Open Access Archivangelism

It is beyond my powers of comprehension to fathom why Cornell University would want to throw $50K of scarce library funds at funding Gold OA publication (for at most 1% of Cornell's annual journal article output) without first mandating Green OA (for the remaining 99% of Cornell's annual journal article output) at no cost at all.

Yes, $50K is a pittance compared to Cornell's $18M library budget (of which about half is for journal subscriptions, based on ARL statistics for 2006). But wasn't this supposed to be about providing OA to Cornell's research output?

If and when all of Cornell's annual journal article output -- about 7.5K articles per year, according to Web of Science -- is made Green OA by a self-archiving mandate, and all other universities do likewise, the planet will have 100% Green OA to all journal articles. If and when the availability of universal green OA induces institutions to cancel all their journal subscriptions, then Cornell's $9M annual windfall cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay the peer review costs for Gold OA for its annual 7.5K articles. Paying a much higher price per article pre-emptively now, when the relevant funds are still tied up in subscriptions, while not even providing Green OA to 100% of Cornell's own research output, is a real head-shaker.

The only advice I can give is that if Cornell as a whole cannot yet achieve consensus on adopting a university-wide Green OA mandate -- as MIT and other universities have done -- then the wiser of Cornell's Colleges, Schools and Departments could just go ahead and adopt "patchwork mandates" of their own (as Arthur Sale already recommended, presciently, in 2006, and as subsets of Harvard, Stanford, and other universities have recently done).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA... 15 May 2009  

Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again... 23 Apr 2009  

On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA 28 Mar 2009

University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without 8 Mar 2009  

Conflicts of Interest in Open Access... 1 May 2009  

Green OA is no threat to grants: Pre-emptive Gold OA, today, might 24 Jan 2007

More OA Somnambulism: Conflating the Journal Affordability and... 5 Mar 2009  

SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion 23 Jun 2008

Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley... 17 Apr 2009

Publisher anti-OA Lobby Triumphs in European Commission... 13 Jul 2007

Physics World: The CERN Gold OA Initiative 8 Mar 2007  

On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving 3 Mar 2007  

Gold and Green Keynotes at IATUL 2007 11 Jun 2007  

Cliff Lynch on Open Access 12 Jan 2007 

Journal Affordability, Research Accessibility, and Open Access 14 Jun 2008  

Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2) 23 Mar 2007  

OA Primer for the Perplexed: I 25 May 2008  

Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data..." 8 Oct 2006

OA Self-Archiving Policy: University of Pretoria

Full list of institutions

University of Pretoria (SOUTH AFRICA institutional-mandate )
http://web.up.ac.za/

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/ http://upetd.up.ac.za/

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

To assist the University of Pretoria in providing open access to scholarly articles resulting from research done at the University, supported by public funding, staff and students are required to:

-- submit peer-reviewed postprints + the metadata of their articles to UPSpace, the University’s institutional repository, AND

-- give the University permission to make the content freely available and to take necessary steps to preserve files in perpetuity.

Postprints are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.

The University of Pretoria requires its researchers to comply with the policies of research funders such as the Wellcome Trust with regard to open access archiving. Postprints of these articles are not excluded from the UP mandate and should first be submitted as described in (1). Information on funders' policies is available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.

Access to the full text of articles will be subject to publisher permissions. Access will not be provided if permission is in doubt or not available. In such cases, an abstract will be made available for external internet searches to achieve maximum research visibility. Access to the full text will be suppressed for a period if such an embargo is prescribed by the publisher or funder.

The Open Scholarship Office will take responsibility for Adhering to archiving policies of publishers and research funders, and managing the system's embargo facility to delay public visibility to meet their requirements.

The University of Pretoria strongly recommends that transfer of copyright be avoided. Researchers are encouraged to negotiate copyright terms with publishers when the publisher does not allow archiving, reuse and sharing. This can be done by adding the official UP author addendum to a publishing contract.

The University of Pretoria encourages its authors to publish their research articles in open access journals that are accredited.

Added by: Monica.Hammes -- up.ac.za on 22 May 2009

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Click here for Latest Growth Graph Update

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In response to Alma Swan's graphic demonstration (posted yesterday and partly reproduced below) of the accelerating growth rate of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates (now including NIH, Harvard, Stanford and MIT), Richard Poynder has posted some very useful comments and questions. Below are some comments by way of reply:

FIGURE: Accelerating Growth Rate in Worldwide Adoptions of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates (2002-2009, in half-year increments) by Research Funders, Institutions, and Departments/Faculties/Schools (Swan 2009)

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(1) The latest and fastest-growing kinds of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates are not only self-chosen by the researchers themselves, but they are department/faculty/school mandates, rather than full university-wide mandates. These are the "patchwork mandates" that Arthur Sale already began recommending presciently back in 2007, in preference to waiting passively for university-wide consensus to be reached.

(The option of opting out is only useful if it applies, not to the the deposit itself [of the refereed final draft, which should be deposited, without opt-out, immediately upon acceptance for publication], but to whether access to the deposit is immediately set as Open Access.)

(2) Another recent progress report for Institutional Repositories, following Stirling's, is Aberystwyth's, which reached 2000 deposits in May.

(3) Richard asks: "Will the fact that many of the new mandates include opt-outs affect compliance rates? (Will that make them appear more voluntary than mandatory?)"

According to Alma Swan's international surveys, most authors report they would comply willingly with a self-archiving mandate. The problem is less with achieving compliance on adopted mandates than with achieving consensus on the adoption of the mandate in the first place. (Hence, again, Arthur Sale's sage advice to adopt "patchwork" department/faculty/school mandates, rather than waiting passively for consensus on the adoption of full university-wide mandates, is the right advice.)

And the principal purpose of mandates themselves is to reinforce researchers' already-existing inclination to maximise access and usage for their give-away articles, not to force researchers to do something they don't already want to do.

(Researchers need to be reassured that their departments or institutions or funders are indeed fully behind self-archiving, and indeed expect it of them; otherwise researchers remain in a state of "Zeno's Paralysis" about self-archiving year upon year, because of countless groundless worries, such as copyright, journal choice, and even how much time self-archiving takes.)

(4) Richard also asks: "What is full compliance so far as a self-archiving mandate is concerned?"

Full compliance is of course 100% compliance, and the longer-standing mandates are climbing toward that, but their biggest boost will come not only from time, nor even from the increasingly palpable local benefits of OA self-archiving (in terms of enhanced research impact), but from the global growth of Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates that Alma has just graphically demonstrated.

(5) "What other questions should we be asking?"

We should be asking what university students and staff can do to accelerate and facilitate the adoption of mandates at their institution. (See "Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access.")

And the right way to judge the success of a mandate is not just by reporting the growth in an institution's yearly deposit rates, but by plotting the growth in deposit rate as a percentage of the institution's yearly output of research articles, for the articles actually published in that same year.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of a publisher's policy on author self-archiving, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

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On 22-May-09, at 5:10 AM, C.J.Smith wrote (regarding my "Definitive Answer: I"):

Stevan,

The John Wiley & Sons entry on SHERPA RoMEO describes the policy of John Wiley & Sons before they merged with Blackwell. Even so, one of the conditions of their ‘green’ status is ‘not allowed on institutional repository’. They only permit the use of the ‘post-print’ on the author’s own website.

Dear Colin, and all:

In the blogged version of the conclusions I drew from all of this, and the advice I gave on its basis, I added a fifth point that I should have added to my posting too. See (5) below:

(1) Under all circumstances,  deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft of your journal article (postprint) in your Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is no need whatsoever to make a single exception. 

(2) Unless you are certain that you have reason not to, set access to that deposited draft as Open Access (OA) immediately upon deposit. (Otherwise, you can set access as Closed Access, for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.) 

(3) The only thing even remotely at issue is whether or not, if you deposit a document in your IR and make it OA, you ever receive a take-down notice from the publisher. 

(4) If and when you ever receive a take-down notice and you wish to honor it, set access as Closed Access for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.

(5) Meanwhile, if there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive on and don't give it another thought until and unless you ever receive a take-down notice.

I also added:

And above all, reflect that if the millions of articles that have been made OA (by computer scientists, physicists, economists, and all other disciplines) since the 1980's had waited (or asked) for a clear, unambiguous green light in advance from each publisher, we would have virtually none of those millions of articles accessed, used and built-upon across those decades by the many users worldwide whose institutions could not afford access to the publisher's subscription edition. 

In other words, I think it is both unnecessary and counterproductive for individual authors (or Institutional Repository managers) to assume the pre-emptive burden of trying to sort out the double-talk that the publisher posts, or that their individual permissions grunts pronounce in response to individual permissions queries.

For the specific question of the distinction between the "institutional repository" and the "author's own website": that distinction is such utter, unmitigated nonsense that I find it difficult to believe that anyone (other than a wishful-thinking publisher's permissions grunt or permissions double-talk text-drafter) would give it a nanosecond of thought. There is no difference between an "institutional repository" and an "author's own website"! They are just names for disk sectors on the author's institutional webserver:

If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

That includes contradictory statements from the same publisher, posted at different URLs, and under slightly different names! (A number of IRs have since explicitly, and wearily, declared that their authors' sector on the IR server is now officially baptized their "website".)

Your quote from the Wiley-Blackwell Author Services page is interesting. It does indeed say the following:

“Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways, including in publications of their own work and course packs in their institution. An electronic copy of the article (with a link to the online version) can be posted on their own website, employer's website/repository and on free public servers in the subject area. For full details see authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp.”

However, when you click through to the ‘full details’ link, there is no further mention of what authors can do with their accepted manuscripts.

My advice: don't click through to the 'full details' link! This is all just double-talk and FUD. Pick the most favorable version, screen-grab it for your records, and then go ahead and post your accepted article on your employer's website/repository and forget about it.

By the way, I am fully aware of what illusion this self-serving double-talk is striving to create in this instance: to make the publisher appear to be Green on immediate OA self-archiving -- but, if you click-through, you realize that it is only at the price of paying them for hybrid Gold OA! This is shameful, misleading nonsense -- but you need not "click through": just take

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

at face value and do not give it another thought until and unless someone from "Wiley-Blackwell" ever ventures to send you a take-down notice.

And let the "you" be the author, to whom this message about how "Wiley-Blackkwell journal authors can use their accepted article" is addressed. Please don't get any 3rd-party intermediaries involved in it -- except in the form of a blanket institutional Green OA self-archiving mandate for its employees.

I asked the Wiley-Blackwell person with whom I have been in touch to update their policy on SHERPA RoMEO. Part of his response to me was as follows:“

We have no connection with the SHERPA/RoMEO site and we do not sanction the service or verify the information held there. The SHERPA/RoMEO site should therefore not be taken as an accurate reflection of our policies.”

I made no particular mention of the SHERPA/ROMEO site in my posting and advice. I simply quoted three published online excerpts of each "Wiley's" public words to their authors. Consider the Romeos to just be short-cuts to publishers' own expressed policies, and summaries of them.

(And I can only repeat, yet again, that it is an enormous strategic error to ask when there already exists a suitable public green light from the publisher -- and even worse to have a 3rd party ask: The only thing the author's institution should do is require immediate deposit, without exception, in all cases, and also to strongly recommend immediately setting access to that deposit as Open Access. But no chasing after permissions on the author's behalf, and especially not in advance, and in the absence of any take-down notice.)

I will now challenge him based on the quote you found above, but his answer to me in writing still seems very clear:

“The submission version is the only version we allow to be placed into institutional repositories. We do not allow the post-peer review article, the author’s final draft, or any other version to be deposited.”

Based on this, and on your “sensible practical advice to authors and Repository Managers alike”, I can see no other choice than to deposit Wiley-Blackwell post-prints under permanent closed access.

I see a very clear and far better choice, with publicly documented support for it from "Wiley-Blackwell":  

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

Let the author "post" his accepted draft to his IR immediately upon acceptance, set access immediately as OA, and then forget about it, as millions of authors have been doing since the 1980's, followed by virtually no take-down challenges from their publishers.

Most journals, on the contrary, have since officially given immediate OA self-archiving their green light. If and when the author ever does get a take-down notice, he can decide whether or not to honor it at that time. But pre-emptive obstacles should not be needlessly created, in advance, by having 3rd parties contact publishers' permission grunts -- even if their portfolio is "W/B Associate Permissions Manager."

(It is the author who is doing the depositing and the access-setting, not a 3rd party. Except where an exception has been negotiated by the author (as recommended, for example, by the Harvard policy), the copyright transfer agreement is between the author and the publisher, not a 3rd party.)

The Open University (OU) should adopt an ID/OA mandate. OU should not doom you, Colin, to having to contact a publisher's permissions grunt for every new OU article written, nor to have to do the hermeneutics to sort out incoherent versions of publishers' official policy. Let authors pick a grammatical English sentence, posted publicly by the publisher, to the effect that authors can post their final drafts on their websites, and take that to be a green light, regardless of whether the publisher goes on to contradict it elsewhere. It's publishers' copy-editors who are supposed to vet incoherent author prose, not authors (or Repository Managers) vetting incoherent publisher prose...

A second word to the wise,

Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: (1) Under all circumstances, deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft of your journal article (postprint) in your Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is no need whatsoever to make a single exception.
    (2) Unless you are certain that you have reason not to, set access to that deposited draft as Open Access (OA) immediately upon deposit. (Otherwise, you can set access as Closed Access, for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.)
    (3) The only thing even remotely at issue is whether or not, if you deposit a document in your IR and make it OA, you receive a take-down notice from the publisher.
    (4) If you receive a take-down notice and you wish to honor it, set access as Closed Access for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.
    (5) Meanwhile, if there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought until and unless you ever receive a take-down notice.

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On 21-May-09, at 6:58 AM, in the American Scientist Open Access Forum, C.J.Smith posted "The definitive answer from Wiley-Blackwell":

In the Wiley-Blackwell copyright assignment form, which most authors publishing in this company’s journals will sign, it states (under item ‘C.2. Permitted Uses by Contributor > Accepted Version’) that:

“Re-use of the accepted and peer-reviewed (but not final) version of the Contribution shall be by separate agreement with Wiley-Blackwell”

I took this to mean that authors can, if they want to, approach Wiley-Blackwell on an article-by-article basis for permission to deposit their final draft manuscripts in their institutional repository.

However, having chased up permission with Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of an author here at the Open University, I received (after a number of email exchanges) the following (apparently definitive) answer from their Associate Permissions Manager:

“The submission version is the only version we allow to be placed into institutional repositories. We do not allow the post-peer review article, the author’s final draft, or any other version to be deposited. Therefore, I can confirm that permission is hereby refused in this case.”

So, unfortunately, given the size of Wiley-Blackwell (fourth largest academic journals publisher?), it seems we have a disappointing barrier to Green OA. Of course, Wiley has always not permitted final draft self-archiving, but it now appears that in merging with Blackwell they have stuck with this policy rather than embracing Blackwell’s.

Although Wiley-Blackwell do offer compliance with the ‘major’ funder mandates (e.g. NIH), it leaves me wondering how they intend to serve their authors who are mandated (for example) by one of the UK Research Councils. Have they thought this through? Are they prepared to lose authors who (in theory at least) could not possibly publish with them because they are not permitted to self-archive?

Colin Smith
Research Repository Manager
Open Research Online (ORO)
Open University Library
Web: http://oro.open.ac.uk
Blog: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/oro
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/smithcolin

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I don't think anything like a definitive answer has been reached through this proxy permission-seeking, insofar as Wiley's Green-status is concerned: All we have is coyness and self-contradiction from Wiley, about whether or not it endorses immediate author Open Access Self-Archiving of the final, refereed draft (postprint).

First, there appear to be three Wileys:

John Wiley & Sons (GREEN)
Wiley-VCH Verlag Berlin (GREEN)
Wiley-Blackwell (GRAY)

Second, the three Wileys have inconsistent self-archiving policy statements -- inconsistent among the three of them, and inconsistent within each.

Wiley-Blackwell says this :

Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways, including in publications of their own work and course packs in their institution. An electronic copy of the article (with a link to the online version) can be posted on their own website, employer's website/repository and on free public servers in the subject area. For full details see authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp .

Wiley-VCH says this (sample from one of its journals):

and John Wiley & Sons says this (sample from one of its journals):

Now let me give some sensible practical advice to authors and Repository Managers alike:

(1) Under all circumstances, deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft of your journal article (postprint) in your Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is no need whatsoever to make a single exception.

(2) Unless you are certain that you have reason not to, set access to that deposited draft as Open Access (OA) immediately upon deposit. (Otherwise, you can set access as Closed Access, for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.)

(3) The only thing even remotely at issue is whether or not, if you deposit a document in your IR and make it OA, you ever receive a take-down notice from the publisher.

(4) If and when you ever receive a take-down notice and you wish to honor it, set access as Closed Access for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.

(5) Meanwhile, if there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought until and unless you receive a take-down notice.

And above all, reflect that if the millions of articles that have been made OA (by computer scientists, physicists, economists, and all other disciplines) since the 1980's had waited (or asked) for a clear, unambiguous green light in advance from each publisher, we would have virtually none of those millions of articles accessed, used and built-upon across those decades by the many users worldwide whose institutions could not afford access to the publisher's subscription edition.

A word to the wise...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

OA Self-Archiving Policy:
ICRISAT International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics

Full list of institutions

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ICRISAT International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (INDIA institutional-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data] http://openaccess.icrisat.org

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

Extract from ICRISAT OA Mandate (20th May 2009)

Every ICRISAT researcher/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author’s final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance.

This policy is effective retroactively to 1 January 2009, in order to capture the publication outputs for the entire calendar year. The policy will remain in effect until further notice.

All PDFs should be sent electronically to the Library and Information Services. Complete citation details need to be provided once the article is actually published. The Library and Information Services will make the PDF available via ICRISAT’s Open Access platform which can be accessed at http://openaccess.icrisat.org

From Peter Suber's Open Access News:

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Wendy Hall has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for her work in computer science, which includes important work on OA.  See the announcement from the University of Southampton or the announcement from the Royal Society, both from May 15, 2009.  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad). 

At the time Hall was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE), Stevan Harnad, her colleague in the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, summarized her contributions to OA:

An invaluable friend to Open Access, University of Southampton's Professor Wendy Hall, as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007, not only presided over the adoption and implementation of the world's first Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate, but she quietly went on to help get Green (ID/OA) Mandates adopted at the European level, as a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Councilas well as President of the British Computer Society (BCS) and member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. It is no small thanks to Wendy's support that the UK in particular and Europe in general are leading the world in its inexorable progress toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for scientific and scholarly research, at long last. And this is but one part of what Wendy has done for computer science, and science in general....

Also see our past posts on Hall and her OA work.

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Gustavus Adolphus College Library Faculty
Open Access Pledge

The Gustavus library faculty believes that open access to scholarship is critical for scholarly communication and for the future of libraries. For that reason we pledge to make our own research freely available whenever possible by seeking publishers that have either adopted open access policies,publish contents online without restriction, and/or allow authors to self-archive their publications on the web. We pledge to link to and/or self-archive our publications to make them freely accessible.

Librarians may submit their work to a publication that does not follow open access principles and will not allow self archiving only if it is clearly the best or only option for publication; however, librarians will actively seek out publishers that allow them to make their research available freely online and, when necessary, will negotiate with publishers to improve publication agreements.

Adopted by the library faculty on May 14, 2009

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Other statements

Oregon State University Libraries, Library Faculty Open Access Policy
University of Oregon Library Faculty Resolution
Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources, University of Calgary
Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Open Access motion (see item 5)
Department of Romance Languages, University of Oregon 
University of Southhampton (UK) Open Access Mandate

More via ROARMAP

Resources

Directory of Open Access Journals
Open Access News (Peter Suber)
Self-Archivin FAQ
SHERPA/RoMEO: Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving

Pre-Emptive Gold OA. There is a fundamental strategic point for Open Access (OA) that cannot be made often enough, because it concerns one of the two biggest retardants on OA progress today -- and the retardant that has, I think, lately become the bigger of the two.

(The other major retardant is copyright worries, but those have shrunk dramatically, because most journals have now endorsed immediate Green OA self-archiving, and the ID/OA mandate can provide immediate "almost-OA" even for articles in the minority of journals that still do not yet endorse immediate OA.)

The biggest retardant on OA progress today is hence a distracting focus on pre-emptive Gold OA (including the conflation of the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem, and the conflation of Gold OA with OA itself, wrongly supposing that OA or "full OA" means Gold OA -- instead of concentrating all efforts on universalizing Green OA mandates.

Conflating the Journal Affordability Problem with the Research Accessibility Problem. Although the journal affordability problem ("serials crisis") was historically one of the most important factors in drawing attention to the need for OA, and although there is definitely a causal link between the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (namely, that if all journals were affordable to all institutions, there would be no research access problem!), affordability and accessibility are nevertheless not the same problem, and the conflation of the two, and especially the tendency to portray affordability as the primary or ultimate problem, is today causing great confusion and even greater delay in achieving OA itself, despite the fact the universal OA is already fully within reach.

The reason is as simple to state as it is (paradoxically) hard to get people to pay attention to, take into account, and act accordingly:

Just as it is true that there would be no research accessibility problem if the the journal affordability problem were solved (because all institutions, and all their researchers, would then have affordable access to all journals), it is also true that the journal affordability problem would cease to be a real problem if the research accessibility problem were solved: If all researchers (indeed everyone) could access all journal articles for free online, then it would no longer matter how much journals cost, and which institutions were willing and able to pay for which journals. After universal Green OA, journals may or may not eventually become more affordable, or convert to Gold OA: It would no longer matter either way, for we would already have OA -- full OA -- itself. And surely access is what Open Access is and always was about.

It is this absolutely fundamental point that is still lost on most OA advocates today. And it is obvious why most OA advocates don't notice or take it into account: Because we are still so far away from universal OA of either hue, Green or Gold. 

Green OA Can Be Mandated, Gold OA Cannot. But here there is an equally fundamental difference: Green OA self-archiving can be accelerated and scaled up to universality (and this can be done at virtually zero cost) by the research community alone -- i.e., research institutions (largely universities) and research funders -- by mandating Green OA. 

In contrast, Gold OA depends on publishers, costs money (often substantial money), and cannot be mandated by institutions and funders: All they can do is throw money at it -- already-scarce research money, and at an asking-price that is today vastly inflated compared to what the true cost would eventually be if the conversion to Gold OA were driven by journal cancellations, following as a result of universal Green OA. For if universal Green OA, in completely solving the research access problem, did eventually make subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of recovering publishing costs, then (a small part of) the windfall institutional savings from the journal cancellations themselves -- rather than scarce research funds -- could be used to pay for the Gold OA.

So instead of focusing all efforts today on ensuring that all institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA, as soon as possible, many OA advocates continue to be fixated instead on trying to solve the journal affordability problem directly, by wasting precious research money on paying for Gold OA (at a time when publication is still being fully paid for by subscriptions, whereas research is sadly underfunded) and by encouraging researchers to publish in Gold OA journals. This is being done at a time when (1) Gold OA journals are few, especially among the top journals in each field, (2) the top Gold OA journals themselves are expensive, and, most important of all, (3) publishing in them is completely unnecessary -- if the objective is, as it ought to be, to provide immediate OA. For OA can be provided through immediate Green OA self-archiving. Worst of all, even as they talk of spending what money they have to spare on Gold OA, the overwhelming majority of institutions and funders (unlike FWF) still do not mandate Green OA! Only 80 out of at least 10,000 do so as yet.

"Gold Fever." That is why I have labelled this widespread (and, in my view, completely irrational and counterproductive) fixation on Gold OA and journal affordability "Gold Fever": trying to pre-emptively convert journals to Gold OA -- to buy OA, in effect -- at a time when all that is needed, and needed urgently, is to mandate Green OA, and then to let nature take care of the rest.

(Universal Green OA will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable and induce publishers to cut costs, jettison the print edition, jettison the online PDF edition, offload all archiving and access-provision onto the distributed network of Institutional and Central Repositories, downsize to just providing the service of peer-review alone, and convert to the Gold OA model for cost recovery -- but at the far lower price of peer review alone, rather than at the inflated pre-emptive asking prices that are being needlessly paid today, without the prerequisite downsizing to peer review alone).

In other words, to see or describe Green OA as only a partial or short-term solution for OA is not only (in my view) inaccurate, but it is also counterproductive for OA -- retarding instead of facilitating the requisite universal adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates: 

If universal Green OA were just a partial or short-term solution, for precisely what problem would it be just a partial or short-term solution? For universal Green OA is a full, permanent solution for the research accessibility problem; that in turn removes all of the urgency and importance of the journal affordability problem -- which can then eventually, at its own natural pace, be solved by institutions cancelling subscriptions once universal Green OA has been reached (since all research is thereafter freely accessible to all users universally), thereby inducing journals to downsize and convert to Gold. 

Instead trying to promote the Gold OA publication-charge model now, pre-emptively, is not only unnecessary and wasteful (spending more money, at an arbitrarily high asking price, instead of saving it), but it distracts from and blurs what is the real, urgent need, and the real solution, which is to mandate Green OA, now, universally. That -- and not pre-emptively paying Gold OA's arbitrary current asking price -- is what needs to be done today!

See:  "Gold Fever" and "Trojan Folly."

OA Books? The third most important distraction and deterrent to universal Green OA is to conflate OA's primary target -- journal articles, which are all, without exception, in all disciplines, author give-aways, written solely for the sake of research uptake and impact, not for royalty income -- with books, which are not OA's primary target, are not written solely for research uptake and impact, have immediate cost-recovery implications for the publisher, book by book, are not nearly as urgent a matter as journal-article access for research, and will, like Gold OA, evolve naturally of their own accord once universal Green OA has prevailed.

But for now, conflating OA with book access is simply another retardant on the urgent immediate priority, which is Green OA mandates (of which -- as we should keep reminding ourselves -- we still have only 80 out of 10,000, while we keep fussing instead, needlessly, about Gold OA, journal affordability, and book OA).

(Having said that, however, it must be added that of course the funder has a say in attaching conditions to the publication of a book whose publication costs the funder subsidizes! But then the greatest care should be taken to separate those special cases completely from OA -- whose primary target is journal articles -- and Green OA mandates, whose sole target is journal articles.)

Data-Archiving. Like book OA -- and in contrast to OA's urgent, primary target: refereed-journal-article OA -- data OA is not yet a clearcut and exception-free domain. Please see these postings on data-archiving.

Unlike articles and books, data self-archiving is not restricted by copyright transfer from the researcher to the publisher. In itself, this would seem to be a good thing: Authors can already archive their data if they wish to; they need not worry that it might violate their publisher's policy or rights.

So -- we should ask ourselves -- why don't most authors do it yet?

The answer is two-fold: If the author does not first provide OA to the journal article that describes and analyzes the research, the author's data are far less useful. So Green OA itself will facilitate and incentivize data-OA.

But, even more important, not all (perhaps not even most) researchers want to make their data OA, at least not until they have had all the time they need and want to data-mine it themselves (and sometimes that can require years). The incentive to gather data would plunge considerably if researchers were forced to declare it open season for all researchers to analyze their hard-won data as soon as it was gathered!

Hence institutions and funders should definitely encourage their researchers to deposit their data in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) as soon as they can, but to leave that up to them. In clear contrast, institutions and funders should mandate that the final, refereed, accepted drafts of all journal articles should be deposited in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication. 

Earlier Drafts.The story is approximately the same for unrefereed preprints as it is for data and for books: Researchers can be encouraged to deposit their earlier drafts (and in some fields authors have been doing so for years), but on no account should it be required. The only thing that needs to be required is the deposit of the refereed, accepted final draft of all journal articles. Publishing in a Gold OA journal can also be encouraged, but again, on no account mandated; and money need not and should not be thrown at it either (by any funder that has not already mandated Green OA), not only because the expense is not necessary in order to provide OA itself, but because the pre-emptive asking price today is arbitrarily high, subscriptions are still paying for most journals, and the majority of existing Gold OA journals do not even charge for publication, but continue to sustain themselves on subscriptions and subsidy!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

University of Oregon (UO) has just registered (in ROARMAP) UO's second Green Open Access (OA) self-archiving mandate in a week -- the world's 80th Green OA mandate overall.

UO's first mandate was for the UO Library Faculty. UO's latest one is for the UO Department of Romance Languages. It's also the first departmental mandate in the humanities (confirming, along with the several humanities funder mandates already adopted, that OA isn't, and never was, just for the sciences!).

This is also the world's 9th departmental mandate, again confirming Arthur Sale's sage advice about the "patchwork mandate" strategy:

If your institution has not yet managed to reach consensus on adopting a university-wide OA mandate, don't wait! Go ahead and adopt departmental mandates, for which consensus can be reached more quickly and easily.

The very first Green OA self-archiving mandate of them all was likewise a "patchwork mandate," adopted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton. (A university-wide mandate has since been adopted as well.)

Also, if your institution does not yet have an Institutional Repository (IR), urge them to create one. (I recommend EPrints as by far the best, fastest, and simplest, of the free OS softwares, yet the one with the most powerful OA functionality.) But, as with mandates, don't wait for your institution to get 'round to it, if they're being sluggish: just download EPrints and create a departmental IR of your own: It can later be integrated with or upgraded into the university-wide IR.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum