Publishing Lobby

Comment on Elsevier Editors' Update by Henk Moed:
"Does Open Access publishing increase citation rates? Studies conducted in this area have not yet adequately controlled for various kinds of sampling bias."

No study based on sampling and statistical significance-testing has the force of an unassailable mathematical proof.

But how many studies showing that OA articles are downloaded and cited more have to be published before the ad hoc critiques (many funded and promoted by an industry not altogether disinterested in the outcome!) and the special pleading tire of the chase?

There are a lot more studies to try to explain away here.

Most of them just keep finding the same thing...

(By the way, on another stubborn truth that keeps bouncing back despite untiring efforts to say it isn't so: Not only is OA research indeed downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, since it accessible free for all, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford a subscription -- but requiring (mandating) OA self-archiving does indeed increase OA self-archiving. Where on earth did Henk get the idea that some institutions' self-archiving "did not increase when their OA regime was transformed from non-mandatory into mandatory"? Or is Henk just referring to the "mandates" that state that "You must self-archive -- but only if and when your publisher says you may, and not if your publisher says 'you may if you may but you may not if you must'"...? Incredulous? See here and weep (for the credulous -- or chuckle for the sensible)...)

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My friend Henk Moed (whose work I admire and whose scientific integrity I am in no way calling into question!) has replied to my query:

"Where on earth did Henk get the idea that some institutions' self-archiving 'did not increase when their OA regime was transformed from non-mandatory into mandatory'?"

Henk wrote to tell me that he got the idea from our own paper! (Gargouri et al 2010, Figure 1)

The figure shows the self-archiving rates from 2002-2006 for four mandated repositories, compared to the unmandated baseline self-archiving rate of about 20% per year. The four mandated repositories all have a self-archiving rate of about 60% for each of the six years.

Now where Henk got the idea that the mandates may not increase self-archiving was from the fact that the date on which the mandate was adopted differed for the four repositories, the earliest mandate being in 2002, the latest in 2004. So he inferred from the fact that the 2002-2006 rates were flat in all cases, that some, at least, of the mandates did not increase self-archiving.

There are two important details that Henk did not take into account:

(1) The date is the date the articles were published, not the date they were self-archived.

(2) When a mandate is adopted, the self-archiving is not just done for articles published on or after the mandate: it is also done retroactively, for articles published before the mandate, especially for recent years.

So the reason the self-archiving rates are flat is retroactive self-archiving. A clue is already there in Figure 1, because both the post-mandate self-archiving rates and the pre-mandate self-archiving rates are about three times the baseline (unmandated) rates (60% vs 20%).

(The baseline rate was derived from comparing the percentage of the articles that our robot found freely accessible on the web for the reference sample of articles in each of the publication years for the four mandated institutions with the percentage the robot found for articles published in the same journals and years, but from other institutions.)

The practice of retroactive self-archiving in the mandated repositories was confirmed in a later study that we will soon report, comparing the self-archiving rate for the same publishing years (from 2002 onward) as sampled by our robot several years later: The percentage for each year continued to grow years after adoption of the mandate.

One important thing to note, however, is that our estimate of the self-archiving rate for mandated institutions was actually an underestimate: We know the rates were higher than 60%, but we used the noisier and less reliable robot method rather than counting what was in the repository directly, in order to make the estimates comparable with the robot's estimate for the unmandated self-archiving rate. (The unmandated papers were not even necessarily self-archived in the author's instituitional repository: many were on their authors' personal or lab websites.)

Re: Richard Poynder: Open Access, brick by brick. Open and Shut? Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Let universities and research funders follow the UK's lead, not Australia's lag (apart from QUT!): Forget about Gold OA publishing for now and mandate the researcher keystrokes that would have given us 100% [Green] OA 20 years ago, had they only been done, unmandated, 20 years ago.

The reward will not only be 100% [Green] OA at long last, putting an end to 20 years of needlessly lost research impact globally, but Gold OA at a fair price soon thereafter.

(Apart from desperate and appallingly maladroit (and doomed) lobbying efforts with governments (and closed-door bargaining efforts with customers) to try to deter or delay Green OA mandates, Elsevier has nothing to do with it, one way or the other: Providing OA is entirely -- repeat: entirely -- in the research community's hands (at their fingertips), once they awaken from their insouciant slumber and realize at last that it is -- and has been all along.

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

Harnad, S. (2010) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Comments on Richard Poynder's interview of Claudio Aspesi in Open and Shut: "Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?"

1. Research libraries cannot, need not and will not cancel (important) journals until all or almost all their contents are freely accessible to their users by some other means.

2. Boycott-threatening authors cannot, need not and will not stop publishing in or refereeing for their best journals: It is neither necessary nor realistic. There are easier and better ways to make those journals' contents freely accessible.

3. Researchers cannot, need not and will not stop serving on the editorial boards of their best journals. It is neither necessary nor realistic. There are easier and better ways to make those journals' contents freely accessible.

4. Research and researchers cannot, need not and will not abandon peer review. It is neither necessary nor realistic. There are easier and better ways to make journals' contents freely accessible.

5. Journals cannot, need not and will not convert to Gold Open Access publishing today: That would simply make OA as unaffordable as subscription access (at current prices).

6. What those who are preoccupied with journal pricing and economics keep overlooking is that the one and only reason it matters so much that journals are overpriced and unaffordable is that there is no other way for would-be users to access their contents.

7. Hence only one course of action is realistic, feasible and makes sense: It will remedy the accessibility problem completely and it will eventually drive down journal expenses and prices as well as induce a conversion to Gold OA publishing at an affordable rate.

8. That course of action is for universities and research funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

9. Once Green OA self-archiving becomes universal because it is universally mandated, the research accessibility problem is solved.

10. Once the research accessibility problem is solved, journal affordability is no longer a life-or-death matter: libraries can cancel unaffordable journals because their contents are freely accessible to their users by some other means.

11. Once post-Green-OA cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable for meeting publishing costs, publishers will downsize to just the cost of peer review alone, offloading access provision and archiving onto institutional OA repositories, and converting to Gold OA publishing.

12. Universities will then have the funds to pay the much lower costs of peer review alone out of their windfall subscription cancelation savings.

(It is this optimal and inevitable outcome for research and researchers that the publishers' lobby is doing its best to forestall as long as it possibly can. But it's entirely up to the research community how long they allow them to do it. As long as they do, it amounts to allowing the flea on its tail to wag the research/dog…)

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

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

Harnad, Stevan (2011) Open Access Is a Research Community Matter, Not a Publishing Community Matter. Lifelong Learning in Europe.