Open Access Archivangelism

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!

But we don't even have free online access yet...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access is part of free online access with re-use rights...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access is already within immediate reach and free online access with re-use rights is not...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access today will pave the way for free online access with re-use rights tomorrow...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But re-use rights to only a fragment of the research in a field are near-useless...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But publishers allowing authors to provide free online access and re-use rights can immediately be undercut by free-riding rival publishers; publishers allowing authors to provide free online access alone cannot...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But publishers will sooner allow authors to provide free online access than allow them to provide free online access with re-use rights…

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But institutions and funders can sooner mandate free online access than free online access with re-use rights…

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But all non-subscribing users need free online access; not all or even most or many users need re-use rights...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But all authors already want all non-subscribing users to have immediate free online access; not all or even most or many authors know or care about re-use rights yet...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access with re-use rights today entails paying publishers even more, over and above uncancellable subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, whereas free online access entails no extra cost...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access is better, even if free online access with re-use rights is best...

"I don't want the better: I want the best!"

But the better will pave the way for the best...

"I don't want the better: I want the best!"

But the better is already within reach and the best is not: why not grasp it?

"I don't want the better: I want the best!"

See Exchange on Elsevier Website regarding Elsevier Take-Down Notices (and please note that this concerns only authors' final drafts, not Elsevier's PDF version-of-record):

December 17, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Stevan Harnad: Tom, I wonder if it would be possible to drop the double-talk and answer a simple question: Do or do not Elsevier authors retain the right to make their peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites immediately, with no embargo? Just a Yes or No, please… Stevan

December 18, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Tom Reller (Elsevier): Hello Dr. Harnad. I don’t agree with your characterization of our explanation here, but nevertheless as requested, there is a simple answer to your question – yes. Thank you.

December 20, 2013
Stevan Harnad: Tom, thank you. Then I suggest that the institutions [and funders] of Elsevier authors ignore the Elsevier take-down notices (and also adopt an immediate-deposit mandate that is immune to all publisher take-down notices by requiring immediate deposit, whether or not access to the immediate-deposit is made immediately OA)… Stevan 

Do follow Peter Suber's wise advice to authors to try to retain their right to self-archive with OA un-embargoed -- but also deposit your final draft immediately upon acceptance whether or not you make your deposit OA immediately; and make sure your institution and funder both adopt an immediate institutional deposit mandate to ensure that all researchers deposit immediately. (And remember that this all concerns the author's final draft, not the publisher's PDF version-of-record.)

Paradoxically, publisher take-down notices for the publisher's proprietary PDF version-of-record are a good thing for the adoption of sensible, effective OA policies and practices: Sleep-walking authors and their institutions need to be awakened to the pragmatics and implications of the difference between the author's final, peer-reviewed, revised, accepted version and the publisher's PDF version-of-record: Green OA mandates are all about the former, not the latter.

Stevan Harnad

"The University of Calgary has been contacted by a company representing the publisher, Elsevier Reed, regarding certain Elsevier journal articles posted on our publicly accessible university web pages. We have been provided with examples of these articles and reviewed the situation. Elsevier has put the University of Calgary on notice that these publicly posted Elsevier journal articles are an infringement of Elsevier Reed’s copyright and must be taken down."

If Elsevier sends a take-down notice to a university, you have two simple options:

(1) Leave it up, and send the notice back to Elsevier with a copy of Elsevier’s policy on self-archiving.

or

(2) Re-set access as Closed Access and rely on the repository’s copy-request Button.

(If the take-down notice was because you deposited the publisher’s PDF, make the publisher’s PDF Closed Access and deposit the author’s final draft instead, and make that OA.)

And fix your mandate to make sure it specifies that the author’s final draft should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, not the publisher’s PDF.

(Calgary would have done better to respond pragmatically to this latest round of Elsevier FUD and bluff -- but, after all, this is exactly what FUD's for, isn't it?)

Rick Anderson [RA] wrote:

"[A] policy that actually makes deposit mandatory is a mandate… But it appears that many of the institutional policies listed on the ROARMAP site... as "mandates"… actually require no deposit at all. A few examples would be those of MIT ("The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author"), the University of Oregon library ("The Dean of the Libraries will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author"), and the University of Glasgow ("Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication.")… [T]hey are policies that require no deposit… [W]hy the insistence on calling such policies "mandates"? If they make no action mandatory, then why not simply call them policies? 

I agree that some of the "mandates" in ROARMAP are not really mandatory, although Merriam-Webster does give two senses of "mandate":

1  : an authoritative command...
2 :  an authorization to act...

Academics do need both: an official requirement (similar to publish or perish) (1) and official backing from their institutions and funders (2), to empower them to deal with their publishers.

But many of the first wave of mandates are indeed weak, and some are not even mandates at all. 

They are, however, increasingly being upgraded to ID/OA (immediate-deposit/optional-access) (Liège/FNRS model):

In the UK, HEFCE/REF's new policy will effectively make all funded research in the UK ID/OA, and the institutions will have to be the ones to ensure that researchers comply. 

The EC's new Horizon2020 is likewise an immediate-deposit mandate. 

Many (including me) are working hard to try to ensure that the US OSTP mandate and the Canadian Tri-Agency mandate will be ID/OA too. 

Both Minho and QUT have recently upgraded their institutional mandates to ID/OA. And several institutional mandate adoptions have lately been ID/OA.

The hope had originally been that the Harvard/MIT-style OA mandates, because they were (i) self-imposed faculty consensus policies, would be even more effective than administrative mandates, and that because they (ii) formally pre-assigned certain rights by default to their institutions in advance of submission for publication, they would strengthen authors' negotiating position with publishers. 

"Each Faculty member grants to (university name) permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles… Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author’s final version of each article no later than the date of its publication [e.g., by depositing it in the institutional repository]…"

But in practice the Harvard/MIT-model OA mandates (often just called OA "policies") seem to have turned out to be less effective than had been hoped: 

First, the Harvard model had (a) had to allow author waivers, which in and of itself rendered the policy non-mandatory; but this in itself is not the problem, because only about 5% of authors formally request a waiver. 

The problem is that (b) most authors neither waive nor deposit. 

The exact proportion of compliance is not known, because the policy is not binding on all faculty (because at Harvard not all Faculties have adopted it, and because at MIT a lot of collaborative project research is not bound by it) and (c) universities in general currently have no way of knowing what their total published research output is. (Enabling institutions to keep track of their  own research output was in fact one of the secondary purposes of OA mandates and institutional repositories.)

So, as with other OA policies, implementation at Harvard and MIT has been reduced to librarians trying to chase after authors to provide their papers, or trying to retrieve their authors' published papers from the web (where they have sometimes been made OA on institution-external sites). I believe librarians even try to retrieve their institutional authors'  papers from publishers' websites, when the library has licensed access -- but then they languish while the library or repository staff try to figure out whether or when they have the right to deposit them. (This, despite the fact that there are only 5% waivers of the default rights-retention clause!)

It is quite problematic that because of its distinguished source the Harvard OA policy model is being widely emulated in the US even though it is now 5 years since it was first adopted in 2008 and yet there are no data available on how well it works compared to other mandate models (or no mandate at all).

In principle, if Harvard takes it seriously that 95% of Harvard faculty have not waived a default rights-assignment policy, then they can make 95% of Harvard papers OA in Harvard's institutional repository immediately. The question is: which version? If authors have not provided their final refereed drafts, it is unclear what can be done with the publisher's PDF.

The Glasgow policy -- I agree it's not really a mandate, and I have just downgraded it to a non-mandate in ROARMAP -- is the weakest kind of OA policy of all: "Deposit if and when your publisher says you can!"

This is why it's so important that institutional and funder mandates should be (I) upgraded to all require immediate deposit and (II) harmonized to all require institutional deposit, with (III) deposit designated as the sole official mechanism for submitting refereed journal articles for individual performance review, institutional research assessment, research funding applications and fulfillment, and official academic CVs. 

(If institutional rights assignment is waived, the publisher has an OA embargo, and the author wishes to comply with the embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access instead of OA, and the repository's automated request-a-copy Button can provide "Almost-OA" during the embargo with one click each from each requestor and the author. But the deposit must be immediate in any case.)

The UK's HEFCE REF2020 and the EU's EC Horizon2020 mandates should soon both be harmonizing institutional mandates in this direction. Let's hope the US, Canada, Latin America, Australia and the rest of the research world will soon follow suit. OA is already fully within reach and absurdly overdue. Let's this time have the good sense to grasp it.

Stevan Harnad

I like Scott Pluchak's posting. We share a vision...

If you're interested in some of the objective evidence on the adoption rate (still too slow) and the effectiveness (quite remarkable, though depending on mandate-type) of OA self-archiving mandates, have a look at ROARMAP and the references below.

(You might also have heard of the US OSTP, EU Horizon2020 and UK HEFCE/REF2020 mandates, soon to come.)

Scott is certainly right that my thinking has been magical:

1. In 1994: I thought it would be enough to just just say "self-archive" and next day all researchers on the planet would do it. (Next day came, and nothing happened.)

2. It was magical thinking also to create CogPrints in 1997, in case researchers in my field weren't self-archiving because they didn't have a central place to self-archive (no success).

3. Magical thought too, that creating EPrints in 2000 (from which DSpace too emerged) -- so that all institutions could create their own OA repositories -- would do the trick (no dice).

4. A series of studies inspired by Lawrence 2001 -- demonstrating that OA increases citations -- made no significant difference either.

5. But then in 2003, things began to pick up, with the adoption of the very first Green OA mandate (Southampton ECS), followed by several more (notably QUT in Australia and U Minho in Portugal). ROARMAP launched, but adoptions were still just a trickle: decidedly unmagical.

6. Then in 2004 the UK Select Committee recommended that all UK institutions and funders mandate Green OA. And the trickle became a trend -- but still a very sluggish one. And most of the mandates were weak, ineffective ones. It would have taken magic to make them work.

7. So in 2006, Peter Suber and I independently proposed the immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA) (Peter called it the "dual-deposit-release" mandate), Southampton designed the automated request-a-copy Button for EPrints and Eloy Rodrigues designed its counterpart for DSpace. (Perhaps it was still magical thinking to imagine they would work -- or would even be adopted.)

8. But then in 2007, Bernard Rentier, rector of the University of Liège, became the first to adopt the ID/OA mandate and the Button.

9. We then waited a few years to see whether it would work.

10. And by 2010 it became evident that ID/OA + Button was working, and generating over 80% OA compared to about 30% for the weaker mandates and even less without mandates. And no magic was needed.

Meanwhile, Gold OA had been making some headway too, but even more slowly than Green, because it required authors to switch journals and because it cost them extra money; and in 2013 the economist John Houghton (in collaboration with publishing consultant Alma Swan) described exactly why Green needed to come first.

Is it magical to think the adoption of ID/OA + Button will become universal in the next few years? Perhaps. But let's be empirical, and wait for the evidence.

Meanwhile, I -- and many others -- will keep "tirelessly trotting out the facts" rather than just waiting passively… And does 1-10 really sound all that hedgehoggy to you? Seems more foxy to me (and a fox who is more of a pragmatist than just a preacher, polemicist or prestidigitator). -- But then I love both of those little creatures (the foxes and the hedgehogs), and would never either wear their hides or eat their flesh, any more than I would those of any other feeling creature (including pragmatists, preachers, polemicists and prestidigitators). And that's a lot bigger and more important thing than OA...

Gargouri, Y., Larivière, V., & Harnad, S. (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, Ed. title to come) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In Open Access Week 2012

Hitchcock, S. (2013) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. & 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.)

Beall, Jeffrey (2013) The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access. TripleC Communication, Capitalism & Critique Journal. 11(2): 589-597

This wacky article is easy to debunk, though I still think Jeff Beall is doing something useful with his list naming and shaming junk journals. It reveals, however, that Jeff is driven by some sort of fanciful conspiracy theory! 'OA is all an anti-capitalist plot.' (Even on a quick skim it is evident that his article is rife with half-truths, errors and downright nonsense. Pity. It will diminish the credibility of his valid exposés. Maybe this is a good thing, if the judgment and motivation behind Beall's list is as kooky as this article, but it will now also give the genuine "predatory" junk-journals some specious arguments for discrediting Jeff's work altogether. It will also furnish the publishing lobby with some good sound-bites -- but they use them at their peril, because of all the patent nonsense in which they are inseparably embedded!)

Now a few deadpan rejoinders to just the most egregious howlers:

"ABSTRACT: While the open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content open-access, its true motives are much different. The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with. The movement is also actively imposing onerous mandates on researchers, mandates that restrict individual freedom. To boost the open-access movement, its leaders sacrifice the academic futures of young scholars and those from developing countries, pressuring them to publish in lower-quality open-access journals. The open-access movement has fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and standalone journals, increasing the amount of research misconduct in scholarly publications and the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were authentic science."

There are two ways to provide OA: Publish your article in an OA journal (Gold OA) - or -
Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).

"The open-access movement isn't really about open access. Instead, it is about collectivizing production and denying the freedom of the press from those who prefer the subscription model of scholarly publishing. It is an anti-corporatist, oppressive and negative movement, one that uses young researchers and researchers from developing countries as pawns to artificially force the make-believe gold and green open-access models to work. The movement relies on unnatural mandates that take free choice away from individual researchers, mandates set and enforced by an onerous cadre of Soros-funded European autocrats…"

Green OA provides online access to peer-reviewed research for all potential users, not just those at subscribing institutions.

With Green OA mandated, those who wish to continue paying subscriptions (and can afford to) are free to keep on paying them for as long as they like.

Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).

"The open-access movement is a failed social movement and a false messiah, but its promoters refuse to admit this. The emergence of numerous predatory publishers – a product of the open-access movement – has poisoned scholarly communication, fostering research misconduct and the publishing of pseudo-science, but OA advocates refuse to recognize the growing problem. By instituting a policy of exchanging funds between researchers and publishers, the movement has fostered corruption on a grand scale. Instead of arguing for openaccess, we must determine and settle on the best model for the distribution of scholarly research, and it's clear that neither green nor gold open-access is that model…"

There are two ways to provide OA: Publish your article in an OA journal (Gold OA) - or -
Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).

"Open access advocates think they know better than everyone else and want to impose their policies on others. Thus, the open access movement has the serious side-effect of taking away other's freedom from them. We observe this tendency in institutional mandates. Harnad (2013) goes so far as to propose [an]…Orwellian system of mandates… documented [in a] table of mandate strength, with the most restrictive pegged at level 12, with the designation "immediate deposit + performance evaluation (no waiver option)".

Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).

"A social movement that needs mandates to work is doomed to fail. A social movement that uses mandates is abusive and tantamount to academic slavery. Researchers need more freedom in their decisions not less. How can we expect and demand academic freedom from our universities when we impose oppressive mandates upon ourselves?…"

Publish in any journal you freely choose, and self-archive your final peer-reviewed draft in your institution's OA repository (Green OA).

(Perhaps a publish-or-perish mandate, too, is academic slavery? Or a "show-up-for-your-lectures-or-you're-fired" mandate? Or a mandate to submit CVs digitally instead of in print? Or not smoke on the premises?)

"[F]rom their high-salaried comfortable positions…OA advocates... demand that for-profit, scholarly journal publishers not be involved in scholarly publishing and devise ways (such as green open-access) to defeat and eliminate them…"

Green OA provides online access to peer-reviewed research for all potential users, not just those at subscribing institutions.

With Green OA mandated, those who wish to continue paying subscriptions (and can afford to) are free to keep on paying them for as long as they like.

If and when globally mandated Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, journals will cut out inessential products and services (such as print edition, online edition, access-provision and archiving) and their costs, and downsize to providing peer review alone, paid for, per outgoing institutional article, out of the institution's incoming journal subscription cancellation savings.

"OA advocates use specious arguments to lobby for mandates, focusing only on the supposed economic benefits of open access and ignoring the value additions provided by professional publishers. The arguments imply that publishers are not really needed; all researchers need to do is upload their work, an action that constitutes publishing, and that this act results in a product that is somehow similar to the products that professional publishers produce…."

Green OA is the peer-reviewed draft. Subscriptions pay for peer review today. If cancelled, the savings will pay for peer review (and any other publisher product or service for which there is still a demand left, once Green OA repositories are doing all the access-provision and archiving). Peer-reviewed publishing is peer-reviewed publishing, not public uploading.

Stevan Harnad

The Green/Gold distinction (which is based on who provides the access: the publisher [Gold] or the author [Green]) is more important now than ever, as publishers fight to retain control of their content. The distinction resolves confusion and is simple to understand (but then needs to be adhered to).

The OA movement should resolutely push for Green OA; Green OA mandates should be formulated to ensure that compliance is by the party bound by the mandate (the fundee, if a funder mandate, the employee, if an institutional mandate). On no account should mandates rely on compliance by a 2nd party, the publisher, who is not bound by the mandate and has every interest in maintaining control over the content.

There is a 3rd way in which articles can be made OA of course, other than by the author (or the author's assigns) (Green) or by the publisher (Gold): It can be made OA by a 3rd party -- either a user or a rival publisher or service provider. This is partly what the Elsevier/academia.edu kerfuffle is about, and it will no doubt spread to other 3rd party providers like ResearchGate, Mendeley and the like. (It also concerns versions, because Green OA usually involves only the author's final draft whereas 3rd-party OA often involves the publisher's proprietary version-of-record.)

My advice to those who are up in arms about Elsevier's take-down notice for 3rd-party service providers is to redirect your resentment toward doing something legal and feasible, namely, mandating and depositing the refereed, accepted author-draft in your institutional repository immediately upon acceptance, and making it OA as soon as your can (or wish).

The term "OA" (and the goal of the OA movement) should also continue to be reserved for immediate (online) access. The inverse of Open Access is Access Denial. Access is denied by Access Tolls (subscriptions, licenses, pay-to-view); but, just as surely, access is denied by Access Embargoes. Hence it is a contradiction in terms to call Embargoed Access "Delayed Open Access." It is Delayed Access (DA), just as Toll Access is Toll Access (TA), not "Toll Open Access!".

And a one year access embargo is now the real target to beat (as publishers already know all too well). Access delayed for a year is not a victory for the advocates of Open Access; nor is it a solution to the Access/Impact problem in the online era. A 1-year delay might be a convenient unit for doing bibliometric measurements on the growth and latency of Green and Gold Access (and a welcome compromise and marketing ploy for the publishing industry), but "Open Access" should continue to be reserved for immediate, toll-free (and permanent!) online access.

Stevan Harnad

Elsevier may have enough clout with take-down notices to 3rd-party service providers like academia.edu, ResearchGate or (its own!) Mendeley (and might be able to weather the fierce backlash blizzard that will now follow) -- but not if they try it with authors or institutions self-archiving the refereed final drafts of their own research output.

This latest incident is yet another cue to push worldwide for the adoption of immediate institutional deposit mandates (and the repositories' automated copy-request Button) by all research institutions and funders.

Since 2004 Elsevier formally recognizes their authors' right to do immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving of their refereed final drafts (not the Elsevier PDF version of record) on their institutional websites.

And even if they ever do try to rescind that, closed-access deposit is immune to take-down notices.

(But I don't think Elsevier will dare arouse that global backlash by rescinding its 9-year-old policy of endorsing unembargoed Green OA by Elsevier authors -- they will instead try to hope that they can either bluff authors off with their empty double-talk about "systematicity" and "voluntariness" or buy their institutions off by sweetening their publication big-deal on condition they don't mandate Green OA…)

The prediction that "It is almost certain that within the next few years most journals will become [Delayed] Gold (with an embargo of 12 months)" is an extrapolation and inference from the manifest pattern across the last half-decade:

1. Journal publishers know (better than anyone) that OA is inevitable and unstoppable, only delayable (via embargoes).

2. Journal publishers also know that it is the first year of sales that sustains their subscriptions. (The talk about later sales is just hyperbole.)

3. Publishers have accordingly been fighting tooth and nail against Green OA mandates, by lobbying against Green OA Mandates, by embargoing Green OA, and by offering and promoting hybrid Gold OA.

4. Although the majority of publishers (60%, including Elsevier and Springer) do not embargo Green OA, of the 40% that do embargo Green OA, most have a 1-year embargo.

5. This 1-year embargo on Green is accordingly publishers' reluctant but realistic compromise: It is an attempt to ward off immediate Green OA with minimal risk by trying to make institutions' and funders' Green mandates Delayed Green Mandates instead of Green OA Mandates.

6. Then, as an added insurance against losing control of their content, more and more publishers are releasing online access themselves, on their own proprietary websites, a year after publication: Delayed Gold

The publishers' calculation is that since free access after a year is a foregone conclusion, because of Green mandates, it's better (for publishers) if that free access is provided by publishers themselves, as Delayed Gold, so it all remains in their hands (archiving, access-provision, navigation, search, reference linking, re-use, re-publication, etc.).

One-year delayed Gold is also being offered by publishers as insurance against the Green author's version taking over the function of the publisher's version of record.

(Publishers even have a faint hope that 1-year Gold might take the wind out of the sails of Green mandates and the clamor for OA altogether: "Maybe if everyone gets Gold access after a year, that will be the end of it! Back to subscription business as before -- unless the market prefers instead to keep paying the same price that it now pays for subscriptions, but in exchange for immediate, un-embargoed Gold OA, as in SCOAP3 or hybrid Gold…")

But I think most publishers also know that sustaining their current subscription revenue levels is a pipe-dream, and that all their tactics are really doing as long as they succeed is holding back the optimal and inevitable outcome for refereed research in the OA era for as long as they possibly can:

And the inevitable outcome is immediate Green OA, with authors posting their refereed, accepted final drafts free for all online immediately upon acceptance for publication. That draft itself will in turn become the version of record, because subscriptions to the publisher's print and online version will become unsustainable once the Green OA version is free for all.

Under mounting cancellation pressure induced by immediate Green OA, publishers will have to cut inessential costs by phasing out the print and online version of record, offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the global network of Green OA institutional repositories, and downsizing to just the provision of the peer review service alone, paid for -- per paper, per round of peer review, as Fair Gold (instead of today's over-priced, double-paid and double-dipped Fool's Gold) -- out of a fraction of each institution's annual windfall savings from their cancelled annual subscriptions.

So both the 1-year embargo on Green and the 1-year release of Gold are attempts to fend off the above transition: OA has become a fight for that first year of access: researchers need and want it immediately; publishers want to hold onto it until and unless they continue to be paid as much as they are being paid now. The purpose of embargoes is to hold OA hostage to publishers' current revenue levels, locking in content until they pay the right price.

But there is an antidote for publisher embargoes on immediate Green, and that is the immediate-institutional-deposit mandate plus the "Almost-OA" Request-a-Copy Button (the HEFCE/Liège model mandate), designating the deposit of the final refereed draft in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review and for compliance with funding conditions.

Once those immediate-deposit mandates are universally adopted, universal OA will only be one keystroke away: The keystroke that sets access to an embargoed deposit as Open Access instead of Closed Access. With immediate-deposit ubiquitous, embargoes will very quickly die their inevitable and well-deserved deaths under the mounting global pressure for immediate OA (for which impatience will be all the more intensified by Button-based Almost-OA).

The scenario is speculative, to be sure, but grounded in the pragmatics, logic and evidence of what is actually going on today.

(Prepare for a vehement round of pseudo-legal publisher FUD about the copy-request Button as its adoption grows -- all groundless and ineffectual, but yet another attempt to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, by hook or by crook…)

Stevan Harnad

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.

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

Hitchcock, S. (2013) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Laakso, M & Björk, B-Ch (2013) Delayed open access. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64(7): 1323–29

Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes.

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.)

Suber, P. (2012) Open Access. MIT Press.

References added in 2014:

Davis, P. (2013) Journal Usage Half-Life Association of American Publishers November 2013

Suber, P. (2014) What doesn't justify longer embargoes on publicly-funded research January 2014

Bo-Christer Björk is quite right. The Elsevier study's arbitrary (and somewhat self-serving) 6-category classification system (each of whose categories is curiously labelled a "publishing system") leaves much to be desired.

It is not just what Elsevier called "Gold Open Access" that was Gold Open Access, but also what they called "Subsidised." The difference is merely that what they called Gold was publishing-fee-based Gold and what they called subsidized was subsidy-based Gold:

1. Gold Open Access
2. Hybrid
3. Subsidised
4. Open Archives
5. Green Open Access: Pre-print versions
6. Green Open Access: Accepted Author Manuscript versions
Elsevier also neglected to mention that "Subsidised" did not necessarily mean subsidized either: There are also subscription-based journals that make their online versions free immediately upon publication; hence they are likewise Gold OA journals.

What Elsevier called "Open Archives" is also not what it sounds like: It seems to be Delayed Access articles, accessible only after a publisher embargo, either on the publisher's website or in another central website, such as PubMed Central, where publishers also deposit, sometimes immediately, sometimes after an embargo.

The two Green Open Access categories are also ambiguous.The pre-print versions are (correctly) described as pre-refereeing drafts (but it would take a lot closer analysis to determine whether the pre-prints differ from the refereed version. It is easy to determine whether they were posted before the official publication date but far from easy to determine whether they were posted before refereeing. (The date of the letter of acceptance of the refereed draft is often one that only the author and the editor know -- though it is in some cases printed in the journal: did Elsevier look at that too?)

The post-refereeing author's drafts are presumably what they are described as being, but it is not clear by what criteria Elsevier distinguished them from pre-refeeeing drafts (except when they were in an institutional repository and specifically tagged as unrefereed).

So, as Bo-Christer points out, there are many methodological questions about the data without whose answers their meaningfulness and interpretability is limited. I would say that the timing issue is perhaps the most important one. And to sort things out I would like to propose a different system of classification:

Open Access (OA): The term OA should be reserved for immediate OA, regardless whether it is provided by the publisher (Gold) or the author (Green). A reasonable error-margin for OA should be within 3 months or less from publication date. Anything longer begins to overlap with publisher embargoes (of 6, 12, 24 months or longer).

Delayed Access (DA): The term DA should be used for delays of more than 6 months. And besides the usefulness of separately counting 6, 12, and 24 month DA, DA should also be analyzed as a continuous variable, reckoned in months starting from the date of publication (including negative delays, when authors post the refereed draft during the interval from acceptance date to publication date. The unrefereed preprint, however, should not be mixed into this; it should be treated as a separate point of comparison.

So there is Gold OA (immediate), Green OA (immediate), Gold DA and Green DA (measured by 6-month intervals as well as continuously in months.

If a separate distinction is sought within Gold, then fee-based Gold, subsidy-based Gold and subscription-based Gold can be compared, for both OA and DA. The locus of deposit of the Gold is not relevant, but the fact that it was done by the publisher rather than the author (or the author's assigns) is extremely relevant.

For Green OA and DA it is also important to compare locus of deposit (institutional vs. institution-external). See mandates below.

In all cases independence and redundancy should uniformly be controlled: Whenever a positive "hit" is made in any category, it has to be checked whether there are any instances of the same paper in other categories. Otherwise the data are not mutually exclusive.

If desired, all the above can be further subdivided in terms of Gratis (free online access) and Libre (free online access plus re-use rights) OA and DA.

Tracking Gold has the advantage of having clear unambiguous timing (except if the publication date differs from the date the journal actually appears) and of being exhaustively searchable without having to sample or check (if one has an index of the Gold OA and DA journals).

Tracking Green is much harder, but it must be done, because the fight for OA is rapidly becoming the fight against embargoes. That's why Green OA should be reserved for immediate access. It is almost certain that within the next few years most journals will become Gold DA (with an embargo of 12 months). Hence 12 months is the figure to beat, and Green DA after 18 months will not be of much use at all.

And the best way to push for immediate Green OA, is to upgrade all Green mandates to require immediate institutional deposit, irrespective of how long an embargo the mandate allows on DA. Requiring immediate deposit does not guarantee immediate OA, but it guarantees immediate Almost-OA, mediated by the repository's automated copy-request Button, requiring only one click from the requestor and one click from the author.

The immediate-deposit requirement plus the Button not only fits all OA mandates (no matter how they handle embargoes of copyright), making it possible for all institutions and funders to adopt it universally, but it also delivers the greatest amount of immediate access for 100% of deposits: immediate Green OA for X% plus (100-X)% Button-mediated Almost OA. And this, in turn will increase the universal demand for immediacy to the point where publisher embargoes will no longer be able to plug the flood-gates and the research community will have the 100% immediate Green OA it should have had ever since the creation of the web made it possible by making it possible to free the genie from the bottle.

Stevan Harnad