Self-Archiving Mandates

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SUMMARY: Sandy Thatcher (President, AAUP) thinks universities prefer building football fields to paying for publishing. I reply that universities are already paying for publishing today, via their journal subscriptions, and that if that cash is ever saved (because subscriptions are cancelled, mandated Green OA having made all journal articles accessible online for free) and journals convert to Gold OA publishing, universities will still need to "publish or perish," which still trumps building football fields. So universities will redirect a portion of their windfall cancellation savings to cover that basic necessity. Only a portion of those savings will be needed, though, because journals will have downsized to just providing peer review, which costs much less than publishing does now. Universities' own institutional repositories will take over the burden of providing the documents, the archiving and the access.

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Sandy Thatcher [ST], President, American Association of University Publishers (AAUP) wrote in liblicense:

ST: "I wish I had as much faith as Stevan [Harnad] that the 'of course' follows from his preceding argument.

'And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.'

"The cynic in me says that it is just as likely that universities will use the "windfall savings" to expand their football stadiums!

"Maybe universities in Britain act "rationally" in this way to move available funds toward supporting research as a top priority. The history of higher education in the U.S. suggests that this is not always the top priority that probably everyone on this listserv would wish it to be."

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The plain fact is that neither publishers nor universities are faced with this eventuality now. And there is certainly no need or justification for demanding that universities pre-empt it, by "committing" in advance to fund anything whatsoever, at this time.

The academic rule -- and for research universities, it definitely trumps football fields, otherwise we are talking about the forces that trump research itself, and that goes far beyond the scope of this discussion -- is Publish or Perish. Today, in our still non-OA world, publishing is being paid for by the subscriber-university, not by the author-university (though they are largely the same university).

Hence, the only thing missing today is OA itself (and perhaps some more football fields) -- not some sort of advance commitment by each university that mandates OA to pay (journal) publishers for anything else at all. Journal publishers are already being paid in full for what they are selling today, and the universities are the buyers. Paying or pledging anything more would simply amount to double-dipping at this time.

Self-archiving mandates are providing universities, their researchers and research with exactly what they are missing today: OA. OA (in case it is not already evident by now) is simply the natural online-age extension of Publish or Perish itself: The reason universities already mandate that their researchers must have their research peer-reviewed and published is that unpublished, unvalidated research is no research at all: it leads to no benefits to anyone, neither knowledge fans nor football fans. Unvalidated, unpublished research, sitting in a desk drawer, may as well not have been done at all. No one can access it, use it, apply it, build upon it.

And research that may as well not have been done at all may as well not have been funded at all, by either the university or the tax-payer.

So we already have Publish or Perish, and in the online age, we have, in addition, "Self-Archive to Flourish," because unnecessary access-barriers are also unnecessary barriers to using, applying and building upon research. Toll-access today is just a bigger desk-drawer.

Toll-booths were necessary in the paper era, to pay the essential costs of generating and disseminating hard copies. (That -- plus peer review -- was what "publishing" meant, way back then.) But today, in the online era, the essential costs of making research accessible to any would-be user webwide reduce to just the costs of implementing peer review -- and those costs (and then some) are currently being paid in full by university journal subscriptions, thank you very much!

So Ian Russell (Chief Executive, ALPSP) is quite mistaken to call his old alma mater, the University of Southampton, a "parasite" for having been the first university in the world to adopt an "unfunded" Green OA self-archiving mandate (beginning with the mandate of Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science in 2001, now university-wide).

What Southampton (and, since then, over twenty other universities and departments, including, Harvard, twice) as well as over twenty research funding agencies (starting with the UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee's mandate recommendation in 2003, and lately including RCUK's, ERC's and NIH's implemented mandates) have done in mandating Green OA for their own research output is not parasitic by any stretch -- while universities continue to pay the costs of publication through subscriptions. Indeed, such mandates could only be "funded" if universities were foolish enough to fund double-dipping by publishers (which Ian rightly disavows), or agreed to lock themselves into paying the current asking price for whatever goods and services publishers bundle into their current product, come what may.

So, as I said, things would only begin to be parasitic if universities elected not to pay for the costs of publishing their own research once those publishing costs were no longer being covered by subscriptions (from other universities).

For if (research) universities elected to build football fields out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings even after the (hypothetical OA-induced) collapse of subscriptions as the means of covering the (sole remaining essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing (i.e., peer review), then research, researchers, and research universities would simply perish: Publish or Perish.

If this extinction is indeed fated to happen, please blame football -- force majeure -- not OA, or university parasitism! But until and unless football really does prevail in the Academy [I'm not claiming it couldn't!], trust that if push ever comes to shove, the Publish or Perish Mandate itself will see to it that the pennies from the universities' windfall subscription cancellation savings that need to be redirected to pay for the true remaining costs -- of getting their own research output refereed and published -- can and will indeed be so redirected. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

But the point is that there is no Necessity -- hence no Parasitism -- now.

Just a pressing need for universities to put a long-overdue end to their needless daily, weekly, monthly, yearly research impact loss, which has been accumulating, foolishly, gratuitously, and irretrievably, since at least the 1990's.

This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly -- to historians in hindsight. To quote the wag (in a 1999 "Opinion piece... [that did] not necessarily reflect the views of D-Lib Magazine, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, or DARPA" [at the time!]):

"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us..."

So the big lesson that still remains to be learned is a lesson for the universities: it is they (not publishers) who needlessly delayed (by well over a decade) adopting the natural PostGutenberg upgrade of their paper-era Publish or Perish Mandates to extend them to the self-archiving of their own peer-reviewed research output, so as to maximize its usage and impact.

The only lesson journal publishers need to learn from this is that they are -- and always were -- merely service-providers for the universities, who in turn are the research-providers, and paying (through the teeth) for the publishers' service, until further notice.

OA is obviously optimal for research, researchers and their institutions. The publishing tail needs to learn to stop trying to wag the research dog. Adapt to whatever is best for the research-providers and the symbiosis (not parasitism) will continue, felicitously, as it was always destined to do.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Ian Russell (CEO of ALPSP) is an alumnus of U. Southampton, the institution that designed and adopted the world's first Green OA self-archiving mandate (first as a departmental mandate, then university-wide).
    Ian suggests that his alma mater's mandate is "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By unfunded, Ian does not mean that Southampton isn't funding its own Institutional Repositories (IRs) (it is); he means that Southampton does not provide funds to pay the costs of publication.
    But of course Southampton (like all other research universities) is already funding the costs of publication: through its journal subscriptions. Subscriptions buy in the research output of other universities; this has nothing to do with mandating the self-archiving of Southampton's own research output.
    If and when all universities mandate self-archiving, and if and when the resultant universal Green OA causes subscriptions to become unsustainable as the means of covering publishing costs, then journals will convert to Gold OA publishing and universities will pay the publication costs for their own research output out of a portion of their windfall subscription cancellation savings. This is already guaranteed by universities' longstanding mandate to "Publish or Perish." (No risk of "parasitism," because otherwise the "parasite" would perish.)
    But for publishers to ask universities to pay publication costs now -- at current asking prices, and while the potential funds are still tied up paying for it via subscriptions -- is either to seek double-dipping or to seek an indefensible hedge against any downsizing and cost-cutting that might be induced by mandated OA.
    OA is optimal and inevitable for research, and feasible right now, through Green OA self-archiving mandates. Both universities and publishers will adapt quite naturally to its sequelae.

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The view of Ian Russell (who is Chief Executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers [ALPSP] and also an alumnus of the University of Southampton) on the subject of the University of Southampton's Green Open Access (OA) Self-Archiving Mandate is presented in a series of exchanges on liblicense.

Ian criticizes the University of Southampton's mandate as "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By "unfunded," he does not mean that the University of Southampton does not fund its own Institutional Repository (which it of course does -- although it does not cost much); he means that the University of Southampton does not fund the cost of publishing its own research output.

But universities do not fund the cost of publishing their own research output: What universities fund is the cost of publishing other universities' research output. And they fund that through subscriptions, which buy in access to the peer-reviewed research output of other universities. That is called the subscription model for publication cost-recovery, and until recently, it was the universal model.

Recently, a small but growing minority (c. 10%) of journals have made their contents freely accessible online to all users. These are called Open Access (OA) journals, and publishing in them is called the "golden road" to OA -- the self-archiving of non-OA journal articles being the "green road" to OA (and that, not Gold OA, is what Southampton, Harvard and the other universities are mandating).

Moreover, as Peter Suber frequently points out, the majority of this minority of Gold OA journals still recovers costs on the subscription (or subsidy) model too. Fewer than half of them levy publication fees, which are then paid for either by the author's research funder or the author -- or, in the case of special "membership" agreements with BioMed Central journals or consortial agreements with SCOAP3 journals, the author's university.

Ian Russell is looking for an advance guarantee from universities that mandate Green OA self-archiving that they will pay Gold OA publishing costs. It is not clear whether he means that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs right now, or that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs if and when subscriptions were ever to collapse. By way of support, Ian cites the Wellcome Trust, which makes such a guarantee to pay, right now.

Either way, such a guarantee certainly is not forthcoming from universities now, nor should it be.

Wellcome, as a research funder, has mandated self-archiving of the research that it funds and has also offered to pay Gold OA publishing costs out of some of those research funds, under current conditions, at current asking prices (when subscriptions certainly have not collapsed).

Universities, however, are not, like Wellcome, research funders. Universities are research fundees and research providers. They also subscribe to journals. As such, they are currently paying for publication costs via journal subscriptions, which have not collapsed.

As noted, when universities mandate self-archiving, they are mandating the self-archiving of their own (refereed) research output. When they pay journal subscriptions, they are buying in the refereed research output of other universities.

If and when journal subscriptions ever do collapse, what that means is that universities will no longer be paying them, and hence that those annual windfall savings will become available to universities to pay the publication costs of their own refereed research output. And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.

(I say "only a portion of those windfall savings," because "publication" will then [i.e., "post-collapse"] mean only peer review implementation costs, not all of the other products and services that subscriptions are paying for today: producing and distributing the print edition, producing and licensing the online PDF edition, fulfillment, archiving, advertising. The post-collapse costs of publication -- peer review alone -- will be much lower.)

In other words, there is nothing for universities to guarantee to pay today, when subscriptions are still sustainable, and still covering all publishing costs, including peer review. And they certainly don't yet have any extra loose change from cancellations to pay the current asking price for Gold OA.

So let's wait for the hypothesized subscription collapse -- if and when it comes -- to free up the universities' funds to pay the cost of having their own research output peer-reviewed and certified as such by the journal's title and track record. Until then, those costs are being covered by existing subscriptions, and the only thing missing is not fee-guarantees but open access -- which is exactly what university self-archiving mandates (like that of Ian Russell's alma mater, Southampton) are intended to ensure (but Harvard's mandate is not one to sneeze at either!)

[To repeat: What it is that urgently needs to be ensured today is open access -- certainly not publishers' revenues, based on the current cost-recovery model and at current asking prices. Publishing is a service to research, not vice versa.]

I close with some quote/comments. (All quotes are from Ian Russell [IR]):

IR: "If we can agree that wide-spread archiving will mean that established subscription income will decline, then surely funds have to be unambiguously made available for the only other show in town: author-side payment."

Funds have to be made available now? while they are still tied up in paying subscriptions? If you are not talking about double-dipping, Ian, then you need to explain where this double-funding is meant to come from -- and why -- in advance of the decline. (For the decline itself will be what releases the requisite funds, if and when it happens.)

And is it "decline" we were talking about, or collapse? (I.e., the subscription model becoming no longer sustainable to cover the true cost of publishing in the OA era.)

For if we are only talking about demand declining here, rather than (as I had thought) about its becoming unsustainable, then the natural response would seem to be publisher cost-cutting, by downsizing to the essentials that are still in demand, rather than guaranteed props for sustaining all the products and services that are currently co-bundled into the published journal subscription, at current prices. Demand-decline is a signal that some products and services are becoming superfluous in the OA era, rather than a signal that they must continue to be provided and paid for at all costs.

IR: "We can't have it both ways and say that subscriptions will still pay the bills AND that cancellations (and hence cost savings) are inevitable."

But we can say that if and when subscriptions are cancelled, universities will have the windfall savings out of which to pay the bills in the new way. (And the cost-cutting and downsizing are just as likely as the cancellations; indeed, they are the flip side of the very same coin.)

If you don't mind my saying so, Ian, you do seem to be more inclined to herald only the bleak side of this prophecy (subscription collapse) rather than its bright side (windfall savings out of which to pay for peer review). And you seem all too ready to see daily research usage and impact continue to be lost as a consequence, unless universities somehow ante up extra funds today to cover everything being supplied at today's asking prices, regardless of demand (while you continue to disavow advocating double-dipping)...

That sounds like a hedge against whatever might turn out to be the real needs of research and researchers in the OA era.

IR: "As regards "double-dipping", it is important not to conflate the issues for an individual journal or research institution with those of the system as a whole."

Agreed. But am I doing the conflating, Ian, or are you? An individual university's Green OA self-archiving mandate (like Southampton's, or Harvard's) has nothing to do with either any individual journal (whether subscription or Gold OA) or the system as a whole.

If and when all universities mandate self-archiving (as I hope they all soon will), that in turn may or may not eventually make subscriptions unsustainable. If it does, then it will also (eo ipso and pari passu) have released the funds to pay for publication on the Gold OA model, subscriptions having become unsustainable -- but not before. There is still plenty of room for some PostGutenberg downsizing, cost-cutting and adaptation before that.

What we will have before any of that hypothetical adaptation, however, is OA itself (which is already long, long overdue), in the form of universal (because mandated) Green OA.

IR: "I don't believe that the PLoS journals could be accused of double-dipping..."

Certainly not. But what do Gold OA journals have to do with university Green OA self-archiving mandates?

IR: "...nor journals that reduce their subscription prices in line with the number of articles published under an author-side payment system."

Ian, I regret that not only would I never recommend buying-in to such a hedged price lock-in system, but I do not for a moment believe that any journal is sincerely putting it into practice. It is just a notion. McDonald's could make the same offer, that if their clients' employers agree to buy into Gold Open Access burgers, free for all, they'll reduce the burger selling price for their remaining direct clients proportionately.

No, if there's going to be a conversion from institutional subscriptions to institutional publication fees, let those fees be shaped by cost-cutting pressure from the PostGutenberg Green OA economies: That pressure will arise from the university mandates to self-archive their own published research, and to provide their own institutional repositories to take over the load and cost of distribution, access-provision and archiving in the OA era -- rather than publishers continuing to co-bundle those goods and services into their current product at their current asking price.

IR: "Why should PLoS lose out because Southampton University (for example) refuses to cover author-side payment fees?"

With respect, I cannot see at all how a Gold OA journal like PLoS is losing out because Southampton is mandating Green OA self-archiving for its own research output! Those researchers who can afford to publish in PLoS journals today, and wish to, can and will.

(Moreover, as far as I know, PLoS is a supporter of self-archiving mandates -- and not just those by funders who offer to pay for today's Gold OA publication fees. And after the "Fall," PLoS too will be able to downsize to the reduced cost of just providing the service of peer review and no more.)

IR: "I am asking institutions not to mandate deposit of research that has been peer-reviewed by a journal, yes, because it is parasitic on the journals system (irrespective of business model) and I do not see how they can claim the right to do so."

And the obvious reply is that it will only be parasitic if and when subscriptions collapse, should institutions then still refuse to pay for publication. (But then of course the parasite will perish, because it will not be able to publish, unless it is ready to use some of its windfall subscription savings to pay for it.)

Until then, institutions have every right to mandate providing open access to their own peer-reviewed research output, whose peer-review costs are all being fully covered by subscriptions today. Nothing in the least bit parasitic about that.

IR: "As I have said repeatedly in this exchange so long as the system is paying for the certification elements of scholarly exchange I have no problem."

Well, the system is indeed still paying for it, Ian, so I have no choice but to conclude that you have no problem!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

"It's one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It's another to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it. That's what's happening at the University of California Berkeley..." (SPARC News May 2008)

It's one thing to support open-access publishing. It's another to provide open access.

What research worldwide needs urgently today is not the money to pay OA journals but OA itself. (Most of the potential money to pay OA journals is currently tied up in paying for non-OA journal subscriptions.)

I hope that apart from just providing authors with money to pay OA publishing fees, Berkeley will also join the ranks of Southampton and Harvard (and 42 other research universities, departments and funders) in mandating that their authors provide OA itself.

"In January, the university launched the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by the University Librarian and the Vice Chancellor for Research to cover publication charges for open-access journals.

"Faculty, post-doc and graduate students can apply for up to $3,000 to cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access publication. The fund also gives up to $1,500 for the cost of so-called hybrid publications' paid access fees, where information is freely available but the journal limits the right to redistribute. The pilot program will last 18 months or until the initial $125,000 fund runs out. The hope - and challenge - is to find a permanent funding source."

Relevant Past Postings:

Berkeley Press's Advice to Universities on Institutional Repositories

Publishing Reform, University Self-Publishing and Open Access

On Paying Publishers Extra For Extra Usage Rights

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

John Palfrey -- Executive Director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Terry Martin's successor as head of the Harvard Law Library -- has just announced Harvard Law School's unanimous adoption of a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate.

This is Harvard's 2nd, the US's 4th, and the world's 44th (with 7 more proposed mandates under consideration, including the EUA council's unanimous recommendation to its 791 member universities in 46 countries).

The Harvard Law School mandate is registered in ROARMAP. Here is John's announcement:

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"I'm just delighted that the Harvard Law School faculty has voted unanimously to adopt an open access policy. This policy is consistent with the policy adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences earlier this year.

"Here is what we approved:

'The Faculty of the Harvard Law School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

'Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office no later than the date of its publication. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

'The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.'

"There have been many champions of this and related issues throughout the academic world, including Peter Suber and Michael Carroll. At Harvard, the university librarian, Robert Darnton, and Berkman Center faculty director Stuart Shieber, of the new school of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard, are chief among them.

"Prof. Robert Darnton said of this vote: 'That such a renowned law school should support Open Access so resoundingly is a victory for the democratization of knowledge. Far from turning its back to the outside world, the HLS is sharing its intellectual wealth.'

"Amen." -- John Palfrey

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