Open Access Archivangelism

I don't know how he does it. His article, "Open Access: Whom would you back?", is full of points with which I profoundly disagree. But he has written it so fairly and so insightfully and so stimulatingly that all one can do is admire it, and him, yet again.

I may be writing a critical commentary shortly, but in the meantime, all I can do is highly recommend it to everyone with any interest in the exciting current developments in Open Access (OA). It will bring you up to speed with the OA movement and also give you a shrewd and penetrating peek at OA's possible future.

Agree or disagree, you cannot fail to be informed, and impressed. The OA movement is fortunate indeed to have Richard Poynder as its chronicler, conscience, and gadfly laureate.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Ivy Anderson, California Digital Library, UCOP, wrote:

Stevan,

I wanted to post this comment to your OA blog, but the blog’s comment function doesn’t display properly in my browser (whether Firefox or IE).

Ivy, Apologies. Now fixed, and comments enabled. 

Here is a response via email which you’re welcome to post to your blog if you wish.  I’m also responding on the SPARC OA Forum list.

You appear to have inferred from reading an article published on The Scientist blog that UC has bundled extra payment into its licensing deal with Springer in order to procure open access for UC authors.  Nowhere in that article, or elsewhere, has a statement been published to that effect. 

My inference was based on this passage from the Scientist article:

"University of California Libraries... minted an agreement with the publishing giant Springer so that all articles written by UC-affiliated authors would be published with full and immediate open access in any of Springer's 2,000-odd journals, even if the rest of the articles in the journals are subscription-only. Under the arrangement, UC authors retain the copyright to their work and don't have to pay additional fees on a per-article basis. In exchange, the publisher receives an undisclosed sum of money that is 'part and parcel of our standard licensing arrangement with Springer'..."

I hope you'll agree that the description is ambiguous, to say the least, and not least because "Big Deal" negotiations with publishers are always a quid-pro-quo bargaining matter, so that whether or not it was monetized in the form of an explicit surcharge, the upshot is the same: UC subscribes to the Springer fleet as a package, and part of the package deal is that OA fees for UC authors publishing in those journals are waived.

I call that a good deal for the publisher and a very bad deal for UC -- until and unless UC mandates Green OA self-archiving for all of its research article output (as 67 other institutions and funders have already done). UC having thereby ensured OA for all UC research output, it becomes a far less important matter what journals UC elects to subscribe to, how much it elects to pay, what deals it makes with any particular publisher, and whatever else it does with any spare cash.

UC does not at all conflate journal affordability and research accessibility;  rather, we have an institutional responsibility to address both issues, and believe we can do so in a principled and sustainable manner, by redirecting our support for research publication from the ‘readership’ side of the transaction to the publication side. 

I will try to translate this into more explicit and transparent terms in order to clarify the underlying dynamics and to show that it all leads in an unscalable and unsustainable direction:

(1) Yes, UC needs both to (1a) provide access to the research output of other institutions for UC researchers and to (1b) provide access to UC research output for researchers at other institutions.

(2) Responsibility 1a is fulfilled by negotiating the best possible deal with publishers for journal subscriptions/licenses and responsibility 1b is fulfilled by adopting a Green OA self-archiving mandate for all UC research output, as Harvard, Stanford, NIH, and over 60 other universities and funders worldwide have done (for the research output of their own faculty and fundees).

(3)  UC's journal affordability problem is addressed directly by 1a; and 1b is UC's local contribution to solving the global research accessibility problem.

(4) It should already be transparent that if other universities follow Harvard's, Stanford's and UC's example with 1b, then the research accessibility problem is solved: 1b is a solution that scales.

(5) It does not require much more analysis to see that once universal Green OA mandates by institutions and funders have solved the research accessibility problem, (5a) the journal affordability problem becomes a far less pressing one; and that (5b) universal Green OA is likely (though not certain) to lead eventually to subscription cancellations and a transition to Gold OA publishing, with each institution redirecting some of its own subscription cancellation savings to pay for its own authors' Gold OA publishing fees.

(6) What requires a bit more reflection is to see that for all this to happen, Green OA (1b) must come first: Until all research is OA, UC researchers do not have access to whatever journals UC cannot afford to subscribe to. And until all research is OA, UC cannot cancel journals to which its researchers need access.

(7) Now it is true that if, mirabile dictu, the publisher of every journal that UC can afford were to offer UC the same sort of "Big Deal" Springer has offered -- "subscribe to our journal(s) at our asking price and your institution's authors can have Gold OA for free" -- and if every research-active institution bought into that deal for every journal it could afford, then that too would (probably) be enough to provide universal OA: But consider the probability -- and the price!

(8) Universal "Big Deal" Gold would buy universal OA at the price of (8a) locking in current journal prices and (8b) locking in all their currently co-bundled products and services (print edition, online edition, peer review); and (8c) what institutions would be negotiating with each publisher annually thereafter would no longer be journal subscriptions and journal subscription prices, but the institution's own researchers' continuing right to publish in each of those journals.

(9) This is of course an absurd and dysfunctional outcome, because journal-level subscriptions and article-level publication charges have fundamentally different units. (One is an entire, annually renewable, incoming journal or fleet of journals from a single publisher, the other is single, one-at-a-time, outgoing articles, destined for different journals and publishers, and depending in each individual case on the outcome of peer review for their acceptance, rather than on just the annual payment for the service of peer review.)

(10) Hence negotiating Gold OA on the "Big Deal" license model is incoherent and is neither scaleable nor sustainable: It means locking in everything that is co-bundled with a subscription today, at today's prices, and treating that as the unit of the transaction even when the unit of transaction must clearly cease to be the journal or the publisher, as the practice spreads across all institutions as well as all journals and publishers competing for their annual "membership" dues. Consortial collective bargaining for all this would just make this oligopoly even more absurd.

That is why I have called such short-sighted reckonings "sleep-walking." But if they are coupled with Green OA Mandates, the incoherence of "memberships" no longer matters, because the real solution -- universal (mandated) Green OA -- is on the way.

Our Springer arrangement is one such initiative; our support for SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, is another. 

SCOAP3 is likewise a co-bundled, price-lock-in "membership" scheme, but it matters much less, because it is being pushed through in the only field that already has near 100% Green OA self-archiving without its having to be mandated. Ensure 100% Green OA in all other fields and the silliness of lock-in Gold OA membership schemes will likewise matter far less. They matter now precisely because they are distracting sleepy institutions from the urgent need to mandate Green OA (or giving them the golden illusion that it will not be necessary).

In these and other efforts, UC seeks to redirect library funds toward open access publishing in order to both foster more unfettered access to research and provide financial support to the scholarly publishing system at the point in the publication chain where a truer market relationship exists – between authors and the journals in which they publish – in the hope that the cost of research publication can be brought down thereby over the long term. 

This may sound as if it makes sense in these abstract terms, but once it is looked at more closely, as I have just done above, in (1) - (10), it proves to be incoherent.

(a) Redirecting library funds from subscriptions to OA publication charges before all research is OA is paying for what other subscribing institutions are already paying for (the publication of your own institution's outgoing articles) and for what can already be had without having to pay even more (the mandated self-archiving of your own institution's outgoing articles).

(b) Redirecting library funds from subscriptions to OA publication charges before all research is OA is locking in publishers' current asking-prices and co-bundled products and services.

(c)  As to "provid[ing] financial support to the scholarly publishing system at the point in the publication chain where a truer market relationship exists – between authors and the journals in which they publish" -- that's precisely what this sort of "membership Big Deal" is not doing, as you will quickly see if you just try to scale it up in your mind, across journals, publishers and time: The "market relationship" is at the level of an individual outgoing article, on a particular occasion, and is dependent on the outcome of peer review; it is not an annual incoming journal quota, the way subscriptions are. Hence it makes no sense to treat it as an annual individual institutional "membership" fee, let alone a global consortial one.

(d) As to the hope of bringing journal costs down: again, this is conflating the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem. -- Indeed, unless UC mandates Green OA, it is letting affordability get in the way of accessibility, even though the latter is fully within reach.

(e) And if you have any doubts about my contention that this local solution is incoherent and is neither scalable nor sustainable, please spell out for me how you envision a university -- formerly an annual subscriber, now an annual "member" of countless Gold OA journals -- will negotiate its annual "membership" payments from year to year with each journal, while its researchers need to go on publishing? Will there be annual acquisitions and cancellations of the right to publish in each journal? (This is yet another symptom of conflating the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem.)

Articles will be deposited into UC’s eScholarship Repository through our Springer arrangement, also supporting the institutional deposit that you favor. 

It is not the deposit of articles whose Gold OA status has been paid for with hard cash that I favor! Those articles are already OA (and at quite a price). What I favor is the mandatory deposit of all institutional research output, irrespective of whether it is published in an OA or a non-OA journal. 

If UC does go ahead and mandates Green OA, then all my objections are immediately mooted, because although these additional publisher deals are still incoherent, premature, unscalable and unsustainable, they no longer matter. However, if these local subscription/membership deals are being pursued instead of mandating Green OA, then they matter very much, because they are needlessly and thoughtlessly retarding the universal OA that is already within reach. (And that is why I call them "somnambulism.)

The deposited articles will be the final published versions, avoiding the concerns about version control that can arise through deposit of final author manuscripts.  We think this is a very good arrangement indeed, and we negotiated it while wide awake. 

I wish I could agree, but in fact everything you have said by way of reply unfortunately confirms the opposite: "version control" is not the OA problem: version absence is. The ones who are fussing about the importance of having the publisher's PDF are not all those would-be users worldwide who cannot access 85% of annual published articles at all today, in any version. The latter is the problem that Green OA mandates are designed to solve. The "version control" problem is trivial, and will be taken care of by the institutional repository software: Please take care of the far more urgent and consequential version-provision problem first.

I write this all in the fervent hope that UC -- the biggest single player in the US OA arena -- will take the long-awaited step that will help awaken the slumbering giant, and make the dominoes fall worldwide at long last: Mandate Green OA.

Best wishes,

Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Excellent news from Harvard! It looks as if the Harvard Green OA Mandate has added an ID/OA Immediate Deposit Clause with no opt-out. 

This would make Harvard's mandate the optimal Green OA Mandate model, now ready for all universities worldwide to emulate: rights-retention (with optional opt-out) plus Immediate-Deposit (without opt-out).

And please remember that the three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving spontaneously 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 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 self-archive, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

The Harvard mandate now has all the requisite ingredients for performing this facilitating function: Deposit itself is required, but negotiating rights-retention and making the deposit OA can be waived if there are reasons to do so. One cannot ask for a better policy than this: Its worldwide adoption will bring us OA as surely as nightfall is followed by day. -- Stevan Harnad

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From Peter Suber's Open Access News

At Harvard, waivers apply to OA, not to deposits

The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication has updated two of the FAQs on the university's OA mandates.  I'm not posting all the new language, just the new answers to two existing questions:

From the Policy FAQ:

What do I have to do to comply with this policy? 

Here is the one-line answer: ADDENDUM or WAIVER but in any case DEPOSIT....

Whether or not you included the addendum or the publisher accepted it, you should always deposit the author's final version of your article in the DASH repository....

From the Procedural FAQ:

Should I include my article in the Harvard repository even if I have gotten a waiver for it?  [PS:  Formerly:  May I be able to include...?]

Yes. The repository accepts not only articles covered by the license granted to Harvard under the FAS policy, but also articles not covered by the license but for which the publisher grants, or the author has otherwise secured, sufficient rights. Even if you take a waiver, the publisher's agreement may provide, or you may be able to negotiate, sufficient rights to allow copies of your article to be made publicly available in the Harvard repository. The publisher may ask that certain conditions be met, some of which the repository can accommodate (for example, an embargo period during which the article will not be made publicly available)....

Comment.  The new language makes clear that the Harvard policies expect deposit even when faculty members obtain waivers and do not or cannot authorize OA.  This is an excellent policy and welcome clarification.

It is apparently more than just a semantic matter, but a cognitive one, when one gets the cognitively impenetrable idée fixe that OA = OA publishing. OA just means free online access.

"coglanglab" writes:

"coglanglab":
"there are other open-access models"

No, there are OA publishing models. OA itself just means free online access. OA ≠ OA publishing. OA is not a "model." Nor are researchers, making their own published articles freely accessible online, nor their institutions and funders, mandating it, a "model."

Maybe lexical markers will help: OA (free online access) can be provided in two different ways. OA provided through OA journal publishing is called "Gold OA". OA provided through author self-archiving of non-OA journal articles is called "Green OA."

You have unfortunately contracted the (widespread) syndrome of "Gold Fever," whose only perceived goal becomes Gold OA!

But the OA problem is not journal affordability or economic models, it is research accessibility. Gold fever conflates the two, whereas both the NIH Mandate and the HR 801's attempt to overturn it are about Green OA.

"coglanglab":
"everybody... understands that these [mandatory Green OA] policies hurt subscription-based journals"

Everybody? Not those in the best position to know, apparently, namely, the publishers whose authors have been making their articles (Green) OA the most and the longest:

Swan (2005)

"we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)"

Mandated Green OA might or might not eventually lead to Gold OA. That is all just hypothetical conjecture and counterconjecture. What is certain is that it will lead to OA itself: free online access. And that is what the OA movement is all about and for.

"coglanglab":
"papers still need to go through peer-review and publication"

And your point is...?

NIH mandates providing Green OA to fundees' final drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles.

"coglanglab":
"we have two models: subscription-based journals... and open-access journals"

Yes. And we have one OA -- free online access -- which can be achieved quickly and surely once Green OA is mandated. And that is what both the NIH Mandate and the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it are about. The rest is all distracting and profitless speculation about models for publication cost-recovery, not OA, which means free online access.

"coglanglab":
"[Harnad's] focus is not on open-access journals... so he has some stake in pointing out that there are other open-access models"

My focus is on OA, so I have a stake in pointing out that a focus on Gold OA cost-recovery models is missing the point of the NIH policy, which is about mandating Green OA. And OA is not a "model"; it is free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

"coglanglab":
"If these policies make the subscription-based journals less profitable, then the open-access journals presumably become more competitive"

Gold Fever, again: The purpose of the NIH policy is to provide OA -- free online access to the peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from NIH funding -- which it is doing as a matter of certainty by mandating Green OA. The rest is irrelevant speculation and counterspeculation about hypothetical sequelae.

"coglanglab":
"If the open-access policies force subscription-based publishers to raise their own publication fees or go out of business, this presumably should help open-access journals..."

If they do and if it does, then presumably it will. But this is all just hypothetical speculation. What the NIH mandate actually does, with certainty, is provide OA (free online access), remember? And access -- not speculative economics -- is what the OA is about, and for.

"coglanglab":
"if there are good reasons to believe that policies like those of NIH and Harvard harm open-access journals and subscription journals alike, then I'd like to know..."

There are good reasons to believe that universal mandated Green OA might eventually induce a transition to Gold OA and there are also good reasons to believe it might not. But what is certain is that that universal mandated Green OA will provide universal OA -- and that the Conyers Bill (HR 801), if passed, will slow or stop that.

So it might be a good idea to restrain the impulse to just keep speculating and counterspeculating about future publishing cost-recovery models and focus instead on providing universal OA while we are still compos mentis and in a position to profit (mentally) from it. And that requires defeating the Conyers Bill.

"coglanglab":
"I'm not really sure what Harnad was getting at in pointing out that some non-profit journals also support Conyers' bill..."

The opposition to Green OA mandates like NIH's comes from journal publishers who argue that it will reduce their revenues and might eventually make the subscription model unsustainable. They may be right or they may be wrong. But they definitely include both for-profit and non-profit publishers.

And, to repeat, OA is free online access to (peer-reviewed) research. OA's purpose is to solve the research accessibility problem. (Not all would-be users can afford to access all research output online today.) Gold OA cannot be mandated. (Publishers are not the fundees or employees of research funders and institutions; the money to pay for Gold OA publishing is currently tied up in subscriptions; research funds are already scarce; and authors don't like to be told where to publish, nor to be required to pay for it.) But Green OA can be mandated, and is being mandated, by NIH plus 66 further funders and institutions worldwide, with many other mandate proposals on the way.

If we can shake off the Gold Fever just long enough to reach for the Green OA that is fully within our grasp, we will have reached (at long last) the optimal, inevitable (and long overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the R & D industry, students, teachers, the developing world, and the tax-paying public who fund the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted.

Gold Fever instead focuses obsessively on publishing economics: the publishing tail, that has for too long been wagging the research dog. Green OA mandates are simply the research community taking into its own hands the matter of providing free online access to their own peer-reviewed research output. Whether the peer review service costs continue to be paid via subscriptions, or are instead paid via Gold-OA fees covered out of subscription cancellation savings is a minor matter concerning the dog's tail. We should stop letting that tail wag the dog, by focusing on mandating Green OA (and defeating Conyers-like Bills that try to oppose it), today.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.)

Note that Edinburgh's is the optimal ID/OA Mandate. (Let us hope Edinburgh will also implement the automatized Request a Copy Button for Embargoed or Closed Access Deposits!)

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University of Edinburgh (UK* institutional-mandate)
http://www.ed.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives:
[growth data] http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.publications.lib.ed.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy:
http://www.acaffairs.ed.ac.uk/Committees/Senate/Meetings/200809/20090127/C4-OpenAccess.pdf

The University of Edinburgh has adopted an OA mandate. Here's an excerpt from the Open Access Publications Policy (January 27 - February 4, 2009), the proposal which the university's Electronic Senate approved on February 18, 2009:

This... Publications Policy... requires researchers to deposit their research outputs in the Publications Repository, and where appropriate in the Open Access Edinburgh Research Archive in order to maximise the visibility of the University’s research....

This policy will be implemented [i.e. become mandatory] from January 2010, and in the meantime, researchers are encouraged to deposit outputs....

The Publications Repository (PR) is a closed repository for use only within the University of Edinburgh and is an internal University tool for research output management, while Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) is a public open access repository, making content available through global searching mechanisms such as Google.

This policy requires each researcher to provide the peer reviewed final accepted version of a research output to deposit. The policy encourages the deposit of an electronic copy of nonpeer reviewed research, particularly where this may be used for national assessments. Researchers (or their proxies, eg research administrators) will deposit these research outputs in the PR, and at the same time provide information about whether the research output can be made publicly available in ERA. It will then be automatically passed into ERA, where this is allowable, with no further input from the researcher or their agent....

There are several strong reasons for pursuing the requirement for the deposits of such research outputs at the moment:

1.  The impact of research is maximized because there is growing evidence that research deposited in Open Access repositories is more heavily used and cited

2. The deposit of outputs in ERA will support compliance with Research Council and other funding agency requirements that research outputs are available openly.

3. This will ensure that each research output has consistent metadata and ensures longevity which, for example, a researcher’s own website does not.

4. Items which are already in Edinburgh Research Archive are well used. The average number of times each item was downloaded during 2008 was 228, with the top countries downloading Edinburgh research being: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, China, Iran and India.

5. Researchers, research groups or Schools can use the PR to provide automatically generated output for their own websites, or for their curriculum vitae.

6. Future possible metrics based research assessment will require us to ensure that Edinburgh’s research be cited as much as possible, and this means that it must be as visible as possible....

9. This will become a competitive tool for Edinburgh’s research by enhancing its reputation and branding as a good place to carry out research....

11. The world of scholarly communication is changing—adopting this policy in Edinburgh will help us move forward within this changing environment. Other universities require their researchers to deposit research outputs. Harvard University, Stirling University—the first in the UK to do so, and very recently the University of Glasgow, have adopted institutional requirements for such deposit.

12. Such a deposit requirement is in line with other UoE policies on knowledge exchange, public accountability and serving the public good....

Since this initiative requires changed patterns of work from researchers, there will be many questions some of which are addressed in this section....

-- What happens if I don’t want to make the research output public? There will always be a variety of circumstances where it is not possible to deposit, for example where a researcher does not wish to go public with their research immediately, because they wish to publish further, or where commercial reasons exist or where there are copyright 
issues (considered below). In these cases the research output should be deposited but only the metadata will be exposed in the PR the item will not be passed into ERA until permission is given.

-- What happens if the publisher does not agree? You should try to avoid assigning the copyright to the publisher or granting them an exclusive license. Rather, you should aim to grant a nonexclusive licence which leaves you with the ability to deposit the work in the University Repositories and possibly make it available in other digital forms.

-- How should I communicate this with the publisher? There will be advice and guidance on how to achieve this and template forms to show how you can amend Publisher copyright forms.

-- What about research outputs which are not journal articles? The PR and ERA can accept most research output types including books, book chapters, conference proceedings, performances, video, audio etc. In some cases – for example books not available electronically – the PR/ERA will hold only metadata, with the possibility of links to catalogues so that users can find locations....

-- What about my research data? Data supporting research outputs is also required by RCs to be made available? and this can be included where requested. IS is establishing a working group to consider research data issues....

-- I would like to publish in an author-pays Open Access journal. Does this mean that I also have to deposit?  Yes, please deposit the research output in the normal manner....

Unfortunately, far too much of what is stated in "coglanglab's" well-meaning blog posting about Conyers' Bill H.R. 801 is simply incorrect, starting with its title:

"Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals"

No, the Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is not considering killing open-access journals; it is considering killing NIH's right to mandate that its fundees must deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that have been published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. The Bill has nothing to do with open-access journals.

"A recent movement has led to the creation of open-access journals, which do not charge access fees. This movement has gained traction at universities (e.g., Harvard) and also at government agencies."

The "open-access journal movement" has indeed been gaining some traction, but this has next to nothing to do with either the Conyers Bill or the Harvard and NIH mandates, which have nothing to do with open-acesss journal publishing: Harvard and NIH mandate that faculty and fundees deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that are published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals.

"NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication."

No, the NIH did no such thing. It required the researchers they fund to deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals -- and to make those deposits openly accessible within a year of publication."

Fortunately for the for-profit journal system, Congress is considering H.R. 801, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies."

The issue has nothing to do with for-profit vs. nonprofit journal publication. The publishers lobbying against the NIH policy include not only for-profit publishers but nonprofit publishers such as the American Chemical Society and the American Physiological Society.

"The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works. Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication."

The "conceit" of Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is that the government should not be allowed to require researchers to make their research open access even when the research has been supported by public funds because that could interfere with the publishers' right to make a return on their investment.

(The Conyers Bill will fail because the public investment in research is incomparably greater than the publisher's, because the government's contractual conditions on that funding predate any agreement the fundee makes with the publisher, and because repository deposit can be mandated even without requiring that access to the deposit be immediately made open access: The repositories' semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can tide over would-be users access needs during any embargo.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Reply to: Conyers, John (2009) A Reply to Larry Lessig. The Huffington Post. March 6, 2009.

Congressman John Conyers (D. Mich) is probably sincere when he says that his motivation for his Bill is not to reward contributions from the publishers' anti-OA lobby: He pretty much says up front that his motivation is jurisdictional.

Here are the (familiar, and oft-rebutted) arguments Rep Conyers refloats, but I think he is raising them less out of conviction that they are right than as a counterweight against the jurisdictional outcome he contests because it is his committee that he feels ought to have decided the outcome of the NIH Public Access Bill. (By the way, the original Bill was anything but secret as it made its way through the House Appropriations Committee, then the House, then the Senate, as Peter Suber's many OA News postings archived along the way will attest.)

Rep. John Conyers:
"[O]pponents [of mandating Open Access to publicly funded research] argue that, in reality, it reverses a long-standing and highly successful copyright policy for federally-funded work and sets a precedent that will have significant negative consequences for scientific research."

(1) Not a Copyright Policy: There is a longstanding federal policy of not allowing federal employees to transfer copyright for research that they do as part of their paid job. It would be quite natural, and no "reversal" at all, to extend this to federal fundees as well.

(2) A Self-Archiving Precondition: But in fact the NIH Public Access Policy does not even do that! It doesn't extend or reverse anything with respect to copyright. It simply requires NIH fundees to make their published articles OA as a (prior) condition of receiving NIH funding, by self-archiving their final drafts free for all online.

(3) Evidence of Positive Consequences: The actual consequences of self-archiving to date have all been positive ones, for research progress: enhanced visibility, access, uptake, usage, applications and impact for research findings.

(4) No Evidence of Negative Consequences: The "significant negative consequences" to which Mr. Conyers alludes (on the prompting of the publishing lobby) are the hypothetical possibility -- for which there so far exists no actual evidence whatsoever -- that OA self-archiving will cause subscriptions (largely institutional) to be cancelled catastrophically, making them unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer review.

(5) Subscription Collapse Would Itself Free the Institutional Windfall Savings to Pay for Peer Review: But the answer to that hypothetical conjecture is that if and when institutional subscriptions were ever to collapse unsustainably, the costs of peer review would be paid for out of the same institutions' self-same subscription cancellation savings -- per outgoing published article instead of per incoming subscribed journal (and with a lot of money saved all round, for products and services that would no longer need to be provided or paid for if the market for subscription was no longer there, such as the print-on-paper edition and its distribution, as well as the online edition): The premise of subscription collapse, after all, is that users will prove so satisfied with the final peer-reviewed drafts self-archived worldwide by their authors under global self-archiving mandates, that there will no longer be any market for subscriptions to the publisher's print or PDF version; hence only the peer review itself would be left to pay for out of all the windfall cancellation savings.

(6) Peer Review Alone Costs Far Less: Nor are those peer-review costs high, since not only do researchers give their papers to publishers for free to sell, but researchers also perform the peer reviewing for publishers for free! So all that's left in the online age is a competent specialist (editor) to choose the peer-reviewers and to adjudicate the referee reports and revisions to ensure they meet the journal's quality standards, plus software to track referee reports, send reminders, and manage the correspondence with the referees. Once it is found acceptable for publication, the author's final draft is simply certified as having been published by that journal.

Rep. John Conyers:
"These opponents argue that scientific journals expend their own, non-federal resources to manage the peer review process, where experts review academic publications. This process is critical because it provides the quality check against incorrect, reckless, and fraudulent science and furthers the overall quality and vigor of modern scientific debate. Journal publishers organize and pay for peer review with the proceeds they receive from the sale of subscriptions to their journals, thereby adding considerable value to the original manuscripts of research scientists."

All true. But no argument at all against Open Access self-archiving mandates! As long as subscriptions remain sustainable to cover the peer review costs, along with all the other products and services that are currently bundled in with it (producing and distributing the print-on-paper edition as well as the online PDF edition), things continue exactly as they do now (and as they have done for over a decade in the few fields, such as high energy physics, where OA self-archiving has been going on spontaneously at close to 100% levels already with no detectable effect on subscriptions).

And if ever subscriptions fail, peer review will be paid on the OA publication-fee model that some OA journals such as PLoS and BMC already use today -- but paid for out of the universal windfall cancellation savings, instead of out of extra funds, poached from somewhere else (often scarce research funds themselves!), as now.

In other words, the ominous talk about a threat to peer review is patent nonsense.

Rep. John Conyers:
"The policy Professor Lessig supports, they argue, would limit publishers' ability to charge for subscriptions since the same articles will soon be publicly available for free. If journals begin closing their doors or curtailing peer review, or foist peer review costs on academic authors (who are already pay from their limited budgets printing costs in some cases), the ultimate harm will be to open inquiry and scientific progress may be severe. And the journals most likely to be affected may be non-profit, scientific society based journals."

The reason this is patent nonsense is that it invokes catastrophic subscription cancellations as the threat, but completely ignores the fact that the ones who are saving money on the incoming journal subscription cancellations are the researchers' institutions -- the very same ones who would then have the money to pay for the (far lower) costs of peer review alone for their own researchers' outgoing articles' peer-review costs, after the hypothetical collapse of subscriptions.

Regardless of whether journals are for-profit or nonprofit, it is clear that research is not an activity that is being funded and conducted in order to provide revenue for those journal publishers! The journals are produced to provide a service to research, researchers, and especially the public who funds the research and for whose benefit the research is being conducted -- a service currently being paid for in full by institutional subscriptions. If and when the only publisher service there is a market left for is peer-review alone, and not the other products and services it is co-bundled with today (and has been ever since Gutenberg), then the peer review will simply be paid for up front, and there will be plenty of saved money out of which to pay for it.

To try instead to keep holding back OA, now that the online medium has made it not only possible, but optimal and inevitable -- and to hold OA back despite its demonstrated direct benefits to research, just in order to indemnify publishers' current subscription revenues and modus operandi against hypothetical risk is rather like trying to keep coal-fed steam engines or horse-drawn carriages in service in order to insure the revenues of stokers and the hay industry -- except it's more like trying to do that with hospital ambulances. (And that's no less true when it is "Learned Society Publishers' 'Good Works'" that are being invoked as the justification for holding up the ambulance than when it's just commercial publishers' purported greed.)


Reference

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.) Note that the Harvard proposal is to deposit institutionally and export centrally. Bravo!

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Harvard Medical School (US* proposed-institutional-mandate)
http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/home.asp

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data]
http://repository.countway.harvard.edu/xmlui/handle/cr1782/137

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

http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/2009/030609/publishing.shtml

...Many [NIH-funded] scientists are still learning what it takes to comply with the NIH public access policy... Some researchers also wonder how they can make their work publicly accessible even if it is not funded by the NIH.

These issues could be solved by a new open-access policy under discussion in the Harvard medical community. A team at the Countway Library [at Harvard Medical School] has developed a two-pronged strategy to help scientists smoothly manage the latest changes in scholarly publishing and further expand the open-access model at Harvard.

A longer-term solution is an HMS-wide open-access policy and repository to streamline NIH-funded article deposits and to showcase the range of scholarly contributions by medical, public health and dental faculties...

A voluntary online repository called HMScholar already exists at the Countway website....

Under an open-access policy, the system would automatically make the NIH-required submissions to PubMed Central and enable the University to track NIH compliance better.

The policy would be similar to those adopted last February by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and in June by the Harvard Law School. The online collection would be integrated with the new University-wide open-access institutional repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) in Cambridge, said Amy Brand at the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. Plans call for DASH to use the Countway mechanism for deposits to PubMed Central....

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SUMMARY: University of California and University of Calgary are both providing extra money to pay publishers to make their researchers' journal articles Gold OA. This makes no sense at all unless they also mandate that their researchers provide Green OA for all of their current and future published journal articles -- by depositing them in their university's Institutional Repository, as about 30 other universities and Departments worldwide, including Harvard's FAS and Law and Stanford's FE (plus 30 research funders), have already mandated (although Harvard's and Stanford's mandates should be upgraded to add a no opt-out immediate-deposit clause, whether of not the author opts out of making the deposit Open Access; deposits can be made Closed Access for the duration of embargoes or opt-outs, which meanwhile still makes it possible for "Almost-OA" to be provided through the repository's semi-automatized eprint requests, individually fulfilled at the author's discretion with one click from the requester and one click from the author). Such policies need to be mandates (i.e., requirements, not just requests, like Boston University's), otherwise, they will fail, as NIH's first deposit policy did, until it was upgraded to a mandate.

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The universities just keep sleep-walking. It would be amusing if it weren't so appalling:

(1) U of C-1 (University of California), conflating completely the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (as so many others have done), triumphantly bundles extra payment for optional Gold OA publishing charges for its own researchers' article output into its "Big Deal" subscription contract with Springer, thereby throwing still more money at publishers -- instead of simply mandating (as 66 universities and research funders have already done) that their own researchers make their own (published) journal articles Green OA by self-archiving them in U of C-1's own Institutional Repository (and, entirely independently, subscribing to whatever journals U of C-1 needs and can afford). And they think this is somehow a "Good Deal" and a big step forward for OA! (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate.)

(2) U of C-2 (University of Calgary) does the same sort of thing (having first cancelled an earlier Badder Deal along much the same lines), triumphantly earmarking scarce funds -- which could have been far better spent (especially in today's financial crunch) on things that U of C-2 really needed and could not get otherwise -- to pay for Gold OA publishing charges for its own researchers's article output. This, again, instead of simply mandating that their own researchers make their own (published) journal articles Green OA by self-archiving them in U of C-2's own Institutional Repository. (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate.)

(3) Harvard (one of the 66) did the far more sensible thing, and mandated Green OA self-archiving instead (but only if the author is willing and able to negotiate rights-retention with his publisher -- otherwise the author can opt out of self-archiving). Over 90% of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving in some form, 63% for the refereed final draft. If Harvard adds to its current mandate a clause that requires the no-opt-out deposit of all articles, without exception, immediately upon acceptance for publication, whether or not the author elects to opt out of the rights-retention clause, then Harvard has the optimal policy.(Access to embargoed deposits and deposits whose authors have opted out can simply be stored in Closed Access instead of Open Access during the embargo, or indefinitely; the Repository's semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can provide Almost-OA to Closed Access deposits almost immediately, with just one click from the requester plus one click from the author, until universal OA inevitably prevails.)

(4) It is not clear whether Boston University's "University-Wide" policy (Harvard's mandate is so far only for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Law) is indeed a mandate at all: If not, it will fail, as all other nonbinding request/encourage policies have failed -- beginning with NIH's policy, which was upgraded to a requirement after two years of abject failure as a mere request. (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate. Ditto for Griffiths University and Nottingham...)

To make all the OA dominoes fall, all it takes is universal deposit mandates; the rest is just (to mix metaphors) treading water and somnambulism.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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