Open Access Archivangelism

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Note added since posting:
Fortunately, all the UK Research Funding Councils (RCUK), contrary to the recommendation of the Finch Committee, have now re-affirmed their commitment to continue mandating Green OA, and have even cut the allowable embargo period down to 6 months.

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The UK’s universities and research funders have been leading the rest of the world in the movement toward Open Access (OA) to research with “Green” OA mandates requiring researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, free for all. A report has emerged from the Finch committee that looks superficially as if it were supporting OA, but is strongly biased in favor of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research. Instead of recommending building on the UK’s lead in cost-free Green OA, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money to pay publishers for “Gold” OA publishing. If the Finch committee were heeded, the UK would lose both its lead in OA and a great deal of public money -- and worldwide OA would be set back at least a decade.

Open Access (OA). Open Access means online access to peer-reviewed research, free for all. (Some OA advocates want more than this, but all want at least this.) Subscriptions restrict research access to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research was published. OA makes it accessible to all would-be users. This maximizes research uptake, usage, applications and progress, to the benefit of the tax-paying public that funds it.

Green and Gold OA. There are two ways for authors to make their research OA. One way is to publish it in an OA journal, which makes it free online. This is called “Gold OA.” There are currently about 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines, worldwide. Most of them (about 90%) are not Gold. Some Gold OA journals (mostly overseas national journals) cover their publication costs from subscriptions or subsidies, but the international Gold OA journals charge the author an often sizeable fee (£1000 or more).

The other way for authors to make their research OA is to publish it in the suitable journal of their choice, but to self-archive their peer-reviewed final draft in their institutional OA repository to make it free online for those who lack subscription access to the publisher’s version of record. This is called “Green OA.”

UK Leadership in Mandating Green OA. The UK is the country that first began mandating (i.e., requiring) that its researchers provide Green OA. Only Green OA can be mandated, because Gold OA costs extra money and restricts authors’ journal choice. But Gold OA can be recommended, where suitable, and funds can be offered to pay for it, if available.

The first Green OA mandate in the world was designed and adopted in the UK (University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, 2003) and the UK was the first nation in which all RCUK research funding councils have mandated Green OA. The UK already has 26 institutional mandates and 14 funder mandates, more than any other country except the US, which has 39 institutional mandates and 4 funder mandates -- but the UK is far ahead of the US relative to its size (although the US and EU are catching up, following the UK’s lead).

Optimizing Green OA Mandates and Accelerating Adoption.To date, the world has a total of 185 institutional mandates and 52 funder mandates. This is still only a tiny fraction of the world’s total number of universities, research institutes and research funders. Universities and research institutions are the universal providers of all peer-reviewed research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, but even in the UK, far fewer than half of the universities have as yet mandated OA, and only a few of the UK’s OA mandates are designed to be optimally effective. Nevertheless, the current annual Green OA rate for the UK (40%) is twice the worldwide baseline rate (20%).

What is clearly needed now in the UK (and worldwide) is to increase the number of Green OA mandates by institutions and funders to 100% and to upgrade the sub-optimal mandates to ensure 100% compliance. This increase and upgrade is purely a matter of policy; it does not cost any extra money.

Gold OA. What is the situation for Gold OA? The latest estimate for worldwide Gold OA is 12%, but this includes the overseas national journals for which there is less international demand. Among the 10,000 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters, about 8% are Gold. The percentage of Gold OA in the UK is half as high (4%) as in the rest of the world, almost certainly because of the cost and choice constraint of Gold OA and the fact that the UK’s 40% cost-free Green OA rate is double the global 20% baseline, because of the UK’s mandates.

Publisher Lobbying and the Finch Report. Now we come to the heart of the matter. Publishers lobby against Green OA and Green OA mandates on the basis of two premises: (#1) that Green OA is inadequate for users’ needs and (#2) that Green OA is parasitic, and will destroy both journal publishing and peer review if allowed to grow: If researchers, their funders and their institutions want OA, let them pay instead for Gold OA.

Both these arguments have been accepted, uncritically, by the Finch Committee, which, instead of recommending the cost-free increasing and upgrading of the UK’s Green OA mandates has instead recommended increasing public spending by £50-60 million yearly to pay for more Gold OA.

Green OA: Useless? Let me close by looking at the logic and economics underlying this recommendation that publishers have welcomed so warmly: What seems to be overlooked is the fact that worldwide institutional subscriptions are currently paying the cost of journal publishing, including peer review, in full (and handsomely) for the 90% of journals that are non-OA today. Hence the publication costs of the Green OA that authors are providing today are fully paid for by the institutions worldwide that can afford to subscribe.

If publisher premise #1 -- that Green OA is inadequate for users’ needs -- is correct, then when Green OA is scaled up to 100% it will continue to be inadequate, and the institutions that can afford to subscribe will continue to cover the cost of publication, and premise #2 is refuted: Green OA will not destroy publication or peer review.

Or Destructive Parasite? Now suppose that premise #1 is wrong: Green OA (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft) proves adequate for all users’ needs, so once the availability of Green OA approaches 100% for their users, institutions cancel their journals, making subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer-reviewed journal publication.

What will journals do, as their subscription revenues shrink? They will do what all businesses do under those conditions: They will cut unnecessary costs. If the Green OA version is adequate for users, that means both the print edition and the online edition of the journal (and their costs) can be phased out, as there is no longer a market for them. Nor do journals have to do the access-provision or archiving of peer-reviewed drafts: that’s offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA institutional repositories. What’s left for peer-reviewed journals to do?

Peer review itself is done for publishers for free by researchers, just as their papers are provided to publishers for free by researchers. The journals manage the peer review, with qualified editors who select the peer reviewers and adjudicate the reviews. That costs money, but not nearly as much money as is bundled into journal publication costs, and hence subscription prices, today.

But if and when global Green OA “destroys” the subscription base for journals as they are published today, forcing journals to cut obsolete costs and downsize to just peer-review service provision alone, Green OA will by the same token also have released the institutional subscription funds to pay the downsized journals’ sole remaining publication cost – peer review – as a Gold OA publication fee, out of a fraction of the institutional windfall subscription savings. (And the editorial boards and authorships of those journal titles whose publishers are not interested in staying in the scaled down post-Green-OA publishing business will simply migrate to Gold OA publishers who are.)

So, far from leading to the destruction of journal publishing and peer review, scaling up Green OA mandates globally will generate, first, the 100% OA that research so much needs -- and eventually also a transition to sustainable post-Green-OA Gold OA publishing.

But not if the Finch Report is heeded and the UK heads in the direction of squandering more scarce public money on funding pre-emptive Gold OA instead of extending and upgrading cost-free Green OA mandates.

The Finch Report, under strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby, instead of recommending extending and optimizing the UK's worldwide lead in providing Green OA, cost-free, through institutional and funder self-archiving mandates, has recommended abandoning Green OA and Green OA mandates and instead spending extra money (£50-60 million yearly) on paying publishers' Gold OA fees as well as a UK blanket national site-license fee to cover whatever is not yet Gold OA (i.e., all the journals that UK institutions currently subscribe to, rather like the "Big Deals" publishers have been successfully negotiating with individual institutions and consortia):

Finch on Green: "The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories… [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]…"

Finch on Gold: "Gold" open access, funded by article charges, should be seen as "the main vehicle for the publication of research"… Public funders should establish "more effective and flexible arrangements" to pay [Gold OA] article charges… During the transition to [Gold] open access, funding should be found to extend licences [subscriptions] for non-open-access content to the whole UK higher education and health sectors…

Now here are some of the actual figures behind the above assertions. Let readers come to their own conclusions about the relative success, cost, benefits, cost-effectiveness, growth potential and timetable of mandating Green OA vs funding Gold OA:

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1. Mandated vs. Unmandated Green OA (20% vs 70%+):

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2. Rise of Green Mandates:

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3. Rise of Green OA, 2009-2011:

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4. Rise of Gold OA 2003-2011 (from Nature, 2012)
(N.B.: Re-scaled at right for accurate comparison with rise of Green, above):

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5. Projected rise of Gold OA (70% in 2020 or 2026; 100% in 2022 or 2029):

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6. Relative Green and Gold OA Worldwide in 2010

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7. Relative Green and Gold OA in United Kingdom in 2010 (from Nature, 2012)

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8. The OA Citation Impact Advantage: (OA vs. non-OA)

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9. The OA Economic Advantage for the United Kingdom:

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Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11273.

Finch, Dame Janet et al (2012) Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings

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

Gargouri, Yassine; Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Stevan Harnad (2012) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In, 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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): 55-59.

Harnad, S. (2011) 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

Hitchcock, Steve (2012) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus

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).

Houghton, John, Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2011) Access to research and technical information in Denmark. Report to The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (FI) and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF)

Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. (2011) The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers. Open and Shut, 19 June 2011

ROAR Registry of Open Access Repositories

ROARMAP Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies

Van Noorden, Richard (2012) Britain aims for broad open access. Nature News 19 January 2012.

This is a response to the comments of Professor Adam Tickell (PVC, U Birmingham) about the Finch Report, Green OA and peer review costs, as quoted in Paul Jump's article, "Open access may require funds to be rationed," in today's Times Higher Ed.

Professor Tickell is quite right that peer review has a cost that must be paid. But what he seems to have forgotten is that that price is already being paid in full today, handsomely, by institutional journal subscriptions, worldwide.

The Green Open Access self-archiving mandates in which the UK leads worldwide (a lead which the Finch Report, if heeded, would squander) require the author's peer-reviewed final draft to be made freely accessible online so that the peer-reviewed research findings are accessible not only to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published, but to all would-be users.

The Finch Report instead proposes to pay publishers even more money than they are already paid today. This is obviously not because the peer review is not being paid for already today, but in order to ensure that Green OA itself does not make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of publication.

To repeat: the Finch Report (at the behest of the publishing lobby) is proposing to continue denying access-denied users access to paid-up, peer-reviewed research, conducted with public funding, and instead to pay publishers 50-60 million pounds a year more, gradually, to make that research Gold OA. The Finch Report proposes doing this instead of extending the Green OA mandates that already make twice as much UK research OA (40%) accessible as the worldwide average (20%) at no extra cost, because of the UK's worldwide lead in mandating Green OA.

Let me also quickly put paid to the publisher FUD (swallowed wholesale by the Finch Committee) about Green OA being (at one and the same time) (#1) inadequate and, at the same time, (#2) leading to the ruination of publishing and peer review:

What is lacking today is clearly not the payment for peer review. Peer review is being paid for many times over by worldwide institutional subscriptions. What is lacking is access to the paid-up, peer-reviewed research, for all those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the subscription access. Green OA and Green OA mandates from researchers' institutions and funders provide that much needed access, and the evidence of its benefits has already been demonstrated over and over, in the form the research uptake, use and impact that is enhanced by OA.

Now suppose that once 100% Green OA is reached globally, the users of the world do indeed find that the Green OA versions alone are adequate to their needs, so their institutions cancel their subscriptions, making subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of publication: What will happen?

First, publisher FUD premise #1 -- that the Green OA version is inadequate -- is refuted by FUD premise #2, that Green OA will, after all, be adequate enough to make subscriptions no longer sustainable!

Second, what will happen to peer review? Let us remind ourselves that peer review is done by researchers themselves, for publishers, for free, as a service to research itself, just as authors give publishers their papers for free. The non-zero cost of peer review is hence just the cost of managing the peer-review service. You need editors with expertise in the subject matter to pick the peers and adjudicate their reviews. That costs money, and that needs to be paid for.

But, unlike today, the money to pay for post-Green-OA peer review is freed up by the very premise (#2) that Green OA will cause subscriptions to become unsustainable: For if and when institutions have cancelled their subscriptions -- because Green OA proves, contrary to premise #1, to be adequate for their users' needs after all -- the institution's annual windfall subscription cancelation savings are then available to pay the true Gold OA costs of post-Green-OA peer review (management). Those institutional savings will be unlocked from subscriptions and made available instead of the extra 50-60 million pounds per year that the Finch Report is instead recommending that the UK squander on pre-emptive Gold OA now, pre-Green-OA, when worldwide subscriptions are still paying for peer review through subscriptions.

Moreover -- and I can assure you that publishers are well aware of all this, even if naive academics are not -- the post-Green-OA cost of peer review will be far less than the cost of peer review cost today, via subscriptions. Cancelation pressure from Green OA will force publishers to cut costs by phasing out needless good and services for which there is no longer any demand (because of Green OA). This means unbundling peer review, which remains essential, from the many other costly publisher goods and services with which it is inextricably bundled today: the print-on-paper edition, the online edition, access-provision and archiving. Green OA will force journal publishing to downsize to peer review service provision alone.

Publisher premise #2 that Green OA will cause subscriptions to become unsustainable (which I think is true -- but only when Green OA is reaching 100% globally, so institutions' users have a sure way to get access to all of the contents of their subscribed journals even if their institutions' subscriptions are cancelled) is the very same premise that guarantees that the Gold OA costs of the co-bundled products and services that universal Green OA has shown to be obsolete in the online era, can be un-bundled and cut, making post-Green-OA peer review affordable to all institutions, payable out of only a small portion of their very own annual windfall subscription cancelation savings. No more need or market for the print and online editions, because the Green OA versions (on the publishers' own premise) are adequate, with the former publisher function of access-provision and archiving now offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories.

In other words, just a little reflection shows that the publisher FUD about the wrack and ruin that would be induced by Green OA contains its very own refutation.

Yet that publisher FUD has successfully gulled the Finch Committee into recommending the sidelining those inadequate and ruinous Green OA mandates, derailing the long-overdue rise of OA from 40% OA to 100% OA, and proposing instead to pay publishers still more money for costly and unnecessary pre-emptive Gold OA, over and above the worldwide subscription revenue that is already paying for peer review and a lot more. All this, instead of extending and optimizing the Green OA mandates that will provide OA now, at no extra cost, and will eventually downsize post-Green-OA publishing to affordable Gold OA prices for peer review alone, as well as freeing the subscription funds to pay for it.

Publishers will reply that they are willing to make a (very big) deal: Lock in our current prices subscription prices and we will give the UK an annual national consortial site licence that gives UK institutions all the journal access they want, and as our Gold OA revenues rise, the UK's consortial license fee will shrink, until it is all being paid by Gold OA (at today's asking prices).

A very expensive insurance policy for publishers, from a UK that can ill afford to pay it, locking in publishers' current revenue streams and modus operandi, in exchange for very little OA (for UK output alone), and very slowly. (And all this on the outrageous pretext of saving UK jobs in the publishing industry!)

A real head-shaker, if the UK heeds the Finch Report -- as I hope it will have the good sense not to do.

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. (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. (2011) 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

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59.

1. The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research.

2. The Finch Report proposes to do precisely what the (since discredited and withdrawn) US Research Works Act (RWA) failed to do: to push "Green" OA self-archiving (by authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors' funders and institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, to boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review -- and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward "Gold" OA publishing, at the publishers' pace and price.

3. The result would be very little OA, very slowly, and at a high Gold OA price (an extra 50-60 million pounds per year), taken out of already scarce UK research funds, instead of the rapid and cost-free OA growth vouchsafed by Green OA mandates from funders and universities.

4. Both the resulting loss in UK's Green OA mandate momentum and the expenditure of further funds to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA would be a major historic (and economic) set-back for the UK, which has until now been the worldwide leader in OA. The UK would, if the Finch Report were heeded, be left behind by the EU (which has mandated Green OA for all research it funds) and the US (which has a Bill in Congress to do the same -- the same Bill that the recently withdrawn RWA Bill tried to counter).

5. The UK already has 40% Green OA (twice as much as the rest of the world) compared to 4% Gold OA (less than the rest of the world, because it costs extra money and Green OA provides OA at no extra cost). Rather than heeding the Finch Report, which has so obviously fallen victim to the publishing lobby, the UK should shore up and extend its cost-free Green OA funder and institutional mandates to make them more effective and mutually reinforcing, so that UK Green OA can grow quickly to 100%.

6. Publishers will adapt. In the internet era, the research publishing tail should not be permitted to wag the research dog, at the expense of the access, usage, applications, impact and progress of the research in which the UK tax-payer has invested so heavily, in increasingly hard economic times. The benefits -- to research, researchers, their institutions, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public -- of cost-free Green Open Access to publicly funded research vastly outweigh the evolutionary pressure -- natural, desirable and healthy -- to adapt to the internet era that mandated Green OA will exert on the publishing industry.

If the UK %Gold is currently lower than the current %Gold globally [as measured by Laasko/Bjork's latest estimates -- we have not yet checked that directly] then the likely explanation is that where cost-free Green is mandated, there is less demand for costly Gold.

That makes sense: it shows why paying for Gold, pre-emptively, now, at today's asking prices, while still locked into subscriptions, instead of just providing cost-free Green is a foolish strategy --and it makes the recent recommendations of the Finch report even more counter-productive. The time to pay for Gold is when global Green has made subscriptions unsustainable, forced publishing to downsize to peer review alone, and released the subscription cancelation funds to pay for it on the Gold OA model. Then, and only then, will Gold OA's time have come.

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. (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. (2011) 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

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59.

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)

Thierry Chanier's posting on the Global Open Access List (GOAL) is very right to express his concern about publisher control over Héloise, the French counterpart of the SHERPA/Romeo directory of publisher policies on author Open Access (OA) self-archiving.

The fundamental function of such an OA policy directory is to inform authors about whether or not a journal to which they are contemplating submitting a paper has given its green light to make their peer-reviewed final draft OA immediately upon deposit -- or, if not, the length of the journal's embargo on making the deposit OA.

Some supplemental information may be useful too (e.g., publisher OA policy on the unrefereed preprint or the publisher's PDF, locus of deposit -- institutional or institution-external -- and further re-use rights).

But the primary purpose of such a directory is to inform authors on whether and when they have a given journal's green light to make a peer-reviewed deposit OA. This is what needs to be foregrounded and made crystal clear.

Héloise instead seems to be a portal for publishers to dictate practice to authors on a variety of matters. This is likely to confuse rather than clarify matters for authors on the one paramount question on which they need a clear, straightforward answer.

It is fine for publishers to provide the requisite parametric information for Heloise (the directory is, after all, meant to inform authors about publisher OA policy), but very far from fine for Heloise to be placed at publishers' disposal to formulate or dictate practice to authors.

Thierry is quite right to ask that Heloise be put under the control of a committee composed exclusively of researchers and academics. Publishers can provide the data, as they do for SHERPA/Romeo, and then Heloise can present the data according to the parameters needed by authors who want to know whether and when they have the journal's green light to make what OA, where.

The current Héloise site makes a travesty out of the meaning of a green tick! (It can mean an embargo of 5 years!)

I suggest that the coding be a green tick only for those publishers or journals that give their green light to immediate OA. (A pale green tick could, optionally, indicate that the publisher or journal gives its green light to immediate OA for unrefereed preprints.) If there is an embargo, its length can be stated (with a red X).

If there are conditions on locus of deposit, these could be stated (institutional or non-institutional). And if there are re-use rights over and above free online access, those too can be stated.

Any further publisher recommendations should be consigned to an appendix or as links to the publisher's website.

The research community can never remind itself too often what it repeatedly seems to forget: Peer-reviewed journal publishing is a service industry. It is performing a service to the research community (for which it is paid, abundantly, via subscriptions). Research is not funded by the public, nor conducted and published by researchers as a service to the publishing industry.

Researchers give their papers to publishers for free, and peer-reviewers (also researchers) give their refereeing services to publishers for free, in exchange for maximal access to their work. OA provides maximal access. If publishers are trying to put constraints on authors providing OA, this should be made crystal clear in Heloise, so the authors can then make informed choices.

Stevan Harnad

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

Dear Falk,

First, I apologize for my school-masterish tone!

On a planet which still has far too few OA mandates and much too little OA, it cannot be repeated often enough that every single mandate is a step forward, and welcomed by all (in the research community!)

But I hope you will agree that optimizing these first pioneering mandates is very important too, to provide a tested, successful model for others to follow.

This is the reason for focusing here -- in this side-discussion that has arisen from the underlying discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the US's NIH mandate -- on the detailed breakdown of Austria's FWF mandate's compliance rate and the formal and implementational details that have been generating it.

You have kindly provided some very important benchmark data on the compliance rate for the FWF mandate in your previous postings:

The compliance rate for the FWF mandate in its current form is 65%.

Of this, half (32.5%) is Green OA self-archiving and half (32.5%) is from publishing in fee-based Gold OA journals, one third of them exclusively Gold OA (11%) and two thirds (22%) hybrid Gold (meaning the journal is still charging institutions for subscriptions, but authors can pay an additional fee to make their own individual article OA -- and FWF pays that extra fee for fundees).

The global baseline for the annual un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate worldwide is about 20% (although Yassine Gargouri will soon be reporting some new results suggesting that this worldwide un-mandated rate may have increased in the last few years).

So it has to be admitted that the FWF mandate's net gain from raising the baseline un-mandated rate of 20% to 32.5% for Green OA self-archiving is not very great (and much smaller than the Green OA rate generated by other current mandates -- such as Belgium's FNRS mandate -- that may be formulated and implemented in ways that could help Austria's FWF mandate increase its Green OA compliance rate too).

The bulk of the OA generated by the FWF mandate (32.5%) comes from articles published in Gold OA journals or in subscription journals offering optional ("hybrid") Gold OA publishing for an extra fee; FWF hence increases by 22.5% the global Gold OA baseline rate, which is under 10%.

But this Gold OA increase, as you will agree, has been bought at a price -- up to 3000 euros per paper. I ask you to keep that figure in mind in some of the replies I make, below, to the points you have raised.

It is also very important to know the discipline breakdown for Green and Gold compliance rates, because, as Andrew Adams has noted, PMC/UKPMC are just for biomedical research, and, as we all know, physicists have been self-archiving in Arxiv for over two decades at very high rates, un-mandated. Hence their contribution is not a result of the FWF mandate.

On 2012-05-21, Falk Reckling [FR] of Austria's FWF wrote on GOAL:

FR:
In 2006 no Austrian institution had a mandate or an IR. Today only some Austrian institutions have an IR [Institutional Repository] but no one has an OA mandate.

Austria's IR tally in 2006 and today, as well as Austria's mandate tally in 2006 and today are roughly comparable with those of other countries: Increase in the number of institutions with IRs (but with those IRs remaining near-empty) and still extremely few mandates (either from funders or from institutions) -- although Austria does seem to be unusually low in its number of IRs relative to its number of universities.

So the question is: What can be done to generate more IRs and more mandates in Austria?

This is precisely where the FWF can help, in three ways:

1. Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, whether or not it is published as Gold OA.

2. Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR).

3. Only offer to pay for Gold OA if conditions 1 and 2 have been fulfilled.

This will ensure that FWF fundees self-archive. 

It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. 

It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the FWF OA mandate.

It will motivate and facilitate the adoption by fundees' institution of a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just FWF-funded research.

It will ensure that most of the compliance with the FWF mandate is not just Gold OA paid for by FWF at 3000 euros per paper.

FR:
By organizing a nationwide network we now try to tackle these problems.

Before organizing a nationwide network in place of upgrading the FWF mandate with conditions that induce institutions to create their own IRs, it would be well to look at the experience of France's HAL, which is a nation-wide repository just as empty as individual IRs that have not mandated deposit.

Years more can be lost travelling down that garden path...

FR:
At the same time, we noted that a lot of Austrian scholars were/are voluntarily willing to deposit their articles in central disciplinary repositories like arxiv, Repec, SSRN, Citeseer or PMC.

I have already replied about the profound denominator error that you are making here. The un-mandated deposit rate for central disciplinary repositories is just as low as the un-mandated deposit rate for institutional repositories. The crucial factor is not the repository but the mandate. 

And convergent, collaborative mandates (from both institutions and funders) designating the author's IR as the locus of deposit will generate far more institutional mandates than divergent, conflicting ones, for the many reasons I've already described.

One also has to be careful how one counts one's central repositories: Arxiv, as noted, is one of the prominent exceptions to the global un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate. Physicists self-archive in Arxiv, un-mandated, at a much higher rate than other disciplines self-archive (anywhere) un-mandated. 

In over two decades, however, the only other discipline that seems to have followed the example of physicists un-mandated self-archiving) is mathematics. It would seem to be a strategic mistake to wait yet another two decades hoping that un-mandated self-archiving will generalize to other disciplines, rather than just to go ahead and mandate it.

Moreover, there is a third prominent exception to the global un-mandated self-archiving rate (20% overall, but much closer to 100% for physics and maths, in Arxiv) and that is computer science, which has been doing high rates of Green OA self-archiving without needing to be mandated to do so -- but they have not been depositing" in Citeseer (which is not a repository at all, but a harvester):

Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own institutional websites (since long before IRs were invented). But their admirable un-mandated practice has not generalized in over two decades either.

Citeseer does provide a good case in point, though, for the power and efficacy of central harvesting, navigation and search across distributed local deposits.

Google and Google Scholar are further examples of the power and functionality of central harvesting across webwide distributed contents: one does not deposit centrally in google. 

There are more examples of central harvesting and navigation/search over distributed content.

But there is no point in further developing the potential of metadata harvesting and functionality while OA content is still so sparce.

That, again, is what OA mandates are for -- and why it is so important to optimize them, so they maximize compliance and OA.

FR:
With BMC, PLoS and others the need for covering APC arose. And we found it useful to support an alternative business model, as other renown institutions did [see COPE] :

[On COPE, see these critiques of paying pre-emptively for Gold before or instead of [effectively] mandating Green OA.]

Paying the additional costs of Gold OA article processing charges (APCs) is fine, if one has already done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by one's OA mandate (and one has the spare cash). 

But (it seems to me), it is very far from fine to spend all that extra money without first having done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by the mandate.

FR:
I do not agree with your position that Gold OA is costly and Green OA is nearly for free. In practice, Green OA costs a lot of time and money for creating repositories, establishing mandates, having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers, e.g.

I would be very grateful to see what actual Green OA costs you have in mind, Falk. Like the denominator fallacy, it is crucial here to compare like with like. Gold OA costs are from 500-3000 euros per paper.

IR software casts nothing, server space costs next to nothing, IR one-time set-up time is a few days of sysad work, and annual IR maintenance is a few more days of sysad work, per year. IRs are set up for a variety of reasons, not just OA, but let us pretend as if the IR costs are just OA costs: How much do you think that adds up to, per paper deposited? (And bear in mind that adopting a mandate costs nothing, and greatly increases the number of papers deposited, hence decreases the cost per paper.)

Yes, extra money can be spent, and is being spent, on "having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers [in place of authors]".

But the very same thing can be said about these additional expenditures as what was just said about expenditures on Gold OA fees: It's fine to spend this extra money if you have the extra cash -- but not if you have not adopted a mandate that will maximize self-archiving. Most IRs are spending all this money without a mandate (since most IRs don't have a mandate, let alone an optimized one).

So we are again speaking apples and oranges, if we try to rationalize spending scarce cash on Gold OA instead of optimizing our OA mandate in the direction of institutional Green OA self-archiving on the grounds that IRs are costly:

If the costs of Green OA and Gold OA are compared on a per-paper basis (as they need to be, to make sense), there is no contest: Green OA is incomparably cheaper, and Green OA mandates generate incomparably more OA.

FR:
That might give you some reasons why we find, for example, that UKPMC offers a very good option to solve some these problems 

UKPMC, a central repository for UK biomedical research, populated mostly by funder mandates, does not even address the matter at hand here, which is about ways to optimize those funder mandates so that they will generate more OA.

The UK too, like Austria (and the US) would benefit from much greater funder mandate compliance and would also generate many more complementary institutional mandates were it to:

1. Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, whether or not it is published as Gold OA.

2. Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR.

3. Only offer to pay for Gold OA if those two conditions have been fulfilled.

This will ensure that fundees self-archive. 

It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. 

It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with funder OA mandate.

It will motivate and facilitate fundees' institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just funded research.

It will ensure that most of the compliance with the funder mandate is not just Gold OA paid for at 3000 euros per paper.

FR:
Finally, we see no contradiction to support both Green and Gold the same time, but we think in the end a change of the business model should be envisaged.

It is question of priorities, contingencies and timing.

Green OA self-archiving has to be made universal first, by both funder and institutional mandates, both designating institutions as the locus of deposit. That will generate 100% (Green) OA. That, in turn, will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable, reduce costs, and induce a conversion to Gold OA, while also freeing institutional subscription funds to pay for it.

All the best,

Stevan Harnad

"FWF requires all project leaders and workers to make their publications freely available through open access media on the Internet."

Message to Falk Reckling (FWF):

Dear Falk,

I fervently hope that you are communicating with us on GOAL open-mindedly, with a view to gaining information you perhaps did not have, and with a readiness to revise policy if a valid case can be made for the fact that it would help.

Because all too often, I have alas found, those who come to OA policy-making tend to make some initial judgments and decisions, implement them, and then when either practical evidence itself, or those who have more and longer experience in OA and OA policy, call into question those initial judgments and decisions, the response is: "My mind's made up, don't bother me with facts!" and the initial policy simply becomes more and more firmly entrenched, regardless of the consequences.

It is too early for such rigidity, Falk. And Andrew Adams and I (and many others) are trying to explain to you what is amiss with both the FWF policy and the rationales that you are voicing here.

On Sun, May 20, 2012 Falk Reckling wrote on the Global Open Access List (GOAL):

FR:
[1] an [Insitutional Repository] has to exist and that is often not the case.
[2] And if an IR exists it is often not used,
[3] mandate or not.
[4] Here some central disciplinary respositories are much more successfull as PMC/UKPMC.

1. Many, many institutions have repositories, and those that do not yet have one are merely a free piece of software and a server sector away form having one.

2. Yes, almost all existing repositories are unused (at least 80% of annual institutional refereed research output is not deposited). But that is the point! That's precisely why deposit mandates are needed.

3. It is an enormous factual error, however, to say that institutional repositories are unused whether or not they have a mandate. Again, that is the whole point. There is abundant evidence that institutions that mandate deposit are not near 80% empty but near 80% full! (And especially when they have adopted the optimal ID/OA mandate of U. Liege.)

4. It is also an enormous factual error to state that central repositories like PMC/UKPMC are exceptions to the 20/80 rule (i.e., that only 20% of total research output is deposited un-mandated). The total research output of an institution is all the refereed journal articles, in all disciplines, that its authors publish each year. The total research output of a central discipline-based repository is all the refereed journal articles published each year by all authors in that discipline, in all institutions worldwide. To imagine otherwise is to fall into the denominator fallacy:

The annual percentage use of a repository is the annual ratio of deposited articles to all target articles within its ambit. For an institution, the denominator is obvious, and easily estimated. For an entire discipline, it is far from obvious, but it too can be estimated. And I can assure you that the un-mandated Bio-Medical Research content of PMC/UKPMC is no higher than the global 20% baseline for all other disciplines. What gives the illusion that it is otherwise is two things, one trivial, one nontrivial:

The trivial reason for this profound error and misconception is the simple fact that disciplines are much bigger than institutions. So the absolute number of articles in a disciplinary repository is much bigger than those in any institutional repository, even though their un-mandated content is just 20% in both cases.

The nontrivial reason for this profound error is the fact that much of PMC/UKPMC content is mandated (by NIH, MRC, Wellcome Trust), and for that subset the percentage deposit is of course much higher -- exactly as it is with institutional mandated content.

So the overall error is to conflate central repository content and mandated content, and incorrectly (and misleadingly) deduce that central repositories are doing better than institutional repositories because they are bigger and have more deposits.

Reflection will show that it is mandates that generate deposits, not centrality or disciplinarity (irrespective of whether the mandates are institutional mandates or funder mandates). 

(The Physics Arxiv is the sole exception, where un-mandated deposits are close to 100%, and have been for two decades: But two decades is far too long to keep waiting in the hope that the physicists' spontaneous, un-mandated self-archiving practices would generalize to other disciplines: they have not. That's why the OA movement has moved toward supporting mandates.)

And as several of us have now stated, the functionality of a central repository for navigation and search (which is certainly incomparably better than the functionality of any single institutional repository, where no one would ever dream of doing navigation and search) is fully preserved if the central repository harvests the metadata and links to the full-text from institutional repositories. 

The point being made here about the importance of ensuring that both institutional and funder mandates collaborate and converge on institutional deposit instead of diverging and competing is that it makes a huge practical difference -- both to the burden on authors and to the probability of persuading institutions (who are the universal providers of all refereed research, funded and funded, in all disciplines) to adopt deposit mandates of their own -- whether funders mandate institutional deposit or institution-external deposit.

But Falk, you do not seem to be hearing this in these exchanges so far: you seem instead to return over and over to the funding of Gold OA fees rather than the mandating of Green OA. Is there any hope of drawing your attention to this much more fundamental and urgent question, on which the prospects of OA growth in upcoming years hinges?

FR:
b) We believe that OA is better supported by the Gold road and therefore a change of the business model is needed. That means costs should be covered by APCs or institutions or mixed models.

It is a great pity if you are rigidly committed to this belief, which is not only erroneous (for the many reasons we have been describing) but costly, because of the premature, pre-emptive focus on getting OA by paying Gold OA fees instead of by mandating Green OA -- and designating institutional repositories as the locus for direct deposit.

If funders mandate institutional deposit, institutions (the universal providers) will mandate Green OA too, and we will have 100% OA (Green). That will already solve the research accessibility problem, completely.

Moreover, that is also the fastest and surest way to eventually convert journals to Gold OA (and liberate the subscription money to pay for it.)

Solving the research access problem does not immediately solve the journal affordability problem too -- but does make it into a far less urgent, life/death matter (since with 100% Green OA, all users have access, whether or not journals are afforded or cancelled.)

I profoundly hope you will set a good example for other policy-makers, by showing some open-mindedness, flexibility and reflection on these crucial questions.

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad