Open Access Archivangelism

Declan Butler's 7 April article in Nature -- "US seeks to make science free for all" -- says a lot about (1) "Gold" Open Access publishing fees (and about where the money will come from).

It also talks about (2) "Green" Open Access self-archiving mandates from research funders that require fundees to deposit the final, accepted drafts of published articles in an Open Access repository (and about how long they are embargoed before they are made Open Access).

But it says nothing at all about the biggest Open Access development of all: (3) Green Open Access deposit mandates from authors' universities and research institutions.

Not all research is funded, but virtually all of it originates from the world's universities and research institutions. And although MIT and Harvard have pledged to commit some funds to pay for some Gold Open Access fees for some of their authors, Declan Butler's article neglects to mention that both universities first mandated Green Open Access for all of their own institutional research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines-- and so have over a hundred other universities worldwide. See ROARMAP.

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s' Slumbering Giant': The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Commentary on:
Jean-Gabriel Bankier & Courtney Smith. "Digital Repositories at a Crossroads: Achieving Sustainable Success through Campus-wide Engagement" VALA2010 Conference Proceedings (2010).

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"...many traditionalists still believe in the post-print driven approach. Stevan Harnad, the “archivangelist,” recently argued that the “main raison d’etre” of the IR is to capture the institution’s own “institutional refereed research journal article output” (Harnad, 2009). To solve the engagement problem, these traditionalists espouse mandates as the only viable solution...

"...we find that the most successful IRs are those that strive to engage a diverse set of groups across campus, specifically liaising and serving both academic and non-academic units, accepting a wide scope of content, aligning repository services with the mission of the university, and facilitating new opportunities for knowledge production and publication."

(1) It's rather early to be described as a "traditionalist" in a field (Open Access, OA) that has yet to get off the ground!

(2) The problem that both OA and Institutional Repositories (IRs) were invented to solve was the problem of providing access -- to the 2.5M articles published annually in the planet's 2.5K peer-reviewed journals -- not only for those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which an article happened to be published, but for all would-be users.

(3) The purpose of OA is to maximize research uptake, usage, impact and progress, to the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, and the tax-paying public that funds much of research and research institutions.

(4) There was indeed a link between OA and institutional libraries' "serials crisis," but only in the sense that no institution could afford subscription access to all or most of the 2.5M annual articles that were OA's primary target.

(5) The institutional libraries worked on trying to lower journal subscription prices so as to make journals more affordable, and they also flirted with the idea of trying to help convert journals from charging institutional subscription fees for access to instead charging institutional article fees for publication ("Gold OA" publishing) by providing funds for it.

(6) But a conversion to Gold OA publishing was largely in the hands of publishers, and while scarce institutional funds were still heavily committed to paying for costly subscriptions, there was not much spare cash available to pay for Gold OA publishing fees.

(7) Nor did there need to be spare cash, since all researchers could provide OA to their own articles cost-free by depositing them in their institutional OA repositories (IRs) immediately upon acceptance for publication ("Green OA" self-archiving).

(8) It soon became evident that despite the demonstrated benefits of OA for both usage and impact, IRs were remaining largely empty (baseline spontaneous deposit rate: 15%) because, as authors indicated in worldwide, cross-disciplinary surveys, most would (because of uncertainties about legality and about the effort involved) only provide Green OA if deposit was mandated by their institutions or funders.

(9) So now we "neo-traditionalists" are working on getting universities and funders to mandate Green OA (as over 100 institutions, including Harvard and MIT, and over 40 funders, including NIH and all the UK funders, have already done).

(10) What BE Press seems to be advocating instead is to set aside filling IRs with the target OA content and focus instead on other useful things one can put into them and use them for.

(11) Well, by all means do other useful things with IRs too, if you like, but do it in addition to doing the most useful thing a university can do -- which is to mandate Green OA -- not instead.

(12) Perhaps it is not so surprising that this recommendation to change the objective for success comes from BE Press. -- After all, BE Press is in the IR business, not in (Green) OA provision (which is not a business, and is in the hands of researchers, their institutions and their funders)...

Dror, I. and Harnad, S. (2009) Offloading Cognition onto Cognitive Technology. In Dror, I. and Harnad, S. (Eds) (2009): Cognition Distributed: How Cognitive Technology Extends Our Minds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53

Tansley, R. & Harnad, S. (2000) Eprints.org Software for Creating Institutional and Individual Open Archives D-Lib Magazine 6 (10)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum