Open Access Archivangelism

Comment on:
Ian Mundell, European Voice:
Red light for green open access approach,

"One of the clearest findings from the [PEER] study is that...‘[G]reen open access' does not work if it is left to academics to deposit their own manuscripts. The active collaboration of publishers is required to feed the repositories." [Michael Mabe, STM]

PEER was a self-interested project of publishers whose motivation was not to provide open access to research but to protect publishers' revenue streams.

Green Open Access (OA) is authors making their peer-reviewed final drafts accessible free for all online by depositing them in institutional OA repositories. What is needed to make Green OA work is not collaboration from authors' publishers but Green OA mandates from authors' funders and institutions.

Green OA can be -- and is being -- mandated (required) worldwide by over 50 research funders (including all the UK Research Councils, the EU, and NIH in the US) and nearly 200 universities (including UCL, Harvard and MIT). The US has a congressional bill (the Federal Research Public Access Act, FRPAA) that would extend Green OA mandates to all the major US research funders. A US public petition supporting this has just reached its target threshold of 25,000 signatures within 2 weeks.

“When research is funded by the EU, we will require open access to the research, whether by green or gold routes”. [Neelie Kroes, VP, EC]

Institutional subscriptions are paying, in full, for research publication today. If universal Green OA ever makes the subscription model unsustainable, institutional subscription cancellations will release the money for a transition to "Gold OA" publishing, in which the cost of publication is paid per outgoing paper rather than per incoming journal.

What is missing and urgently needed now, for research impact and progress, is research access for all potential users, not new sources of revenue for publishers while subscriptions are paying for publication.

Paying pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions are still paying the full cost of publication is a waste of scarce funds in exchange for precious little OA: Full speed ahead on Green OA mandates.

Stevan Harnad

Comment on:
Open-access petitioners trigger White House response, Paul Jump, Times Higher Education

Open Access (OA) means online access free for all -- specialized researchers and general public alike. Hence there is no conflict at all about whether OA is needed for researchers or for the public. It's needed by both. Moreover, researcher access is itself in the interest of the public: It is for the benefit of the public that researchers use, apply and build upon the research that is funded for that purpose by the public.

Nor is it just a few disgruntled researchers who lack access -- and hence cannot use, apply and build upon the research that the public has funded. No research institution, not even the richest, can afford subscription access to all, most or even much of the research that is published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals; most research institutions can only afford access to a small fraction of those journals. That means that most research is accessible only to a fraction of its intended users. This is borne out by the finding, in field after field, that research that is accessible free for all is used and cited significantly more than research that is accessible only to subscribers.

But only about 20% of research is made OA spontaneously by its authors today, and the main reason is that authors are afraid to make it OA (even though the majority of journals have already given authors their official blessing to make their peer-reviewed final drafts OA immediately, with no embargo, by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories).

This is why official OA self-archiving mandates from authors' institutions and funders are so important and urgent today.

And this is why over 25,000 people have petitioned the White House to mandate OA for publicly funded research.

Stevan Harnad

Comment on:
Setting Prices for Open Access, Paul Jump, Times Higher Education

The urgent issue today is not publisher profits but research access -- access for all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research was published.

The way to provide more research access is to provide more research access, not to pay publishers more.

Providing more access is entirely in the hands of researchers, their institutions and their funders. Free online access (Open Access, OA) to the authors' final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles ("Green OA") can be provided by self-archiving them in the author's institutional repository.

Green OA can be -- and is being -- mandated (required) worldwide by over 50 research funders (including all the UK Research Councils, the EU, and NIH in the US) and nearly 200 universities (including UCL, Harvard and MIT). The US has a congressional bill (the Federal Research Public Access Act, FRPAA) that would extend Green OA mandates to all the major US research funders. A US public petition supporting this has just reached its target threshold of 25,000 signatures within 2 weeks.

Institutional subscriptions are paying, in full, for research publication today. If universal Green OA ever makes the subscription model unsustainable, institutional subscription cancellations will release the money for a transition to "Gold OA" publishing, in which the cost of publication is paid per outgoing paper rather than per incoming journal.

But what is missing and urgently needed now, for research impact and progress, is more research access, not new sources of revenue for publishers while subscriptions are paying for publication.

The UK has been the leader in the worldwide OA movement. It would be a great pity if Mr. Willetts and Dame Janet Finch were to allow the UK to become an insurer of publishers' revenue streams instead of an insurer of access to the research funded by the UK tax-payer.

That would not only be a waste of scarce funds in exchange for precious little OA, but it would be to allow the publishing tail to wag the research dog at the expense of the UK tax-payer.

Stevan Harnad