Open Access Archivangelism

Practically speaking, public access (i.e., free online access to research, for everyone) includes researcher access (free online access to research for researchers).

Moreover, free online access to research, for everyone, includes both public access and researcher access.

So what difference does it make what you call it?

The answer is subtle, but important:

The goal of providing "public access to publicly funded research" has a great deal of appeal (rightly) to both tax-paying voters and to politicians.

So promoting open access as "public access" is a very powerful and effective way to motivate and promote the adoption of open access self-archiving mandates by public research funders such as NIH and the many other federal funders in the US that would be covered by the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

That's fine for publicly funded research.

But not all research -- nor even most research -- is publicly funded.

All research worldwide, however, whether funded or unfunded, originates from institutions: The universal providers of research are the world's universities and research institutes.

To motivate institutions to adopt open access self-archiving mandates for all of their research output requires giving them and their researchers a credible, valid reason for doing so.

And for institutions and their researchers, "public access to publicly funded research" is not a credible, valid reason for providing open access to their research output:

Institutions and their researchers know full well that apart from a few scientific and scholarly research areas (notably, health-related research), most of their research output is of no interest to the public (and often inaccessible technically, even if accessible electronically).

Institutions and their researchers need a credible and valid reason for providing open access to their research output.

And that credible and valid reason is so as to provided access for all of the intended users of their research -- researchers themselves -- rather than just those who are at an institution that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published.

Subtle, but important.

It has become obvious that the >75% of researchers who have not been providing open access to their research for over two decades now -- despite the fact that the Web has made it both possible and easy for them to do so -- will not do so until and unless it is mandated. That's why mandates matter.

The rationale for the mandate, however, has to be credible and valid for all research and all researchers. "Public access to publicly funded research" is not.

But "maximize researcher access to maximize research uptake and impact" is.

And it has the added virtue of not only maximizing research usage, applications and progress -- to the benefit of the public -- but public access to publicly funded research also comes with the territory, as an added benefit.

So Mike Rossner (interviewed by Richard Poynder) is quite right that the two are functionally equivalent.

It is just that they are not strategically equivalent -- if the objective is to convince institutions and their researchers that it is in their interest to mandate and provide open access.

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.)

Many estimates have been made of the true costs of Gold Open Access (OA) publishing (e.g., by Claudio Aspesi, in the discussion of Richard Poynder's recent article), but the estimates are rather arbitrary and unrealistic if the other causal factors that could raise or lower them are not taken into account.

The two most important causal factors are (1) Green OA and (2) institutions' subscription budgets.

Institutions cannot cancel essential journals if their contents are not otherwise accessible to their users.

If Green OA is universally mandated, then authors' final, peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles are deposited in institutional repositories and freely accessible to all users whose institutions cannot afford subscriptions to the journals in which they appeared.

This makes it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions, eventually making the subscription model unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of publication.

Subscription cancelations force journals to cut inessential costs.

With the refereed final drafts of all articles accessible to all through Green OA, journals no longer need to (1) provide the print edition, (2) provide the online edition or (3) provide access or archiving: The distributed network of Green OA repositories provides all that is needed. The rest are all obsolete products and services in the universally mandated Green OA era.

When the costs of (1), (2), and (3) are unbundled from publication products and services made obsolete by universal Green OA, the only essential cost remaining is that of implementing peer review.

Peers review for free, so the cost of peer review is just the cost of managing the peer review process, including the editorial expertise and judgment in choosing referees, adjudicating referee reports, and adjudicating revised drafts.

If peer review is provided as a "no fault" service to the author's institution, per submitted draft, regardless of whether the outcome is rejection, revision, or acceptance, the cost of rejected articles can be unbundled from the cost of accepted articles; this not only lowers and distributes the cost of peer review, but it removes the risk of lowered peer review standards and over-acceptance for the sake of making more money through Gold OA.

This much lower cost of post-Green OA no-fault Gold OA -- my guess is that it would be between $200 and $500 per submitted draft -- would not only be incomparably more affordable than today's pre-Green OA fees for Gold OA, but the money to pay for it would be available, many times over, from a fraction of institutions' permanent annual windfall subscription savings released by the cancelations made possible by universally mandated Green OA.

The only essential element for having Gold OA at this much more realistic and affordable price is one cost-free act on the part of the universal providers of all research output: Institutional Green OA mandates (reinforced by research funder Green OA mandates).

Without taking these costs and causal factors into account, estimates of the costs of OA are arbitrary and the wait for universal OA will continue to be long.

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. (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.

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.

Research Councils UK are seeking public comments on their draft new OA policy.

Please send any comments to communications@rcuk.ac.uk and use "Open Access Feedback" in the subject line.



Here are my own comments and recommendations to RCUK:

1. It is excellent that RCUK is reducing the allowable embargo period (to 6 months for most research councils).

2. A license that formally allows more re-use rights (e.g., "Libre OA", CC-BY) is desirable, but it asks for more than just free online access ("Gratis OA") at a time when we are still far from having free online access. It thereby puts more constraints on authors, demands more of publishers, and those added constraints make it harder for that vast majority of institutions and funders who have not yet managed to reach consensus on adopting a Green OA self-archiving mandate of their own.

I accordingly recommend to RCUK that "Lbre OA" be strongly encouraged, but that only "Gratis OA" (which automatically includes linking, downloading, local print-off, local storage, local data-mining, search-engine harvesting and search) be required.

This makes it easier and more probable that universities and research institutions will be able to follow suit, adopting complementary Green OA mandates of their own, for all of their research output, whether or not RCUK-funded. It will also make it easier and more probable that other research funders will adopt similar institution-friendly mandates.

Once mandatory Gratis OA prevails, it will not be long before it is upgraded to Libre OA. But first things first. Do not let the best get in the way of the good, of which there is still so very little.

3. The designated locus of deposit should be the fundee's own institutional repository, not an institution-external central repository. Central repositories and search engines can then harvest the metadata from the institutional repository for search or re-display. 

The reason for this is again that there are more publisher restrictions on institution-external deposit than on institutional deposit, and at this time when there is still so little OA and so few OA mandates, it will make it easier and more probable that universities and research institutions will be able to follow suit, adopting complementary Green OA mandates of their own, for all of their research output, whether or not RCUK-funded, if their researchers do not need to do multiple institution-external deposits or to face needless extra publisher restrictions. http://bit.ly/DepLoc

4. The optimal Green OA Mandate is ID/OA -- Immediate Deposit, Optional Access -- is identical to the RCUK Mandate in every respect except that it stipulates that the deposit itself must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, rather than only after the allowable embargo period has expired. 

This means that users will see the metadata immediately, and can already make automated eprint requests to the author for single copies for research purposes during the embargo.

5. Repository deposit should be officially stipulated as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for research assessment as well as for submitting publication lists for RCUK research proposals.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5 (10) e13636

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

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

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.)

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.