Open Access Archivangelism

"Gold" Open Access (OA) journals (especially high-quality, highly selective ones like PLOS Biology) were a useful proof of principle, but now there are far too many of them, and they are mostly not journals of high quality.

The reason is that new Gold OA journals are premature at this time. What is needed is more access to existing journals, not more journals. Everything already gets published somewhere in the existing journal quality hierarchy. The recent proliferation of lower-standard Gold OA journals arose out of the drive and rush to publish-or-perish, and pay-to-publish was an irresistible lure, both to authors and to publishers.

Meanwhile, authors have been sluggish about availing themselves of a cost-free way of providing OA for their published journal articles: "Green" OA self-archiving.

The simple and natural remedy for the sluggishness -- as well as the premature, low-standard Gold OA -- is now on the horizon: Green OA self-archiving mandates from authors' institutions and funders. Once Green OA prevails globally, we will have the much-needed access to existing journals for all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe. That will remove all pretensions that the motivation for paying-to-publish in a Gold OA journal is to provide OA (rather than just to get published), since Green OA can be provided by authors by publishing in established journals, with their known track records for quality, and without having to pay extra -- while subscriptions continue to pay the costs of publishing.

If and when universal Green OA should eventually make subscriptions unsustainable -- because institutions cancel their subscriptions -- the established journals, with their known track records, can convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model, downsizing to the provision of peer review alone (since access-provision and archiving will be done by the global network of Green OA Institutional Repositories), with the costs of peer review alone covered out of a fraction of the institutional subscription cancellation savings.

What will prevent pay-to-publish from causing quality standards to plummet under these conditions? It will not be pay-to-publish! It will be no-fault pay-to-be-peer-reviewed, regardless of whether the outcome is accept, revise, or reject. Authors will pay for each round of refereeing. And journals will (as now) form a (known) quality hierarchy, based on their track-record for peer-review standards and hence selectivity.

I'm preparing a paper on this now, provisionally entitled "No-Fault Refereeing Fees: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed."

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In "Open Access - if you build it (for them) they will come…," Jan R. writes:

"Robert Darnton['s]... "The Case for Open Access" makes the useful point that Universities will probably be much more effective in building their IRs if they mandate permission (i.e. require faculty to secure and then give the university non-exclusive permission to host their works on the institutional repository) as opposed to mandating deposit (i.e. requiring faculty to do the work of stocking the repository.)"

But what Professor Darnton actually wrote (in Feb 2008) was this:

"Many repositories already exist in other universities, but they have failed to get a large proportion of faculty members to submit their articles. The deposit rate at the University of California is 14 percent, and it is much lower in most other places. By mandating copyright retention and by placing those rights in the hands of the institution running the repository, the motion will create the conditions for a high deposit rate."

In other words, Darnton was not comparing deposit mandates to permission mandates: he was comparing (actual) repositories without deposit mandates to (hypothetical) repositories with permission mandates (not yet in existence at the time, the world's first being Harvard FAS's, adopted in that month).

There was then (and there still is now, two years later), no evidence at all that mandating permission would be more effective in generating Open Access than mandating deposit. Quite the opposite. Deposit mandates (of which there are more, and of longer standing than permission mandates) have been extremely effective, and that evidence was already there in 2008. In contrast, the effectiveness of permission mandates, which are more recent (beginning in 2008) and less numerous, is not yet known.

Moreover, permission mandates, because they in fact ask for more than just deposit, all have to allow an opt-out clause (for those authors who cannot or do not wish to negotiate permission with their publishers). Hence not only is the effectiveness of permission mandates not yet known: it is not even clear whether permission mandates are indeed mandates at all.

[MIT, the university with the planet's first university-wide permission mandate, had 850 deposits in March 2010, one year after adoption. This needs to be considered as a percentage of MIT's annual journal article output: the figure to beat is the current worldwide baseline 20% rate for spontaneous, unmandated deposit. Most deposit mandates are at about 60% within 2 years and well on the road toward 100%. -- But I've also heard recently that Harvard's longer-standing FAS policy has more promising compliance rates, which I hope will be reported publicly, by way of feedback and guidance on the effectiveness of the Harvard model.]

The bottom line is that deposit mandates are necessary for OA, whereas permission mandates are (desirable but) not necessary. The optimal solution is hence to mandate deposit, without opt-out, plus permission, with opt-out:

• "Upgrading Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause"

• "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?"

• "The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model"

• "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"

• "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

• "On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

[This is Canada's 11th OA Mandate: 8 funder mandates and 2 departmental mandates, but it's Canada's first institution-wide one. Sweden's Blekinge Institute of Technology has also just adopted an institution-wide OA mandate, its second, alongside a funder mandate: See ROARMAP.]

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Concordia University Opens its Research Findings to the World; Senate Supports Free Internet Access to Faculty and Student Research

MONTREAL, April 22 (AScribe Newswire) -- Concordia University's academic community has passed a landmark Senate Resolution on Open Access that [requires] all of its faculty and students to make their peer-reviewed research and creative output freely accessible via the internet. Concordia is the first major university in Canada where faculty have given their overwhelming support to a concerted effort to make the full results of their research universally available.
      "Concordians have, once again, found a way to share their innovative findings and creativity with communities the world over", says Judith Woodsworth, President and Vice-Chancellor of Concordia. "As befits its role as host of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences next month, our university is now leading the way on this year's Congress theme: Connected Understanding/le savoir branche."
      Gerald Beasley, Concordia's University Librarian, was instrumental in the campus-wide dialogue on open access that began more than a year ago. "I am delighted that Senate voted to support the recommendations of all four Faculty Councils and the Council of the School of Graduate Studies. There are only a handful of precedents in North America for the kind of leadership that Concordia faculty have demonstrated by their determination to make publicly-funded research available to all rather than just the minority able to afford the rapidly rising subscription costs of scholarly databases, books and journals."
      This past year, Concordia launched Spectrum, an open access digital repository that continues to grow beyond its initial 6,000 dissertations submitted at Concordia, and at its predecessors Sir George Williams University and Loyola College. [In addition to requiring deposit of peer-reviewed journal articles, the] Senate Resolution encourages all of Concordia's researchers to deposit their research and creative work in Spectrum.

David Wiley's version of the double-payment objection is only partly correct. To the extent that both research funding and research library funding are paid by the tax-payer, there is indeed some double-paying — but the one who gets the free ride is the publisher, who gets to charge for access to material most of which was funded by the tax-payer.

(But not so for peer review, which the publisher manages, though the reviewing is again actually being done for free by the peers. Nevertheless, an honest broker is needed to manage the peer review, or else it’s vanity press. The cost of managing peer review is much less than the cost of publishing, but it will be an invariant expense that needs to be paid no matter what.)

The double-pay objection is incorrect, however, when it is made from the standpoint of the subscriber institution. (Private universities’ journal budgets are not paid by tax-payers; and even public universities cover it partly out of student fees or other sources.) The institutional librarians who say “Our institution takes the trouble and expense to provide the research, gives it to publishers for free, only to have to buy it back for subscrption fees” are mistaken: An institution has its own research output: It’s buying in the research output of other institutions with its journal subscriptions. (So unless one thinks the same argument ought to be applied to books, there’s no valid double-pay objection here.)

But, last, the real rationale for Open Access is not the fact that tax-payers feel a burning wish or need to read the peer-reviewed reports of the often highly specialized research they fund. It is that if the research they have funded is to provide the maximal benefits to the tax-payers who funded it, it should be accessible to all of its intended users: the researchers who are in the position to use, apply and build upon the scholarly or scientific findings, and not just those whose institutions can afford a subscription to the journal in which they happen to be punished.

But the moral is the same: Both research funders and universities should mandate that all their peer-reviewed research articles are made freely accessible to all their potential users online (“Green OA”). If and when making all this peer-reviewed research freely available online makes journal subscriptions unsustainable as the way of recovering the costs of peer review, institutions can pay those true costs, by the outgoing article, out of just a fraction of their annual windfall savings from their subscription cancellations.

Harnad, S. (2007) The “Double-Pay”/”Buy-Back” Argument for Open Access is Invalid. Open Access Archivangelism. Sep 9 2007

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

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

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

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In response to the above comments, DW wrote that "we’re both on the same team," and we are! So readers should see the follwing exchange as fine-tuning the strategic details:

DW: "[SH] seems to think publisher free riding is a bigger problem than asking taxpayers to pay multiple times for access to research"

The access problem is the problem of publisher access-tolls (subscriptions, licenses) preventing research from being accessible to all of its intended users. Hence publisher free-riding (apart from peer review) is the problem.

What I said was that in those cases where there really is double payment by the tax-payer -- funding both the research itself and the subscription to the resulting published articles -- that subscription cost (apart from the peer review) is largely based on publisher free riding. The remedy for that is indeed to mandate that fundees make their articles free for all online. (We agree on all of this.)

But I also said that (a) not all or most journal subscriptions are paid with taxpayer funding and that the real problem is (b) neither double-payment nor (c) taxpayer access to the research but (d) researcher access to the research (so the research can be used and applied, to the benefit of the taxpayer).

DW: "My post doesn’t bring up the notion of institutions as objectors on the twice pay grounds. The objections [SH] raises above must be baggage... from previous conversations. My post is focused very clearly on taxpayers..."

The twice-pay argument is most frequently used by university librarians (that's why it's prior baggage to the twice-pay issue; see the references I cited).

But not all (perhaps not even most) research is taxpayer-funded, whereas virtually all research is university-produced (or research-institute-produced). Hence for global research access across all fields of research, funded and unfunded, OA mandates from the universal research-providers -- universities and research institutes -- are by far the biggest factor.

The rationale for university OA mandates is not based on twice-pay arguments at all; and the rationale for funder OA mandates is only partially based on the twice-pay argument. the rationale for both funder and university mandates is based on the need for research to be accessible to all of its intended users, in order to maximize the progress and benefits of research.

About this conclusion -- the primary rationale for providing OA is for the sake of uptake and usage by its intended users, namely, researchers -- you wrote that this was as if I had said:

DW: “Normal taxpayers aren’t capable of understanding research so it’s ok if only qualified, PhD-holding people have access... [This] smacks of Pre-Reformation ideas about restricting access to the scriptures..."

But that was neither what I said nor what I meant: In order to get researchers to make their research OA -- and in order to get their institutions and their funders to mandate that they make their research OA -- you have to find a rationale that is valid, and that applies to all research. The twice-pay argument applies only to a subset of funded research, and the taxpayer-access argument is hardly an argument at all, since most research isn't of the slightest interest to taxpayers, whereas researcher access to research is in the interest of all taxpayers (if funding the research in the first place was in their interest!).

Besides, making research OA makes it freely accessible to everyone anyway, researchers and taxpayers alike: That comes with the territory. (OA provides free access to all, even if the primary rationale for providing OA is to ensure that research is accessible to all the users for which it is primarily written.)

DW: “It's unclear to me why universities are acceptable actors here [mandating Green OA self-archiving] when they weren’t two paragraphs above."

Two paragraphs above I pointed out that the universities' version of the pay-twice argument was incorrect, that the taxpayer version of it was only partially correct (for a minority of funded research) and that the fundamental rationale for both funder and university OA mandates is the same: To ensure that all research, funded and unfunded, is made accessible to all of its intended users.

DW: "taxpayers (the research funders) should implement measures (legislatively, through their representatives) that guarantee them access to research findings"

Agreed! And universities should also implement measures (administratively, through their research auditing and performance evaluation procedures) that guarantee open access to their research findings.

And the primary rationale for both these mandates is so that all research should be accessible to all of its intended users, not just to those who can afford subscriptions to the journals in which it was published. Open access is optimal for all research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the taxpaying public that funds the funders (and institutions).

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. (2008) How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates Open Access Archivangelism. March 2 2008.

Here are the latest six Green OA Mandates. (Still keeping up, but looking forward to the day when I no longer can!)

149 Wake Forest Library Faculty
150 Telethon Italy
151 Harvard Business School
152 Duke University
153 University of Lincoln
154 University of Puerto Rico School Of Law