (Closed Access) full-texts, just their metadata.

IDOA and the Button -- or Paid Gold OA? Here, as I said, my colleagues and I may agree to disagree on the second, minor point, as to whether (a) it is a better strategy to rely, for now, on mandated IDOA and the Button for articles published in non-Green journals (38%), trusting that that will eventually force those journals to go Green (62%)? or, rather, (b) it is a better strategy to pay for Gold OA right now? But note that what is not at issue either way is whether Gold OA itself requires or provides "re-use" rights over and above those capabilities already provided by Green OA -- hence whether in paying for Gold OA one is indeed paying for something further that is needed for research, but not already vouchsafed by Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The UK Research Assessment Exercise has taken a few steps forward and a few steps back:

(1) In evaluating and rewarding the research performance of universities department by department, future RAEs (after 2008) will no longer, as before, assess only 4 selected papers per researcher, among those researchers selected for inclusion: All papers, by all departmental researchers, will be assessed. (Step forward)

(2) The assessment will be in terms of objective metrics, not just in terms of panel review. (Step forward)

(3) The metrics will be multiple, rather than just a single metric. (Step forward)

(4) The new system will apply to science, technology, and engineering, at least. (Step forward)

(5)The new system may only apply to science, technology and engineering. (Step Backward)

(6) The metrics considered may be only three, picked a priori: (i) prior research income, (ii) postgraduate numbers, and (iii) the "impact factor" (i.e., the average number of citations) of the journal in which each article was published. (Step Backward)

As I have pointed out many times before, (i) prior research income, if given too much weight, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and reduces the RAE to a multiplication factor on competitive research funding. The result would be that instead of the current two autonomous components in the UK's Dual Support System (RAE and RCUK), there would only be one: RCUK (and other) competitive proposal funding, multiplied by the RAE metric rank, dominated by prior funding.

To counterbalance against this, a rich spectrum of potential metrics needs to be tested in the 2008 RAE, and validated against the panel review rankings, which will still be collected in the 2008 parallel RAE. Besides (i) research income, (ii) postgraduate student counts, and (iii) journal impact factors, there is a vast spectrum of other candidate metrics, including (iv) citation metrics for each article itself (rather than just its journal's average), (iv) download metrics, (v) citation and download growth curve metrics, (vi) co-citation metrics, (vii) hub/authority metrics, (viii) endogamy/interdisciplinarity metrics (ix) book citation metrics, (x) web link metrics, (xi) comment tag metrics, (xii) course-pack metrics, and many more.

All these candidate metrics should be tested and validated against the panel rankings in RAE 2008, in a multiple regression equation. The selection and weighting of each metric should be adjusted, discipline by discipline, rationally and empirically, rather than a priori, as is being proposed now.

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.

(I might add that RCUK's plans to include "potential economic benefits to the UK" among the criteria for competitive research funding could do with a little more rational and empirical support too, rather than being adopted a priori.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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SUMMARY: Given the undeniable, irreversible and growing clamour for Open Access (OA) worldwide, journal publishers face two Prisoners' Dilemmas. (1) The first concerns whether to continue business as usual, to mounting opprobrium from the academic community as well as the tax-paying public, or to convert directly to Gold OA now, at the risk that institutional subscriptions at current prices for incoming journals may not transmute stably into institutional "memberships" for outgoing article publication costs at the same institutional price. If publishers convert from institutional subscriptions to institutional Gold OA "memberships" today, they counter the opprobrium and lock in current subscription rates for a year (or whatever duration-deal is agreed with institutions), but they risk institutional memberships defecting after the duration elapses, with cost-recovery fragmented to an anarchic individual author/article level that may not be enough to make ends meet. (2) The second Prisoners' Dilemma facing publishers is that if they instead counter the opprobrium by converting to Green OA now (as 62% of them already have done), Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates may still force their conversion to Gold eventually, but because access-provision and archiving (and their costs) will by then be performed by the distributed network of mandated Green OA Institutional Repositories, the revenues (and expenses) of journal publishing then may be reduced from what they are now. (Perhaps this can all be integrated into just a single Prisoners' Dilemma -- or perhaps it is not a Prisoners' Dilemma at all: just the optimal and inevitable outcome of the powerful new potential unleashed by the online medium for the communication of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research.)

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Although I no longer write much about it -- because there are strong reasons for according priority to Green OA Self-Archiving first, and I am ever fretful about doing anything that might instead help get us bogged down, yet again, in passive, pre-emptive speculation rather than practical action -- I too expect and welcome an eventual transition to Gold OA journal publishing, and have done so from the very beginning.

The question, of course, is how we get there from here. My own expectation (based on much-rehearsed reasons and supporting evidence) is that it will be the eventual cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA that both forces and funds the transition to Gold OA, with the institutional cancellation savings paying the institutional Gold OA publication fees. But this scenario is predicated on two necessary prior conditions: (a) universal Green OA and (b) universal journal cancellations.

This scenario for converting to Gold OA does not work if it is not universal; in particular, it cannot unfold "gradually" and piecemeal, either journal by journal or institution by institution. The three reasons for this are that (1) the true, fair costs of Gold OA publishing are not known at this time, (2) nor is the money available to pay for them, (3) nor (and this is perhaps the most important) would publishers be willing to downsize to those asymptotic reduced costs at this time of their own accord. Only (a) the cancellation pressure from universal Green OA, together with (b) the distributed infrastructure provided by universal Green OA -- allowing the functions (and costs) of access-provision and archiving to be offloaded from journal publishers and libraries onto the distributed network of Green OA Institutional Repositories -- will suffice to force both the downsizing and the transition, while at the same time freeing the funds to pay for it.

(My profound ambivalence about again raising this speculative hypothesis concerning the future of journal publishing at this time is that it risks delaying universal Green OA, by increasing publisher resistance to the Green OA mandates that are needed to bring OA about. Yet I keep having to resurrect the hypothesis now and again, as a counter-hypothesis, to answer equally speculative hypotheses about a direct transition from non-OA to Gold OA, neglecting the nonhypothetical, tried, tested, demonstrated and hence feasible, intermediate step of universal mandated Green OA, which is, apart from all else, an end in itself, being eo ipso 100% OA.)

The trouble with the "flip-over" hypothesis (the aggregator's-eye view proposed by then-CEO of Ingenta, Mark Rowse in 2003 -- see Peter Suber's recent summary) is the same as the trouble with the "institutional membership" strategy of BioMed Central as well as the "hybrid Gold" option offered by a number of publishers today (the author/institution can choose either conventional, no-fee non-OA publishing or fee-based OA publishing, paid for per individual article published): The reality is that today most of the potential institutional funds for paying for Gold OA (whatever the price) are still committed to paying for institutional journal subscriptions. Although the idea of locking this all in at current subscription rates, using the very same money, and just "flipping" -- from institutions as users, buying-in journals (i.e., annual collections of articles published by other institutions), to institutions as providers, paying-out for publishing their own individual articles -- sounds appealing (especially to an aggregator, and as long as we forget for the moment that the current subscription prices and publishing costs are arbitrary and inflated, not reflecting the substantial economies to be made from distributing the access-provision and archiving load across the network of Green OA institutional repositories), there is a logical problem inherent in the minutiae of this flip that make it into something of an Escher drawing:

An institution can commit in advance to paying for the buy-in of a certain yearly collection of journals for its users. But can it commit in advance to publishing, in any particular journal, a certain yearly number of articles by its authors? Are even the prior years' publication figures for that journal from that institution a valid predictor of what will be submitted by that institution to that journal the following year? And can a peer-reviewed journal commit in advance to accepting a certain yearly quota of papers from a given institution? (Is it not the referees who must decide, article by article, journal by journal?)

Is it not more likely that the yearly institutional quota of articles published in any particular journal will vary substantially from year to year, and from institution to institution? And is it not the author who must decide, in each case, where he wishes to submit his article (and for the referees to decide whether they will accept it)?

The equation does balance out, even at current prices, if the "flip" is universal. But as long as it is instead piecemeal and local to a journal or institution, it contains certain internal contradictions. While there is no universal OA, individual institutions will still need subscription access to the individual journals their users require. (This is equally true if the subscription access is transfered from the journal level to the individual article level, through "pay-per-view.") As long as an institution is paying for those annual institutional incoming content access-fees, that money is not available to pay for outgoing article publication-fees.

If an individual journal agrees to make all of an institution's outgoing articles OA in exchange for the current subscription fee, that's fine -- so far that's still just a bonus for renaming the "institutional subscription fee" an "institutional publication fee." The institution continues to get access to all the incoming articles in that journal, and, in addition, its own outgoing articles in that journal become OA: What subscribing institution would not happily agree to receiving that bonus as well, in exchange for merely rebaptizing its current "subscription charges" as "publication charges"?

But then (assuming this no-risk bonus is offered to all subscribing institutions rather than just one, and they all accept this renaming), the result would of course be that, next year, virtually all articles in that particular journal become Gold OA, for all institutions, whether or not they publish in or subscribe to that journal. So, the following year (or whenever the "membership" deal elapses), why bother to subscribe to that journal at all, especially for institutions that only publish the occasional article in it every few years?

In evolutionary biology, this is what is called an "evolutionarily unstable strategy". At the single-journal level, it is a recipe for inviting cancellations, soon. It does not scale, either across time, or across individual journals.

The same offer may sound less risky at the publisher "big-deal" level, in which it is a joint subscription to a whole fleet of journals that is at issue, rather than a single journal. But, first, if that is viable at all, it is only viable for publishers with fleets of journals. And even there, it is still the authors (not their institutions) who decide, individually, each year, in what journal they should publish. Libraries can consult annual user statistics to decide what journals to subscribe to next year, but it is not clear that this also translates coherently into author publication statistics. Again, libraries may be happy to take the Gold OA bonus in exchange for just renaming their fleet-subscription fees "publication fees" today, but what happens in subsequent years, when it is author statistics that are consulted on which fleets of publishing fee "memberships" to "renew"?

The system may stay stable for a while, if there is wholesale transition by most journals at a fleet level. In fact, initially, the ones most at risk for cancellation might then be the journals that do not offer the OA bonus in exchange for renaming their subscription fees publication fees; so this would in fact act to further universalize the transition to Gold (a good thing). But we should be clear on the fact that this exercise would have been a name-game, alongside a wholesale voluntary transition to Gold OA publishing on the part of publishers, with libraries ready to commit to pay for it at current rates, for now, as "membership fees."

(For the subscribing institution, the fee-based "product" was incoming journals or fleets of journals; but for the publishing institution, the fee-based "service" is based on individual outgoing articles, each in its own author's chosen journal. A "flip" here would be rather like all countries agreeing to pay McDonalds, Burger King, etc. a flat annual rate out of taxes for all the burgers their tax-payers eat annually, based on their running national averages for the latest N years: Fine for the fixed big-mac-eating tax-payer, perhaps, but not for the ones who never touch the stuff, or prefer more wholesome fare for their money. And that's without taking into account that this would also lock in current prices in a way that is impervious to supply and demand; or the possibility that it could prove a lot cheaper to produce burgers some other way, some day. McDonalds' promise to "pass on" any future economies to the consumer would sound pretty hollow in this captive-market "membership" arrangement.)

Nevertheless, I'd certainly be happy if this could all be agreed quickly and amicably, between publishers and institutional libraries: But can it? Or would publishers, in a kind of prisoner's dilemma, worry that institutions might then defect on some of their journals -- the ones they currently subscribe to and use, but in which their authors do not publish much? The prospect of such selective "cancellations" might well be enough to keep publishers from making the first move, preferring instead to stick with subscriptions and just offer hybrid OA (as many already do) as an option, at an extra institutional fee per article, with no risk to the publisher, rather than as an unconditional freebie in exchange for the current subscription fee (simply renamed), relying on faith that "memberships" will stay loyal in the long term even after everything becomes OA.

I can't second-guess the outcome of this prisoner's dilemma concerning voluntary publisher conversion to Gold OA, but I can already say confidently that the current option of hybrid Gold OA won't scale, because there isn't the extra money to pay the extra OA fees while the potential money for paying them is still paying for subscriptions. So hybrid Gold OA fees will remain just an occasional extra bonus to publishers (and an extra expense to institutions).

The one thing that just might encourage publishers to make the full transition to Gold OA voluntarily, however, is the worry that if they wait to make the transition under the anarchic pressure of Green OA self-archiving and self-archiving mandates at the article level, then the transition may indeed come with a forced downsizing and loss of income, as I have hypothesized, whereas if they convert voluntarily now, at the journal level, then they might hope to "lock in" current prices for a while longer yet. This is in fact a second prisoner's dilemma, and I certainly can't second-guess its outcome either, except to say that if it does drive the transition, then it will have been the prospect of Green OA mandates that induced the transition, rather than the actual practice of Green OA mandates -- but the cause will still have been the Green OA mandates!

What the research community must not do in the meanwhile, however, is to just sit passively, waiting to see whether or not the publisher and library community resolve their Prisoners' Dilemma(s) in favour of Gold OA. Rather than "waiting for Gold," I hope we will continue pushing full-speed for 100% Green OA by mandating it. That way we win, regardless of how the Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved. The Gold OA dilemma, after all, is between the publishing community and the library community, whereas Green OA is entirely between the research community and itself.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Individual departments should not sit and wait for their university to get its OA act together: Unless a consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide OA self-archiving mandate can be reached promptly, departments should go ahead and adopt their own bottom-up mandates (the "patchwork mandates" recommended by Prof. Arthur Sale), as Southampton's ECS did in 2003. Apart from maximising the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output, an OA Repository (with a self-archiving mandate) can serve as an institution's or department's internal record, ending its need to rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor and assess its own research output. (Southampton now has at least 13 EPrints Repositories to date; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.)

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On Mon, 1 Oct 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

NM: I know that Dr Leslie Carr wrote: "...we genuinely can't answer questions about the percentage of our research output that gets put into our repository, because we have [no] independent way of knowing what the size of our research output is!"

But a quick search in the staff publications site www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=nnnn (where nnnn is a random integer between 1 and 1890) gives many publications that do not seem to be available in http://eprints.soton.ac.uk

It would be interesting to know the % deposit rate in ECS from all faculties (Divisions, Research Centres) in Southampton University. Could someone do a quick spidering of allstaff/staffpubs.asp?

The ever-alert Napoleon Miradon, has raised two very important and valid questions in connection with my posting about Les Carr's estimates of the current deposit rate in the repository of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. One of the questions is an explicit empirical one, and the other is an implicit methodological one. I shall answer the methodological question first. Reformulated explicitly, the question is:

Since, apart from their Repositories themselves, there is today no record of their total research output, Southampton -- and most other universities and departments worldwide -- have no way of knowing what their total research output is:

So how can they determine what percentage of that total research output is being self-archived?

The answer is that that can only be estimated today by consulting external databases, such as ISI's Web of Science, or ACM's Digital Library (or Google Scholar), to sample what has been published, and then to check back to see whether they are in the Repository. That is what Les Carr did, and that is where his percentages come from.

The point to note here is that one of the added benefits of having an OA Repository and a self-archiving mandate is that once the deposit rate has been confirmed (by such external sampling) to be at or near 100%, the Repository itself can be used as the internal record of the institution's or department's research output. Count that -- alongside the fact that it maximises the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output -- as yet another reason for having an OA Repository, and for mandating deposit: It is a very powerful and effective form of internal record-keeping, so an institution (or department) can track its own research productivity as well as submit it for external performance assessment. Having and filling its own OA Repository also releases the institution or department from the need to consult and rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor its own research output.

But I think M. Miradon in fact understood the fact that Repository deposit rates currently have to be estimated through sampling; I have only made the methodological point explicit for readers who might have needed the clarification. We now move on to M. Miradon's empirical point: He has done a bit of random sampling himself, and indeed he has managed to do this using a Southampton-internal record of Southampton publications: He has sampled the staff publications list in Southampton's Department of Civil Engineering, and he has found many publications to be absent from Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science's IR: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

But the explanation for this is very simple: I was reporting the results for the 4-year-old Repository and mandate of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton (ECS), not the Department of Civil Engineering! I stressed -- in connection also with Arthur Sale's recommendation that universities should promptly proceed with adopting bottom-up departmental mandates ("patchwork mandates") until/unless they have rapid consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide mandate -- that ECS's mandate, the world's first OA mandate as far as I know, was a departmental mandate, not a university-wide mandate.

Which prompts me to describe a few more historical details about self-archiving policy at the University of Southampton: As anyone can see by consulting ROARMAP, Southampton does have another, bigger Repository, and another Repository policy: It has a university-wide Institutional Repository (IR) -- ePrints Soton -- and has had it for nearly as long as it has had the ECS Departmental Repository ("DR"). Southampton also now has a university-wide mandate proposal (not yet announced), one that has even been officially approved; but it has not yet been officially adopted.

(Don't ask me why it is taking Southampton so long to adopt its approved self-archiving mandate! I have no idea, except that I note that the delay is depressingly commensurate with similar bureaucratic delays at many other institutions. All the more reason for individual departments like ECS to push ahead with Arthur Sale's "Patchwork Mandate" rather than sitting around waiting for their university to get its act together: Southampton has at least 13 EPrints Repositories; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.)

Last point: I confidently count a self-archiving mandate a success if it generates a deposit rate of 100%. That means the keystrokes are getting done; and it is (and always was) keystrokes alone that have been standing between the research community and the 100% Open Access to its own research output that has been within its reach ever since the dawn of the online era.

Les Carr points out that some of the ECS Repository deposits are Closed Access (CA) rather than Open Access (OA). That is not a problem, because the Repository's semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (also known as the "Fair Use" Button) can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA during a Closed Access embargo period, providing for all user needs until either embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths under mounting webwide pressure from the increasingly palpable benefits of OA, or authors simply tire of performing the extra keystrokes involved in fulfilling individual eprint requests one by one, and hit the master key that transforms their deposit from "CA" to "OA" once and for all.

A slightly more problematic case is the one where the authors have only done the keystrokes to deposit their metadata, but have failed to do the last keystroke, the one that deposits their full-text (whether as OA or CA). There we have a visible but orphaned reference, with no text to request or send. The EPrints IR software has not implemented a second button, with which would-be users can prod the author to deposit the missing text (and then send it), because we are confident that this dysfunctional practice is becoming increasingly rare and will remedy itself with time and experience of its own accord -- inasmuch as it needs to be remedied at all: For there are cases where an author may legitimately wish to deposit only a paper's metadata, for record-keeping purposes, but not the text itself. Examples would be seminars and conference papers that are written but not published, being merely precursors of later published papers. And of course there are books, of which the author may not wish to deposit the full text! ECS's self-archiving mandate applies only to published, peer-reviewed articles (in journals or refereed conference proceedings). Authors are not obliged to deposit every text they have ever keyed, let alone make them all OA!

NM: I have received some results from a random spidering of staff publication lists at www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=nnnn
Here are the first three entries:

Prof. Mike McDonald: 307 publications (17 in ePrints Soton)
Prof. Chris Clayton: 221 publications (14 in ePrints Soton)
Prof. AbuBakr Bahaj: 155 publications (25 in ePrints Soton)

I am afraid I did not explain sufficiently explicitly: U. Southampton has a number of other Repositories (at least 13) besides that of the ECS Department. The biggest of them is the university-wide IR, ePrints Soton.

However, as explained in my reply above, whereas the departmental mandate of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was officially adopted in January 2003, the university-wide mandate, though already officially approved some time ago, is still (for reasons unknown to me!) awaiting official adoption. In the meanwhile, the university as a whole has no self-archiving mandate yet, so whatever deposits you find in ePrints Soton will be the usual spontaneous (unmandated) ones (for which the worldwide baseline deposit rate is about 15%), probably increased in this case beyond that baseline also by library mediation and encouragement (which Arthur Sale's analyses show to produce a better deposit rate, but nothing anywhere near Alma Swan's predicted 80-90% for mandated deposit). The deposit of only a subset of a researcher's total publications reflects the fact that depositing current and future papers requires far fewer keystrokes and effort than depositing one's full prior opus (which may even require scanning and OCR) -- though eventually that should of course all be deposited too!.

I hope this dispels any further ambiguity!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

From Peter Suber's Open Access News:

"How many publishers have publicly disavowed PRISM or distanced themselves from it?  Nine and counting (with links to their public statements): Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, University of Chicago Press.  How many publishers have been identified on the PRISM web site as members of the PRISM 'coalition'? Zero."

Hiring the high-profile PR pitbull Eric Dezenhall seems to be turning into something of a high-priced, high-profile PR disaster for the publishers' anti-OA lobby.

Andrew Adams (2007) has written a powerful, relentless and devastating critique of (the Open Access aspects of) Kevin Taylor's (2007) "Copyright and research: an academic publisher's perspective." Adams cites other archivangelists in support of his position, but this lucid, timely, rigorous and compelling synthesis is entirely his own. It will be seen and cited as a landmark in the research community's delayed but inexorable transition to Open Access.

Taylor, K. (2007) Copyright and research: an academic publisher's perspective. SCRIPT-ed 4(2) 233-236

Adams, Andrew A, (2007) Copyright and research: an archivangelist's perspective. 4(3) SCRIPT-ed 285

(Kevin Taylor is Intellectual Property Director at Cambridge University Press, a publisher that is on the side of the angels insofar as its author self-archiving policy is concerned, which is as green as green can be. However, although Kevin's views on other aspects of copyright and publishing may well be irreproachable, his views on Open Access need substantial rethinking.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum