Open Access Archivangelism

Lawrence Lessig (LL) has just written "John Conyers and Open Access," a trenchant and useful critique of the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn the NIH OA mandate. But there is one crucial error in LL's critique: It conflates (1) (Gold) OA publishing (in OA journals) with (2) (Green) OA self-archiving (of articles published in conventional non-OA journals).

What the NIH is mandating is Green OA, not Gold OA. So what the Conyers Bill is trying to overturn is Green OA self-archiving mandates (of which there are 65 others, besides NIH's), not Gold OA publishing mandates (of which there are none).

It is hence somewhat misleading to write in this context, as LL does, that

"Open access journals... have adopted a different publishing model... [and] NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge."

What both NIH and FRPAA are and were exploring is mandating Green OA as the better way to spread knowledge. Once Green OA becomes universal, we already have OA. Whether or not -- and if so when -- this will in turn lead to a transition to the Gold OA publishing model is another question, and a hypothetical one. And it is certainly not what NIH is mandating and the Conyers Bill is attempting to unmandate.

It is true, of course, as LL states, that "[p]roprietary publishers, however, didn't like it" [i.e., the NIH OA Mandate], but not because Gold OA was being mandated: Publishers would be perfectly happy if NIH were foolish enough to take some of the scarce funds it uses to support research itself and redirect them instead to paying publishers for Gold OA publishing fees (especially at today's going rates). (In fact, I believe publishers even did some lobbying in that direction, trying to persuade NIH to mandate Gold OA instead of Green OA).

But what it was that publishers were actually unhappy with was mandatory Green OA self-archiving. The majority of journals have already formally endorsed elective Green OA self-archiving by their authors, because of the growing pressure from the worldwide research community for OA. But only about 10-15% of authors actually bother to take them up on it, by self-archiving of their own accord, whereas Green OA mandates by funders and institutions will eventually raise that percentage to 100%.

And that's the real reason publishers are lobbying against Green OA mandates: They feel it might one day make the subscription/license model unsustainable, and may hence eventually induce downsizing and transition to the Gold OA model for the recovery of the (much reduced) costs of publication.

And it might. But that is all just hypothetical. Treating the actual NIH mandate (and the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it) as if it were a mandate to convert to Gold OA publishing (rather than just a mandate to self-archive papers published in non-OA journals, so as to make them [Green] OA) not only mischaracterizes what it is that NIH is actually mandating, but it upgrades a mere hypothetical conjecture into what then looks as if it were an actual, current, direct effect!

Talking about Green OA as if it were tantamount to making subscription/license publishing unsustainable is actually playing into the hands of the anti-OA lobby. This doomsday scenario has often been used as a scare-tactic by anti-OA publishers themselves (sometimes with temporary success) to blur the difference between Green and Gold OA as well as the difference between hypothesis and reality. But in most cases this only succeeds as a temporary delaying tactic. Eventually the illogic is reversed, and the optimal and inevitable prevails.

I think it is both a factual and a strategic mistake for the pro-OA lobby to (inadvertently) reinforce this doomsday tactic on the part of the anti-OA lobby by conflating Green and Gold OA along much the same lines, especially with respect to what the NIH mandate is actually mandating (and even if one's heart is really with Gold OA!).

Yes, universal Green OA might eventually lead to a transition to Gold OA. Or it might not. But that is not what the NIH mandate is about, or for. And it certainly is not what the NIH is mandating.

The NIH is mandating that its fundees provide (Green) OA, now, not in some hypothetical golden future, so that all research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the R&D industry, teachers, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit most research is being funded and conducted -- rather than, as now, just those who can afford subscription/license access to the publisher's proprietary version -- may access, read, use, apply and build upon the research that research funders fund, research institutions conduct, and tax-payers' money pays for.

Research is not funded or conducted to provide revenues to the publishing industry. Publishers are service-providers for the research community and they are currently being paid in full through subscriptions. Perhaps one day they will instead be paid through publication fees, perhaps not. That is not what is at issue with the NIH mandate: OA is.

The publishing tail is trying to wag the research dog with the Conyers Bill, by treating research as if it were no different from Disney cartoons. The tax-paying public needs to reassert mastership.

[See also James Boyle's brilliant spoof on the Conyers Bill in the Financial Times: "Misunderestimating open science."]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)

OA Self-Archiving Policy: University of St. Gallen

Full list of institutions

University of St. Gallen (SWITZERLAND* institutional-mandate)
http://www.unisg.ch

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data from ROAR] http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

The new 'Reglement zur Open Access Policy' (signed December 15th, 2008 by the Senate, the academic governing body of the university) contains rules for the researchers at the University of St. Gallen. These rules go beyond the former 'Open Access Policy' (signed November 12th, 2007 also by the Senate). The new regulations are mandatory.

There are three parts in the new regulations: General provisions, Obligations and Rights of researchers.

General statement: The results of the research at the University of St. Gallen should be open to public access.

Obligations : The researchers are obliged to retain the necessary rights for self-archiving under OA (Open Access) prior to publication. If this is only possible with a temporally limited embargo, they have to fix this period in the contract. If there is a possibility to publish the post-print version under OA instead of the pre-print one the researchers have to choose the former.

There is, however, a phrase in the regulations "soweit möglich", meaning "where possible", because the university is aware of the situation that there are publishers who do not allow self-archiving under OA.

The full text (post-print or pre-print) has to be published in the institutional repository of the research platform of the University of St. Gallen (http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch) at the moment of acceptance by a publisher. Further, the university encourages the researchers to publish in OA-journals.

Rights: The university supports the researchers concerning all matters of OA.

Added to ROARMAP by: Ruedi Lindegger (Coordinator Research-Platform) alexandria AT unisg.ch on 03 Mar 2009