Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet "memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however, it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, leveraged, scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships" is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done locally to generate global OA.

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On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Ivy Anderson (UCoP) (IA) wrote (about University of California’s (UC’s) arrangement with Springer to renew Springer journals on condition that all UC authors’ articles published in Springer journals are made Gold OA and deposited in UC’s Institutional Repository (eScholarship) by Springer):

IA: “Researchers’ apathy toward voluntary self-deposit (except in narrow disciplines) has begun to be viewed by some as an indicator of indifference – if scholars truly cared (the argument goes), the game should be changing much more rapidly, since they themselves are the true owners of the system.”

It is not quite accurate to say that researchers are apathetic about self-deposits. Rather, most universities and funders (with the exception of the 68 that have already done so) seem to be apathetic (or, more accurately, narcoleptic) about mandating self-deposit (Green OA).

The attitude of researchers themselves has been surveyed in several international, interdisciplinary studies, and their expressed view is consistent:

"The vast majority of authors (81%)...[in a Key Perspectives] international, cross-disciplinary author study on open access [with] 1296 respondents... would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." (Swan 2005)

These author attitude-survey outcomes have since been confirmed in actual author behavior by Arthur Sale, whose studies have shown that, if (and only if) deposit is actually mandated, authors do indeed self-deposit, and their deposit rates rise from the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) rate of c. 15% to approach 100% within about 2 years of the adoption of the Green OA mandate. The 68 university and funder mandates to date are further confirming this (including NIH’s delayed upgrade to a mandate, with deposits up from <5% before the mandate to 60% within the first year of adoption).



The three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving until it is mandated are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need Green OA mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to deposit their research article output in their institution's repository, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

UC renewing Springer’s fleet of 2000 journals may have merits of its own, but apart from that it seems a pricey way to spare UC authors’ a few minutes’ worth of (Green OA) keystrokes.

IA: “The same can be said of author-sponsored gold OA (it is not that hard for an editorial board to resign and take its journal elsewhere – at least it should not be, if there were an obvious somewhere else to go).”

But a rather crucial difference is that universities and funders can mandate that their employees and fundees self-deposit, but they cannot mandate that their employees and fundees resign from editiorial boards, nor can they mandate that publishers provide Gold OA, as publishers are neither their employees nor their fundees.

Universities and funders can pay publishers to provide OA, evidently, but it is the wisdom as well as the scalability of that strategy that is at issue here! What looks as if it will work locally for one university, dealing with one publisher, does not scale up to 10,000 universities doing it with the publishers of 25,000 journals, not even for the subset of those journals that each university currently subscribes to: Annual university subscriptions to incoming journals or journal-fleets are fundamentally different from annual university “memberships” in exchange for the publication of outgoing articles: Articles are not published on the basis of an annual journal/publisher quota but on the basis of the individual peer-review outcome, per article, per journal.

IA: “Gold OA journals that require a one-to-one correspondence between ‘membership’ fees and author uptake are beginning to lose library support”

Exactly. (And "memberships" would never have had library support in the first place, if their incoherent scaling scenario had been thought through in advance, as above.)

Librarians have been at the vanguard of the Open Access movement from the beginning, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince the faculty in other disciplines university-wide to deposit, as well as to convince the university itself to mandate deposit. There is now something the Library Faculty can do on its own, to provide an example for the rest of the university, along the lines of Arthur's Sale's suggestion that rather than just waiting for university-wide mandates, "patchwork mandates" should be adopted at the laboratory, department or faculty level. The Library Faculty at Oregon State University has just shown the way, adopting the planet's first Green OA Mandate by a Library Faculty.

IA: “My own conversations and observations lead me to believe that for most authors, the difficulties and uncertainties, rather than the desirability of the outcome, are the main obstacle. But if academic administrators believe that researchers don’t care, then support for institutional repositories, which entail their own costs, will wither in difficult times. Large acts are needed, ones which place a significant amount of research output on an open access footing in ways that capture people’s interest and imagination. Harvard’s mandate is certainly one such act.”

You seem to have answered your own question: Mandate Green OA, as Harvard did.

And as to difficult times: We're in them! And there are few lower-cost investments for a university today -- a linux server, a piece of free software, a few days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year sysad maintenance time... plus the adoption of a (free of charge) Green OA self-archiving mandate -- that can generate benefits anywhere near the order of magnitude of the benefits of OA.

IA: “UC’s largescale arrangement with a major publisher is another...”

Not unless you can explain how it is to scale from just an ad hoc local arrangement between one university (even one as big as UC) and one (big) fleet-publisher to something that can work for all universities and all journals without dissolving into Escher-drawing incoherence.

IA: “In UC’s arrangement with Springer, UC-authored articles will be deposited in our eScholarship repository. If enough other institutions followed suit (and 3 other European organizations have already preceded us), a large number of papers in those journals will be available in institutional repositories. Some of my librarian colleagues (the ones most skeptical of this experiment) have told me that if that happens, their institutions will cancel, and the system will convulse.”

Please explain to me how paying for Gold OA for a university’s own article output, in a particular journal or journal-fleet, via a university subscription/membership for that journal or journal fleet, will induce cancellations of that journal or journal-fleet: Who will cancel? The nonsubscribing institutions? (They have nothing to cancel.) The subscribing institutions? But then what happens to their own authors’ Gold OA output to that journal or journal-fleet? And what happens to their own users’ need for access to that journal or journal-fleet, if the Gold OA is no longer being paid for? And how do you cancel journals when they are still part Gold OA and part not?

My guess is that not even a small fraction of these awkward contingencies has even been considered by UC, let alone thought-through, in this somnambulistic plunge into institutional gilded OA deals. Nor is it in any publisher’s interest, in negotiating a Big Deal like this, to awaken their client to any of these troublesome complications (since complications concern how that client is to deal with that publisher's competitors, further down the road, once this particular “Big Deal” is no longer the only deal in town...).

Just to clarify: My beef is not at all with Springer, for trying to make the best deal they can. Springer is fully Green on immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by their authors. That means Springer is squarely on the Side of the Angels, insofar as OA is concerned. My beef is with the naivete of the universities who keep somnambulating toward the Escherian glitter without first grasping the green that is within their reach: Mandate Green OA and then make whatever subscription/membership deal you like and can afford. Just don't go for the Gold without first grasping the Green!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum