OA or mOre-pAy?

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SUMMARY: Springer Open Choice offers authors the choice of paying for Optional Gold OA: While all publication costs are still being paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors can pay Springer $3000 extra to make their article (Gold) OA for them.
   But there is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are still paying all publication costs. Researchers' institutions and funders should instead mandate that their researchers self-archive their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to make them (Green) OA.
   Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which the publishing industry should have no say whatsoever. The way to remove the publishing industry lobby from this research-community decision loop is the pro-tem compromise -- wherever there is any delay in adopting an OA self-archiving mandate -- of weakening the mandate into an immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA), so that it can be adopted without any further delay.
   (Such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate in all cases, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)

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Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their own article.

I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs.

Sixty-two percent of journals (including all 502 Springer journals) already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting self-archiving embargoes, or both.

In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research-community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers should have no say whatsoever.

The way to put an end to the publisher filibuster on Green OA self-archiving mandates is the pro-tem compromise of weakening the mandates into immediate-deposit/optional-access mandates (ID/OA), so that they can be adopted without any further delay. This immunizes them from any further attempts by publishers to prevent or delay adoption: Only deposit is mandated (immediately). Access to the immediate deposit can then either be set as Open Access immediately, or (in case of a publisher embargo), as Closed Access, provisionally, with almost-OA provided by the "Fair Use" Button during any embargo.

This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after.

(Note also that such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)

But Jan Velterop (JV) is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell:

JV: "It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: 'almost-OA'."

No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of delay by publishers.

What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is mandated is immediate deposit.

Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate, almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful, propagating benefits of universal OA.)

Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000 Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course, but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too:

JV: "This 'almost-OA', metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if their main goal is to achieve 'almost-OA' it rather seems a waste of time and money."

Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2) the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address: The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester.

That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all expenses are already covered).

No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100% OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all) for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open Choice Gold OA even less so.

OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more intent on more-pay than OA...

JV: "OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not 'almost-OA', but true and immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository, which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA publishers I am familiar with)."

Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it, yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions are still paying all the publishing costs.)

And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates, will very soon bring on 100% OA.

JV: "So my advice to authors who want secure, sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the OA choice."

And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum