Open Access Archivangelism

Why was the WHO IGWG OA recommendation downgraded from "requiring" OA to just "strongly encouraging" it? As Manon Ress and Peter Suber point out, this is simply a replay of the failed NIH policy, likewise downgraded from a requirement, tried for 2 years, resoundingly unsuccessful, and now being upgraded again to a requirement by the US Congress (only to be vetoed by George Bush). As repeatedly shown by Alma Swan's surveys of what authors say they will do and Arthur Sale's studies of what authors actually do, only a requirement (mandate) works.

The following prior wording:

(b) promote public access to the results of government funded research, through requirements that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts.

has for some reason been changed in the November Geneva version to:

(b) promote public access to the results of government funded research, by strongly encouraging that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts.

George Santayana (on being condemned to repeat history) comes to mind.

---

Candour prompts the following shame-faced disclosure: In the very first mandate recommendation of them all, this feckless archivangelist also cravenly allowed himself to be persuaded once -- but only once! -- to equivocate on mandating vs. "strongly encouraging," despite having insisted on the need to mandate self-archiving from the outset. To mortify me, compare the original wording of the 2003 recommendation first submitted to the UK Parliamentary Select Committee with the subsequent (downgraded) version. Fortunately, only one mention of "mandate" was diluted to "strong encouragement." The rest of the mentions are all the m-word, and it was that, fortunately, that the wise members of the Select Committee hewed to in their actual recommendation...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Michael Smith [MS] (Anthropology, ASU, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

MS: "The practice of author payment for open access journals may work for the hard sciences, but it presents major difficulties for various categories of scholars..."

Paying to publish journal articles presents difficulties for any author who does not have the money to pay, regardless of field. But it is not an obstacle to providing Open Access (OA) itself:

Although only about 10% of journals are OA journals ("Gold OA Publishing"), over 62% of journals are "Green," meaning that they have already given their green light to all their authors to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts ("postprints") OA by depositing them in their own Institutional (or Central) Repositories (IRs) upon acceptance for publication -- and immediately making them OA ("Green OA Self-Archiving"). Another 29% of journals endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint, with embargoes of various lengths on making the postprint OA.

(The IR software also makes it possible for all users to request and for all authors to provide almost-instant almost-OA even for Closed or Embargoed Access postprints on an individual Fair-Use basis by means of a semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" button. That means 62% instant OA plus 38% almost-instant almost-OA.)

OA self-archiving (Green OA) costs nothing. But it should also be pointed out that the majority of Gold OA journals today do not charge for publication -- and those that do, waive the fee if the author cannot afford to pay. (The much larger number of hybrid-Gold publishers -- offering the author the option to pay for Gold OA -- do not waive the Gold OA fee, but most of them are also Green.)

MS: "(1) social sciences and humanities, where grants are smaller and fewer than in the natural and physical sciences."

All authors in the social sciences and humanities should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(2) graduate students and younger scholars."

All graduate students and younger scholars should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(3) scholars in the third world."

Scholars in the third world should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "The author-pay model puts people in the above categories (and others) at a serious disadvantage. It would effectively leave out an entire sector of scholarship in the third world. Panglossian arguments about convincing funding agencies to pay for author charges, or transferring university library budgets from subscriptions to author charges, ignore the current financial plight of research in most of the world today."

No need of Pangloss for OA: All authors can provide Green OA to articles (62% immediate full OA, 38% almost-immediate almost-OA) by self-archiving their postprints in their IRs, today.

Green OA self-archiving mandates from researchers' own institutions and funders are now on the way worldwide. (The US congress has recently approved a particular big NIH Green OA Mandate, in a Health Bill which has just been vetoed by President Bush, but it may still be adopted if the veto is over-ridden, and could be implemented by NIH and US universities in light of congressional adoption in either case. Six of seven UK research funding councils have already mandated Green OA after it was recommended but not adopted by Parliament. There are already a total of 32 funder and university mandates adopted worldwide, and at least nine more proposed or pending.)

Once adopted globally, these Green OA mandates will immediately provide 62% OA and 38% almost-OA, and the Closed Access embargoes will soon recede under the growing pressure from the powerful and obvious benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the tax-paying public that funds them, and the vast R&D industry.

(Eventually, 100% Green OA may even lead to the cancellation of non-OA journals, thereby releasing those institutional subscription funds to pay the much lower costs of Gold OA publishing for an institution's researchers -- costs which reduce to just those of peer-review alone, with all access-provision and archiving now offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA IRs.)

But there is no need to keep waiting for Gold OA: Green OA can be provided right now.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum