Open Access Archivangelism

Commentary on: "Putting Science into Science Publishing" by Joseph Esposito, Publishing Frontier (blog) December 11 2007.

The posting contains the by now familiar litany of lapses:

(1) Open Access is not only -- nor even primarily -- about Open Access Publishing (Gold OA): It is about OA itself, which includes Green OA, the far bigger and faster-growing form of OA: Authors making their own published, peer-reviewed non-OA journal articles (not only or primarily their unpublished preprints) OA by self-archiving them in their own OA Institutional Repositories. Only 10% of journals are Gold OA, but over 90% of journals endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving by their authors -- with over 60% endorsing the immediate self-archiving of the author's final peer-reviewed draft.

(2) The question of whether librarians will cancel journals is not about Gold OA: It is about Green OA. Joseph Esposito contemplates whole-journal cancellations of subscriptions to Gold OA journals, whereas the speculations have been about whether and when librarians would cancel non-OA journals as Green OA self-archiving grows. Green OA self-archiving grows anarchically, not journal by journal. So not only is it hard for a librarian to determine whether and when all the articles in a given journal have become OA, but all the evidence (from the publishers) to date in the few areas (of physics) where Green OA self-archiving is already at or near 100% is that there are as yet no detectable cancellations as a result of 100% Green OA. (Rather, the publishers themselves seem to be adopting Gold OA in these areas: SCOAP3.)

(3) The OA citation impact advantage is not about unpublished or low-impact Gold OA journal articles versus high-impact non-OA journal articles: It is about the additional citation impact provided by OA, for any non-OA article, including those articles published in high impact journals! They don't lose their non-OA citations: they just gain further OA citations.

(4) The international, interdisciplinary survey evidence of Swan and Associates did not just tautologically confirm that people comply with requirements if required: The point was that over 95% of researchers report that they would comply with a Green OA self-archiving mandate from their employers or funders and 81% report they would do so willingly. (Only 14% said they would comply unwillingly, and 5% said they would not comply.) Arthur Sale's comparisons of actual mandates and compliance rates confirmed these findings, with spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving rates hovering around 15%, encouraged self-archiving rates rising to about 30% and mandated, incentivized self-archiving rates approaching 100% within two years. (Not surprising, since academics are busy, and would be publishing much less too, if it were not for the existing universal publish-or-perish mandate.) Self-archiving is rewarded by the resulting enhanced research impact metrics, which their institutions also collect and credit, if researchers self-archive. [Added: see also Swan's rebuttal.]



In sum, OA is not about publishing, it is about maximizing research progress and impact. The outcome -- 100% OA -- is optimal and inevitable for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public.

Publishers need to adapt to the optimal and inevitable for research. Research is not conducted and reported in order to provide revenues to the publishing industry. The publishing industry is providing a value-added service -- which, in the online era is rapidly scaling down to just the management of peer review and the certification of its outcome: The peers review for free, the authors can generate and revise their electronic texts themselves, and their institutions can archive and provide access to the final, peer-reviewed drafts in their OA Institutional Repositories.

What is left of peer-reviewed journal publishing, then, is to implement the peer review itself, and to certify the outcome with the journal's name and track-record. For now, journals are still providing much more than that (paper edition, mark-up, PDF, distribution), in exchange for journal subscriptions, and as long there is still a market for all that, the publishing status quo remains.

If and when subscriptions should ever become unsustainable because of universal Green OA, journals can downsize and convert to Gold OA as SCOAP3 is already doing. But for now, it is up to the research community -- and the research community alone -- to hasten the transition to universal Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum