Think Twice Instead of Double-Paying for Open Access

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) did not "sell out" to Elsevier in agreeing to pay for Open Access publication charges in exchange for compliance with their (very welcome and timely) Open Access mandate. They (and the Wellcome Trust) simply made a strategic mistake -- but a mistake that no one at HHMI (or Wellcome) as yet seems ready to re-think and remedy:

What HHMI should have done was to mandate that all HHMI fundees must deposit the final, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints") of all their published articles in their own institution's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Instead, they uncritically followed the (somewhat incoherent) "e-biomed" model, and mandated that it must be deposited directly in PubMed Central, a central, 3rd-party repository, within 6 months of publication.

The reason this was a mistake (and the reason it is silly to keep harping on HHMI's "selling out") is that all Elsevier journals, including Cell Press, are already "Green" on immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR: It is only 3rd-party archiving that they object to (as rival publication).

But there is no reason whatsoever to hold out (or pay) for direct deposit in a central repository: All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Hence any central repository can harvest their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.) and simply link it to the full-text in the author's own IR. (Oaister, Scirus, Scopus, Google, Google Scholar, etc. can of course also harvest and link for search and retrieval).

So in exchange for their unnecessary and arbitrary insistence on having the full-text deposited directly in PubMed Central within six months of publication, HHMI (and Wellcome, and other followers of this flawed model) have agreed instead to pay arbitrary, inflated, and unnecessary "Gold" OA publication charges. That would in itself be fine, and simply a waste of money, if it did not set an extremely bad example for other research funders and institutions, who are also looking to mandate OA self-archiving, but do not have the spare change to pay for such extravagant and gratuitous expenses.

Below is Cell Press's Self-Archiving policy:

Authors' rights (Cell Press):

"As an author you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:

"...Post a revised personal version of the final text (including illustrations and tables) of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or your institutional website or server, with a link (through the relevant DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not for commercial purposes..."

See also:

Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access

Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum