Open Access Archivangelism

Re: Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated (Richard Poynder)

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Let’s simplify:

1. Stick to peer-reviewed research articles: that’s all FOA is or was ever about.

2. Copyright and re-use rights are and always have been a red herring in the FOA age.

3. All that’s needed is an FOA version of the peer-reviewed research article.

4. That’s the author’s peer-reviewed final draft.

5. The only thing needed from “journals” (or equivalent) is the adjudication and certification of the peer review.

6. That’s a service, not a product: Nothing to “copyright.”

7. To make the current house of copywrit (sic) cards collapse, all authors need do is make 4 (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft FOA (freely accessible online)

8. FOA immediately (upon “acceptance”) and permanently (“FIPATRAFTO”).

9. For the faint-hearted and superstitious, there’s the Copy-Request Button during any (bogus) publisher “embargo” on “OA.”

10. Like Copyright worries (2), Button worries are red herrings.

11. FOA is all that’s needed or was ever needed.

12. Once researchers, their institutions and their funders get round to providing FOA (= “Green, Gratis OA”), Fair Gold “OA” (peer-review service fees) and all the re-use rights researchers need will be within trivial reach.

(Waiting for researchers, their institutions and their funders to get their heads around this and to set their fingers in motion continues to be yawningly boring; please wake me when they get round to it...)

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Charles Oppenheim:
Stevan is not quite correct. Copyright IS relevant because the authors foolishly agree to assign (or give an exclusive licence) it to the publisher. For Stevan's proposal to work, they must stop doing that. If a researcher has foolishly given away that right, Stevan's No 7 onwards in principle cannot work. So amend Stevan's 12 point plan by adding a final sentence to his point 6, "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE AUTHOR ASSIGN COPYRIGHT TO THE PUBLISHER, OR GRANT IT AN EXCLUSIVE LICENCE TO THE WORK". Then his plan is legally watertight. I do agree with Stevan's final thoughts in brackets. I too am waiting.....

Stevan Harnad: Charles’s formal caveats are quite correct — for pedants and poltroons. But think: if the physicists in 1991 (or the computer scientists even earlier) had had the slightest inclination to give such reservations a single moment’s credence — instead of going ahead and doing exactly what they did (self-arxiving their preprints, and then their refereed final drafts, immediately, and not bothering with the publisher’s “version of record”), FOA would never have made even the modest strides it has made:

So let’s stop fussing about copyright and start self-archiving all our refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication! It’s 2017, almost 3 decades since good sense first erupted and prevailed in some intrepid subsets of the research community. Coraggio!

Apart from that (which should be done in any case), Charles is also right that it is foolish (and unnecessary) to assign copyright or grant an exclusive license to the publisher. The limited right to publish and sell the version of record, online and on paper, is more than right enough — and as much reward as they deserve for their one and only “value-added,” which is the administration of the peer review (which the peers provide for free, just as the author provides the text for free).

Scholastica Interview:

You’ve long championed the Green OA movement. Why do you feel this model has the most promise, and what do you envision for a Green future? 

Green-first is the only approach to OA (1994) that I have ever championed since long before the term “OA” was coined (2002):

My approach is, and always has been:

1. All researchers self-archive all their peer-reviewed research (immediately upon acceptance for publication, or even earlier, in their own institutional repositories). Self-archiving (1994) came to be called BOAI-I (2002) and then “Green OA” (2004) (with OA journal publishing, formerly BOAI-II, dubbed “Gold OA”).

2. Once Green OA is universal, libraries can cancel subscriptions (because everything is available as Green OA), making subscriptions unsustainable, and forcing peer-reviewed journal publishers to cut obsolete products and services and their costs and downsize to their only remaining essential service: the management of peer review. There is no more print edition and all archiving and access-provision is offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories.

3. Journals then have to down-size to just peer review and its cost and convert to Gold OA for cost-recovery (this is what I now call “Fair Gold OA”) paid for by authors’ institutions out of a small fraction of their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings.

4. But Gold OA before universal Green-OA-induced downsizing is “Fool’s Gold OA” because it is unnecessary, arbitrarily inflated in price, double-paid (uncancellable institutional subscriptions for their input and Fool’s-Gold OA fees for their output) or even double-dipped (in the case of hybrid subscriptions/fool’s-gold journals) at a time when subscriptions alone are already unaffordable.

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/ Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. 

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 (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

What has delayed this optimal, inevitable and obvious outcome is (1) researcher slowness in self-archiving, (2) institutional and funder slowness in implementing and monitoring Green OA self-archiving mandates and (3) Fool’s-Gold-Fever. Publishers have also tried to embargo Green OA — but for this there is a solution, the institutional repository’s eprint-request Button for any embargoed deposits:

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) 

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An International Resource eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference) 

Harnad, Stevan (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141

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What do you think are the pros and cons of current Gold OA solutions such as using an APC or library subsidy model to fund publications? Do you think these models could become sustainable or do you think they are replacing current research funding struggles with new ones (e.g. instead of grappling with subscriptions libraries will now grapple with APCs)? 

For pre-Green Fool’s-Gold OA, it’s all cons and no pros. The pros are for Green OA, and that can be provided free. 

Pre-Green Fool’s-Gold is enormously over-priced (because it still includes the products and services and their costs that universal Green OA makes obsolete), double-paid, double-dipped (in hybrid Fool’s Gold journal), unaffordable and unsustainable.

In contrast, down-sized post-Green Fair-Gold (for peer review service only) is affordable and sustainable.

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Do you think control of research publication needs to be taken away from corporate publishers or do you think it is possible for them to work with the academic community? If the former, who do you think needs to take over research publication and dissemination - groups of academics running their own journals, societies or university presses taking back journals, library publishers etc. and why?  

No, I think this is all nonsense and has been holding us up for decades. There is no way to “take over” and it’s unnecessary. What’s necessary is for all institutions and funders to mandate Green OA. That will force downsizing and conversion to Fair-Gold without the need for "take-overs" (except in the case of abandoned titles, which can then indeed be taken over by Fair-Gold OA publishers).

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  

Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score. Journal of the  Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)  67

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In the OA movement do you think there is a place for discussion about substantially lowering research access fees as opposed to trying to eliminate them entirely? Do you think this is something that is/should be considered more (e.g. iTunes model where articles are $2 instead of $40)? 

This is the oldest and silliest approach of all: the SPARC approach in the 1990’s (till they realized it doesn’t work and switched to Green and Gold OA): try to collectively negotiate licenses to lower the price of subscriptions. It doesn’t work, because journals are independent and will not downsize unless they are forced to. And only mandatory Green OA and cancellation can force them to do it. And no subscription price is a fair price because subscriptions are unnecessary and obsolete with universal Green OA

It is taking the author/institution/funder/library community a ridiculously long time to learn that that their only path to universal OA is by first universally mandating Green. The outcome remains optimal and inevitable (and obvious) but I have tired of repeating myself, so I am no longer actively archivangelizing except when asked.

Harnad, S. (1997). How to fast-forward learned serials to the inevitable and the optimal for scholars and scientists. Serials Librarian, 30(3-4), 73-81.

Harnad, Stevan (2016) Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview? CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open Science), Summer Issue 

http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml

https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/homenews?id=112