Open Access Archivangelism

Richard Poynder:
"Peter Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution"
Open and Shut [& Information Today]
1 July 2011.
Congratulations to Richard Poynder for another timely, incisive and insightful OA interview.

And heartfelt admiration and gratitude to the undisputed leader of the leaderless OA revolution, Peter Suber!

…Which doesn't prevent me from mentioning two minor strategic matters!

(1) It is a good idea to recommend, as Peter does, that non-Green publishers channel any opposition or apprehension they may have concerning OA or Green OA self-archiving mandates into embargoing Green OA self-archiving instead of lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates.

But I don't think it's a good idea to encourage Green OA publishers like Springer (or Elsevier, or APS or any of the other 60% of publishers who are already Green on immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving) to backslide into embargoes rather than lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates!

Let those publishers who wish to lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates do so, if they wish. The benefits -- to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, students, and the tax-paying public -- are so overwhelming that lobbying against Green OA mandates is extremely unlikely to be successful, especially regarding institutional mandates. For whereas not all research is funded, virtually all of it, funded and unfunded, originates from universities and research institutions. Anti-mandate lobbying has had some success in delaying the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates at the government funder level, but it has no leverage at the institutional level.

(2) The broad-spectrum, low-selectivity, pass/fail mega-journal certainly has a potential niche today (whether OA or non-OA), but not only is that not the only way, the best way, or the most economical way for researchers to provide OA for their articles (Green OA self-archiving is), but it does not provide the level of quality control that the users of the top journals in each field need and depend on: Deferring that for "postpublication" peer review is not only the equivalent of embargoing it (and with a much less certain outcome), but it deprives authors of the level of immediate scrutiny and feedback that they expect and need from today's top journals, while also depriving users of the immediate indicators of a paper's quality level.

The immediate purpose of OA is to free the entire hierarchy of peer reviewed journals, such as they are, from access-barriers for all potential users: the purpose is not to flatten the peer review quality hierarchy and wait for pot-luck thereafter!

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship