Open Access Archivangelism

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Armbruster, Chris, Implementing Open Access Policy: First Case Studies. Chinese Journal of Library and Information Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.1-22, 2010. ["a concise summary of many of the pioneering (e.g. QUT, Wellcome, Zurich, HHMI, FWF), comprehensive (e.g. PMC, ukPMC, INRIA/France) and international (e.g. SCOAP3) implementation efforts."]

Armbruster, Chris, Open Access Policy Implementation: First Results Compared. Learned Publishing, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2011. ["a comparative evaluation discussing the most salient issues, such policy mandates and matching infrastructure requirements, content capture and the issue of scholarly compliance, benefits to authors, and efforts to provide access and enable usage"]

Armbruster, Chris, Implementing Open Access: Policy Case Studies (October 14, 2010). [original report]

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Chris Armbruster's policy cases, comparisons and conclusions make several useful points, some new, others already noted and published by others.

There is also a lot missing from Armstrong's policy cases, comparisons and conclusions, partly because they do not take into account what has already been observed and published on the subject of OA policy and outcome, and partly because Armstrong fails to cover several of the key institutional repositories and their policies, including the first of them all, and among the most successful: the U Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science green OA self-archiving mandate was adopted in 2003, provided the model for mandatory OA policies in the BOAI Handbook, and continues to provide both OA repository guidance and (free) OA repository software and services; it is also the source of most of the OA policy variants at the institutions that Armbruster does take into account.

There are also some rather important confusions in Armstrong's conclusions, notably about versions, embargoes, "digital infrastructure," and the nature of green vs. gold OA.

For those who seek a clear, practical picture of the woods, rather than a rather impressionistic sketch of some of the trees, what both institutions and funders need to do is:

1. Mandate deposit of the author's final refereed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the author's institutional repository.
2. Designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting refereed publications for institutional performance evaluation and for national research assessment.
3. Implement the email-eprint-request button to tide over researcher needs during the embargo, for any publisher-embargoed deposits.

Once institutions and funders have done that, all the rest will take care of itself (including versions, embargoes, "digital infrastructures" and gold OA.

Beginning this autumn, guidance to institutions and funders worldwide on implementing OA policies will begin to be provided by EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), founded by the rector of the University of Liege, another institution whose highly successful OA policy Chris Armbruster neglected to mention in his comparisons.

Stevan Harnad

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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In the Hedda Blog, Reme Melero said:

"I think we should start thinking on a more wider concept, i.e. Open Knowledge and Open Scholarship..."

Yes, Open Scholarship and Open Knowledge are both desirable. But unlike Open Access to the annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals, they are not within immediate reach.

Why not?

Because (1) not all authors of all scholarly and scientific writings -- let alone of all "knowledge" -- want to give their writings away, free for all online. (2) Not all (or even most) book and textbook authors want to put their chances of earning royalties at risk. (3) Most novelists and poets don't give away their writings in order to advance knowledge and to maximize the "research impact" that earns their reputations, pays their salaries, and funds their grants, as researchers do. Rather, novelists and poets (like playwrights, musicians, artists, journalists and trade authors) try to sell their works in order to put bread on the table (or maybe even to get rich).

Besides, nothing is stopping any give-away author (of book, textbook, treatise or verse) who wants to make his work free for all online from making it free for all online. No one can mandate that he must do it. But no one can stop him from doing it either.

That makes it all the more ironic that it is in the one knowledge domain in which every single author, of every single refereed journal article, without exception, wishes his work to be accessible not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to it, but to all its potential users -- so that they can read, use, apply, build upon and cite it in their own subsequent work -- that these special authors nevertheless feel that there is something stopping them from giving their work away free for all online.

What this special, exception-free population of give-away authors feel is stopping them from being able to give away their work free free for all online varies from author to author. There are at least 38 different groundless worries paralyzing them, copyright worries being perhaps foremost among them:

But it is precisely in order to free these authors from their Zeno's Paralysis that green OA self-archiving mandates are needed from their institutions and funders.

For other kinds of authors, it's only the fact that they may wish to earn revenues from its sale, rather than to give it away gratis, that prevents them from making the words they have to offer "open." (It's not their knowledge they are concerned to sell, remember, it's their words.)

Let us therefore first grasp what is already within reach -- by mandating green open access self-archiving -- rather than holding out for even more, thereby letting the unreachable Best get in the way of reaching the reachable Better.

And remember that the very first essential PostGutenberg distinction is to distinguish the author give-away work from non-give-away work so please let us not conflate them.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis. In: Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Chandos.

Abstract: Open Access (OA) means free access for all would-be users webwide to all articles published in all peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific disciplines. 100% OA is optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders because it maximizes research access and usage. It is also 100% feasible: authors just need to deposit ("self-archive") their articles on their own institutional websites. Hence 100% OA is inevitable. Yet the few keystrokes needed to reach it have been paralyzed for a decade by a seemingly endless series of phobias (about everything from piracy and plagiarism to posterity and priorities), each easily shown to be groundless, yet persistent and recurring. The cure for this "Zeno's Paralysis" is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the keystrokes, just as they already mandate publishing, and for the very same reason: to maximize research usage, impact and progress. 95% of researchers have said they would comply with a self-archiving mandate; 93% of journals have already given self-archiving their blessing; and those institutions that have already mandated it are successfully and rapidly moving toward 100% OA.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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In the Hedda Blog, Chris Maloney (Contractor for PubMed Central) asked:

"Assuming the article is in the biomedical field, can authors simultaneously put a copy of their manuscript in their institution’s repository, and upload it to PMC through the NIHMS? Or does the article have to be funded by the NIH for them to do this?… The reason I ask question #2 is that I am wondering if just putting a manuscript [in]to an IR is enough to truly make the article visible and accessible. Just because something’s on the web doesn’t mean it will be found. Just because something’s indexed by Google doesn’t mean it will have high rank in their search results. Putting a manuscript on PMC, through NIHMS or other channels, means that it would be indexed in PubMed, which would make it more accessible."

This an extremely important practical issue, and at the moment it is not being properly implemented.

The short answer is, yes, a document deposited in the author's institutional repository (IR) can be uploaded to PMC through NIHMS, regardless of whether NIH has funded the research (and, a fortiori, regardless of whether NIH has funded extra "gold" OA publication fees).

But those extra author self-archiving steps should not be necessary! The reason it became apparent that green OA self-archiving mandates (from both institutions and funders) would be necessary was that spontaneous, unmandated self-archiving rates remain low (about 20%), even when recommended or encouraged by institutions and funders. That's why the first NIH OA policy, a request, failed until it was upgraded to a requirement.

But the practical implementation of the NIH mandate was still short-sighted: It required direct deposit in PMC, and allowed this to be done by either the author or the publisher. The result was not only (1) uncertainty about who needed to deposit what, when, not only (2) a partial reliance on a 3rd party other than the fundee, not bound by the grant, namely, the publisher, to fulfill the conditions of a grant to the fundee, but it also (3) imposed a double burden on fundees if their own institutions were to mandate self-archiving too: They had to deposit in their own IRs and also in PMC.

This did not help either with encouraging more institutions to adopt self-archiving mandates (even though institutions are the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines) nor with encouraging authors, already sluggish about self-archiving at all, to comply with self-archiving mandates (since they might be faced with having to deposit the same paper many times).

Yet in reality, the problem is merely a formal one, not a technical one. Software (e.g., SWORD) can import and export the contents of one repository to another automatically. More important: There is no need for institutional authors ever to have to self-archive directly in an institution-external (central) repository like PMC: The contents of IRs are all OAI-compliant and harvestable automatically by whatever central repositories might want them.

So institutional and funder mandates need to be collaborative and convergent, not competitive and divergent, as some (including NIH's) are now. And the convergence needs to be on institution-internal deposit, followed by central harvesting (e.g. to PMC) where desired -- certainly not the reverse.

"Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally." This not only encourages institutions to adopt their own mandates, to complement funder mandates and cover the entire OA target corpus, but it also puts institutions in a position to monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates. (Ensuring that all funder grant fulfillment conditions are met is something that institutions are always very eager to do!)

(The visibility/accessibility worry is, I think, a red herring: OAI-compliant institutional repositories are harvested by Google, Google Scholar, BASE. citeseerx and many other search engines, including OAI-specific ones. And besides, IR metadata and documents can also be harvested into central repositories like PMC and UK-PMC. The only real factor in visibility and accessibility is whether or not an article has been made green OA at all! Where it is made OA matters little, and it matters less and less as more and more is made OA.)

See:

"How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

Summary: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
      Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
      Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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In the Hedda Blog, Chris Maloney (Contractor for PubMed Central) asked:

"Can/do journal publishers put stipulations on authors, as a condition of publication, that their self-archiving have an embargo period (i.e. not be available for a period such as six months)?"

Yes they can and do. See SHERPA Romeo.

But over 60% of them (including most of the top journal publishers) do not, and instead endorse immediate "green" OA self-archiving of authors' refereed final drafts, in the author's institutional repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication.

For the minority of journals that still do embargo OA, there is nevertheless a work-around: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate still requires immediate deposit, but allows the author to set access to the deposit as Closed Access instead of OA during the embargo. Would-be users web-wide can still access the bibliographic metadata, and can then use the IR's automated "email eprint request" Button to request a copy.

(This is not OA but "Almost-OA" and can tide over researcher needs while hastening the natural, inevitable and well-deserved demise of the remaining publisher embargoes.)

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

ABSTRACT: We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

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Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

1. Open access (OA) is not synonymous with OA publishing (gold OA). OA means free online access, and its primary target content is the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals. Currently, these articles are only accessible to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published. Research is hence losing potential usage and impact.

2. There are two ways to provide OA: The authors of the 2.5 million articles can self-archive their peer-reviewed final drafts online, free for all, in their institutional OA repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication (green OA); or the world’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals can convert to OA publishing (gold OA), publishing all their articles free for all online, with the author’s institution or funder paying the cost of publication..

3. Providing green OA to the final drafts of their published articles is entirely in the hands of the research community, the providers of the content; providing gold OA is in the hands of the publishing community, the purveyors of the content.

4. A transition to universal green OA can be mandated by the research community (its research institutions and research funders); a transition to gold OA cannot be mandated by the research community: it depends on the publishing community.

5. The costs of publishing today are being paid for, in full, by research institutions, through journal subscriptions.

6. That means the potential funds to pay for gold OA are locked into institutional journal subscriptions today.

7. It is hence an unnecessary waste of increasingly scarce research funds to pay pre-emptively for gold OA today.

8. What the research community — research institutions and research funders — accordingly need to do today is to mandate green OA.

9. As green OA becomes universal, it provides universal OA, solving the research access problem; it does not solve the journal affordability problem, but it makes it far, far less important and urgent, since universal online access is available to all, whether or not they can afford the journal subscription.

10. If and when users find universal green OA sufficient for their usage needs, institutions will be able to cancel the subscriptions in which they were locked as long as the contents were accessible to subscribers only.

11. If green OA-induced subscription cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of recovering the essential costs of publication, publishers will cut costs, downsize and convert to the gold OA cost-recovery model and institutions will have the annual windfall savings from their subscription savings out of which they can then pay the gold OA publishing costs for their individual outgoing articles, instead of paying for access to the incoming articles from other institutions, in the form of bundled journal subscriptions, as they do now.

12. The gold OA publication cost per article, however, post-green-OA, will be far lower than the asking price for pre-emptive gold OA today, because in converting from subscription publishing to gold OA publishing under the cancellation pressure of universal green OA, publishers will have downsized substantially, phasing out their print editions (and their costs) entirely and offloading all access provision and archiving (and their costs) onto the distributed worldwide network of institutional repositories and harvesters, with the green OA version now becoming the canonical version of record.

13. Hence post-green-OA gold-OA publishing costs will have scaled down to just the cost, per paper, of managing peer review (since the peers review for free), its outcome certified by the title and track-record for quality-standards of the journal that publishes the paper (exactly as now).

14. But all of this is contingent on institutions and funders mandating green OA first, rather than paying even more for gold OA, at today’s still-inflated asking prices, while still unable to cancel the subscriptions that are essential to their users.

So what needs to be lobbied for today is the adoption of green OA self-archiving mandates by research institutions (mostly universities) and funders instead of just the spending of scarce funds on paying pre-emptively for gold OA (and fulminating against inflated journal subscription prices). This is what Southampton ECS was the first in the world to do (and urge the rest of the research community to do) in 2002.

Carr, L., Swan, A. and Harnad, S. (2011) Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution. In: Curating the European University.

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

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FOURTEEN PRIMA FACIE OBJECTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. What evidence is there that “research is losing potential usage and impact” because “articles are only accessible to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published”?

2. Who says “there are two ways to provide OA” [green OA self-archiving of non-OA journal articles or publishing in a gold OA journals]? Why can’t researchers just post articles online instead of publishing them in a journal at all?

3. Why is only green OA “in the hands of the research community”? Can’t the research community just stop publishing in and subscribing to journals that don’t convert to gold OA?

4. Why is it that only “green OA can be mandated by the research community”? Can’t the research community just stop publishing in and subscribing to journals that don’t convert to gold OA?

5. Why are publication costs paid only by “institutions, through journal subscriptions.” What about individual subscribers?

6. What ensures that the “funds to pay for gold OA” will be used for that purpose, if they are no longer “locked into institutional journal subscriptions”?

7. Why is it “a waste of… funds to pay pre-emptively for gold OA today.” OA is OA, isn’t it?

8. Why does “the research community… need to… mandate green OA”? If they need/want OA so much, can’t they just provide it, unmandated?

9. How is it that “universal green OA” makes “journal affordability… far, far less important and urgent”? Journals still need to be paid for, don’t they?

10. How do institutions know whether “users find universal green OA sufficient for their usage needs” so they can “cancel the subscriptions in which they were locked”?

11. How do we know that all “institutions will have the… subscription [cancelation] savings [to] pay the gold OA publishing costs for their individual outgoing articles”? Won’t those that have more “individual outgoing articles” be paying more?

12. If publishers “phas[e] out… print editions… and offload access provision and archiving (and their costs) onto… institutional repositories…[and] the green OA version… becom[es] the… version of record,” don’t institutions still bear the costs? And is the author’s final draft fit for the record?

13. “If publishing costs… scale down to just… peer review,” what keeps those costs from rising — and keeps the peer review quality standards from falling?

14. Why do “institutions and funders [need to] mandat[e] green OA first, rather than [just] paying… for gold OA? Can’t the research community just stop publishing in and subscribing to journals that don’t convert to gold OA?

[ANSWERS SOON: COMMENTS WELCOME -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog]

David Colquhoun (2011) is quite right on practically every point he makes: There is too much pressure to publish and too much emphasis on journal impact factors. Too many papers are published. Many are not worth publishing (trivial or wrong). Peer reviewers are overworked. Refereeing is not always reliable. There is a hierarchy of journal peer review quality. The lower levels of the quality hierarchy are practically unrefereed.

But the solution is not to post everything publicly first, and entrust the rest to post hoc "peer review," including anonymous peer review.

First, the situation is not new. Already a quarter century ago Stephen Lock (1985), former editor of the British Medical Journal, noted that everything was getting published, somewhere, in the hierarchy of journals.

And journals' positions in the hierarchy serve a purpose: Their names and public track-records for quality are important filters for potential users, helping them decide what to invest their limited time in reading, how much to trust it, and whether to risk trying to apply or build upon it. This is especially true in medicine, where it is not just researchers' time and careers that are at risk from invalid results.

Classical, prepublication peer review is answerable: The submitted paper is answerable to the referees. The referees are answerable to the editors. The editors and journal are answerable to the readership. In the higher quality journals, if revisions cannot be made to bring a paper up to its standards, it is rejected. Peer review is a means of raising paper quality, for authors, and of filtering paper quality, for users.

Self-appointed post hoc peer review is not answerable. No editor's or journal's public track record is at stake to ensure that qualified referees assess the papers, nor that their recommendations for revision are valid, heeded or followed.

And referee anonymity is a two-edged sword. Yes, it protects junior researchers and rivals from vindictiveness, but it also allows anyone to say anything about anything, immunized by anonymity. (Look at the unevenness in the quality of the comments on Professor Colquhoun's article here in the Guardian. This is not peer review.) Journal referees are anonymous to authors, but not to editors.

No, the solution is not that everything should be publicly posted, unrefereed, and then to hope that open commentary will somehow take care of the rest. The solution is to post all peer-reviewed, revised and accepted papers online, free for all (Open Access) and to allow postpublication open peer commentary (anonymous and onymous) to complement and supplement classical peer review.

And to end the arbitrary tyranny of journal impact factors (which just means the journal's average number of citations per article), let 1000 new Open Access metrics bloom -- a metric track-record, public and answerable.

Colquhoun, D. (2011) Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science Guardian September 5 2011.

Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292.

Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [Web Matters]

Harnad, S. (2003) Valedictory Editorial. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Journal of Open Peer Commentary) 26(1): 1

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1)

Lock, Stephen (1985) A difficult balance : editorial peer review in medicine London : Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust.

Dana Roth (CalTech Library) wrote:

"Stevan: In fairness to responsible publishers, I think it would be appropriate to call George Monbiot to task for not differentiating between commercial and society journals. Wiley is especially egregious in increasing prices while publishing fewer and fewer articles (e.g. Biopolymers)."

Dana, I think it's wrong to demonize publishers at all, whether commercial or learned-society. Let them charge whatever subscription prices they can get.

The real culprits (to paraphrase Pogo) are researchers -- the 80% of them that don't yet make their refereed final drafts freely accessible online immediately upon acceptance for publication.

It's for that reason that "green" open-access self-archiving mandates from institutions and funders are the natural solution to the problem of making sure that refereed research is accessible to all potential users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they are published.

But apart from not demonizing publishers, it's also important to name and laud those publishers that have endorsed immediate, un-embargoed green open-access self-archiving. On the side of the angels in this respect are most of the major commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer and, yes, Wiley.

(In contrast, some of the major society publishers -- notably the American Chemical Society -- are not yet on the side of the angels, and for that they deserve to be named and shamed. -- There are, however, work-arounds, even for such regressive cases.)

No, green OA self-archiving does not solve the journal affordability/over-pricing problem. But what gives that problem its urgency -- what makes it indeed a serials crisis -- will be completely remedied once green OA self-archiving is universally mandated by institutions and funders worldwide: For once the final drafts are accessible free for all, it becomes a far less critical matter to a university whether it can still afford to subscribe to any particular journal. What they cannot afford, their users can access in its green OA version. The real underlying problem -- research accessibility -- is completely solved by mandating green OA, even if the problem of journal affordability is not.

Let me close with the pre-emptive re-posting of the abstract of the paper that answers the habitual rebuttal to what I have just said, namely, that green OA self-archiving is "parasitic" on journal publishers:

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access Is a Research Community Matter, Not a Publishing Community Matter. Lifelong Learning in Europe, XVI (2). pp. 117-118.

ABSTRACT: It is ironic that some publishers are calling Green OA self-archiving “parasitic” when not only are researchers giving publishers their articles for free, as well as peer-reviewing them for free, but research institutions are paying for subscriptions in full, covering all publishing costs and profits. The only natural and obvious source of the money to pay for Gold OA fees – if and when all journals convert to Gold OA -- is hence the money that institutions are currently spending on subscriptions -- if and when subscriptions eventually become unsustainable.

Dixit,

Your Weary Archivangelist (gone quite long of tooth during the past two wasted decades of inaction),
Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship