Open Access Archivangelism

Richard Poynder: "If you were composing the Subversive Proposal today how different would it be? Would it be different? If so, would you care to rephrase it to fit today’s environment? In other words, how would the Subversive Proposal look if written for a 2014 audience (in less than 500 words)?"

SH: Knowing now, in 2014, that researchers won’t do it of their own accord, I would have addressed the proposal instead to their institutions and funders, and in less than 200 words:

"To maximize the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of your publicly funded research output, mandate (require) that the refereed, revised, accepted final draft of all articles must be deposited in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication as a condition for research evaluation and funding. If you allow a publisher embargo on making the deposit OA (freely accessible to all online), implement the automated almost-OA Button (and don’t let the embargo exceed 6-12 months at most). This is called “Gratis Green OA.” Do not pay for Gold OA journal publication fees (“Fool’s Gold”) until global Green OA has made subscriptions unsustainable; then you can pay for Fair-Gold out of your subscription cancellation savings. Fair-Gold will also be Libre OA (with re-use rights such as data-mining, re-mixing and re-publishing). Ignore publishers’ lobbying to the effect that Green OA will destroy peer-reviewed journal publishing: it will re-vitalize it and save the research community a lot of money while maximizing the access, uptake, usage, progress, productivity, applications and impact of their research."

And this is how I should have written the original Proposal in 1994:

FREE ONLINE ACCESS TO REFEREED RESEARCH: A SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL

Abstract: We have heard many predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day. It is applicable only to refereed scientific and scholarly journal articles (but that is the lion's share of the research corpus anyway), a body of work for which authors (researchers) do not and never have expected to SELL their words. They want only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes of their peers, their fellow scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's work in that collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.
      For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of research journal articles made the Faustian bargain to allow a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its intended readership because that was the only way to make their work public in the era when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) were the only way to do so. But today there is another way, and that is by depositing it in the author's institution's online repository:
      If every research institution in the world this very day established a globally accessible online institutional repository for every piece of refereed research output from this day forward, and if all research institutions and research funders mandated (required) that the final, refereed drafts of all their research output must be deposited in the repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, the long-heralded transition to free online access would follow almost immediately.
      The only factor standing in the way of this transition at the moment is the fact that peer review happens to be implemented today almost exclusively by journal publishers. If all scholars' refereed final drafts were universally available to all scholars online, institutions could cancel their journal subscriptions and refereed journal publishers would then have to restructure themselves, phasing out their obsolete print and online editions, access-provision and archiving and their costs, and downsizing to just implementing the peer review service, paid for by researchers' institutions out of their subscription cancellation savings.
      The subversion will be complete, because the refereed research literature will have taken to the airwaves, where it always belonged, and those airwaves will be free (to the benefit of us all) because their true minimal expenses will be covered the optimal way for the unimpeded flow of research findings to all: In advance.

Important Addendum and Correction from Eloy Rodrigues (June 19):

The CAS mandate is for immediate deposit:

CAS requires its researchers and graduate students to deposit an electronic version of the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of their research articles, resulting from any public funded scientific research projects, submitted and consequently published in academic journals after the issuing of this policy, into the open access repositories of their respective institutes at the time the article is published, to be made publicly available within 12 months of the official data of publication.

And CAS already has a network of IRs. Xiaolin Zhang the CAS Library Director has been a very active OA and IR advocate.

The two Chinese OA Mandates (NSFC and CAS) came fast (2014), but the possibility of complying with them is coming slowly (no repository till 2016).

In addition, articles need not be deposited until 12 months after publication.

In most fields, especially the fast-moving sciences, the benefits of Open Access (maximised uptake, usage, impact and progress) are biggest and most important within the first year of publication. That is the growth tip of research. Access losses in the first year are never fully caught up in later years. The iron needs to be struck when it is hot.

There are two very simple steps that China can take to minimise the needless loss of research uptake, usage and impact because of lost time:

(1) China should set up the repositories immediately, using the available free softwares such as EPrints and DSpace. It requires only a server and a few hours worth of set-up time and the repository is ready for deposits. There is no reason whatsoever to wait two years. It would also be sensible to have distributed local repositories — at universities and research institutions — rather than just one central one. Each institution can easily set up its own repository. All repositories are interoperable and if and when desired, their contents can be automatically exported to or harvested by central repositories.

(2) Although an OA embargo of 12 months is allowed, China should mandate that deposit itself must be immediate (immediately upon acceptance for publication). Access to the deposit can be set as closed access instead of OA during the embargo if desired, but EPrints and DSpace repositories have the “Request-Copy” Button for closed-access deposits so that individual users can request and authors can provide an individual copy for research purposes with one click each. The repository automatically emails the copy if the author clicks Yes.

On Tue, May 27, 2014, Alicia Wise (ELS-OXF)  wrote:

Alicia Wise (Elsevier):

Hi Stevan,

I must confess to being utterly perplexed by this email. Elsevier's policies have not changed (though we are reflecting and reviewing, as always) so is it that Romeo has changed the way it classifies our existing policies?  Very interested in learning  more...

With kind wishes,

Alicia

Dr Alicia Wise
Director of Access and Policy
Elsevier

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Stevan Harnad:

Hi Alicia,

I agree completely that Elsevier's Green OA No-Embargo Policy has not changed at all from the way Karen formulated it 10 years ago:

"An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version."  

But SHERPA Romeo is classifying the Policy correctly as Green (and for some Elsevier journals "Blue," which actually also means Green! But because of Romeo's absurd colour scheme, "Romeo Blue" means that the refereed final draft can be immediately self-archived without embargo, whereas "Romeo Green" is reserved for when both the refereed final draft and the pre-refereeing draft can be immediately self-archived -- which is utterly irrelevant for OA, and causes needless and endless confusion, being at odds with the way "Green OA" is now universally used!)



But I also have to add that some of the confusion is caused by Elsevier's more recent attempts to add some pseudo-legal hedges to its Green OA policy, to the effect that Elsevier's authors retain the right to do everything Karen specified in 2004 except if they are required to exercise that right (by their institutions), in which case they may not do it.

That is every bit as absurd as SHERPA's green/blue distinction, and can and should also be ignored by all authors. But you wanted to learn more...

I think that today, the 10th anniversary of the Elsevier Green OA Policy, would be an excellent day to publicly scrap the empty hedges and re-assert the very progressive and constructive Elsevier Policy as it was and is. The hedges just cause gratuitous confusion and are very bad for Elsevier's image...

With best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

Elsevier Keeps Revising Its Double-Talk (But Remains Fully Green)
How Elsevier Can Improve Its Public Image
Elsevier's Public Image Problem
Institutions & Funders: Ignore Elsevier Take-Down Notices (and Mandate Immediate-Deposit)
Some Quaint Elsevier Tergiversation on Rights Retention
Publisher Double Dealing on OA
Free Will and Systematicity
Elsevier requires institutions to seek Elsevier's agreement to require their authors to exercise their rights?

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Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 23:51:58
From: Stevan Harnad  

Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving

Elsevier has just gone from being a Romeo "Pale-Green" publisher to a full Romeo Green publisher: Authors have the publisher's official green light to self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their refereed postprints. 

Elsevier has thereby demonstrated that -- whatever its pricing policy may be -- it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed desire of the research community for Open Access (OA) and its benefits to research productivity and progress. 
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html 

There will be the predictable cavils from the pedants and those who have never understood the real meaning and nature of OA: "It's only the final refereed draft, not the publisher's PDF," "It does not include republishing rights," "Elsevier is still not an OA publisher." 

I, for one, am prepared to stoutly defend Elsevier on all these counts, and to say that one could not have asked for more, and that the full benefits of OA require not one bit more -- from the publisher. 

For now it's down to you, Dear Researchers! Elsevier (and History) is hereafter fully within its rights to say: 

"If Open Access is truly as important to researchers as they claim it is -- indeed as 30,000+ signatories to the PLoS Open Letter attested that it was http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/cgi-bin/plosSign.pl -- then if researchers are not now ready to provide that Open Access, even when given the publisher's official green light to do so, then there is every reason to doubt that they mean (or even know) what they are saying when they clamour for Open Access." 

Elsevier publishes 1,700+ journals. That means at least 200,000 articles a year. Eprints.org will be carefully quantifying and tracking what proportion of those 200,000 articles is made OA by their authors through self-archiving across the next few months and years. Indeed we will be monitoring all of the over 80% of journals sampled by Romeo that are already green. 

(The following Romeo summary stats are already out of date, because 1700 pale-green journals have now become bright green! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html but we will soon catch up at: http://romeo.eprints.org/ [which is under construction, waiting for full journal lists from each of the 93 publishers sampled so far].) 

The OA ball is now clearly in the research community's court (not the publishing community's, not the library community's). Let researchers and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by adopting and implementing institutional OA provision policies. Don't just sign petitions for publishers to provide OA, but commit your own institution to providing it: 

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php 

Stevan Harnad 

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Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100 
From: "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)"  
To: "'harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk'"  
Cc: "Karssen, Zeger (ELS)" , "Bolman, Pieter (ELS)" , "Seeley, Mark (ELS)"  
Subject: Re: Elsevier journal list 

Karen Hunter (Elsevier):

Stevan, 

[H]ere is what we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e. published articles, whether published electronically or in print): 

An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version. 

We will be gradually updating any public information on our policies (including our copyright forms and all information on our web site) to get it all consistent. 

Karen 

Karen Hunter 
Senior Vice President, Strategy 
Elsevier 
+1-212-633-3787 
k.hunter--elsevier--com