OA Primer for the Perplexed: I

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SUMMARY: OA1 is Free Access and OA2 is Licensed Re-Use. Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.)
    Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1).
    This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles.
    Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles.
    That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority.
    Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this.

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Peter Murray-Rust continues to misunderstand, and hence misrepresent OA. The picture is a lot simpler than Peter makes it sound. Here's a simple glossary:

1. Research Data vs. Research Articles:

Data: Research generates raw data.
Articles: Research generates journal articles describing, analyzing and interpreting the raw data.
Data in Articles: Sometimes articles don't just describe but actually contain raw data.
Articles as Data: Sometimes the articles themselves are treated as data.

2. OA1 (Free Access) vs OA2 (Free Re-Use):

OA1: Articles made accessible/useable free online for users who do not have subscription access to the journal in which they are published.
OA2: Articles or data made accessible/useable free online with various kinds of re-use licenses.

(There is only one OA1 but there are several degrees of OA2, depending on which re-uses are licensed.)

3. The Green vs. Gold Roads to OA:

Green OA: Authors make their articles and/or their data OA1 or OA2 by self-archiving them online.
Gold OA: Journals make their articles OA1 or OA2.

Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.)

Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1).

This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles.

Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles.

That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority.

Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this, especially the practical causal path and its attendant priorities.

Here are the kinds of misunderstandings that keep recurring in Peter's discussion of Green OA1 [translations are provided in brackets]:

PMR: "Green Open Access [OA1 to articles] is irrelevant to Open Data [OA1 or OA2 to data] (I think it makes it harder, others disagree)."

No, OA1 to articles is not irrelevant, either to OA1 to articles or data, or to OA2 (licensed re-use rights) to articles and data. Nor does OA1 make it harder to achieve OA2 (for articles or data). But it would certainly make it harder to achieve Green OA1 for articles through Green OA1 mandates if we tried pre-emptively to insist on OA2 instead, or first.

PMR: "There is no explicit mention in the GreenOA upload model [Green OA1 to articles] for items other than the “full-text” [data]."

There is no "GreenOA upload model" but there is Green OA1 self-archiving of articles, and Green OA1 mandates to self-archive articles. Data and OA2 can certainly be mentioned in these mandates, but they cannot be mandated (because not all authors wish to provide OA1 to their data, or OA2 to their articles or data, whereas all authors wish to provide OA1 to their articles (even if it needs to be mandated to get them to actually do it!).

PMR: "The primary goal of Stevan Harnad - expressed frequently to me and others - is that we should strive for 100% GOA [mandated Green OA1 to articles]compliance and that discussions on Open Data, licences and other matters [OA2 to articles, OA1 or OA2 to data] are a distraction and are harmful to the GOA process."

What is distracting and harmful for getting consensus and compliance on Green OA1 mandates, hence for getting OA1 to articles, is not the discussion of OA2 or of data, but the suggestion that it is not enough to mandate OA1 to articles. The time to insist on more than Green OA1 mandates is when Green OA1 is already faithfully mandated and provided, not before Green OA1 mandates have prevailed.

PMR: "if Open Data [OA2 to data] is irrelevant or inimical to GOA [OA1 to articles] then it is hard to see GOA [OA1 to articles] as supportive of Open Data [OA2 to data]."

Pre-emptive insistence on OA2 to data (or articles) is inimical to achieving consensus and compliance on mandating OA1 to articles. Achieving OA1 to articles will certainly facilitate going on to achieve OA1 and OA2 to data as well as achieving some OA2 to articles.

PMR: "my main argument is that lack of support for Open Data in GOA [OA2 to data and articles] is potentially harmful to the Open Data movement [OA2 to data and articles]. Let’s assume that Stevan’s approach succeeds and we get 100% of papers in repositories through University mandates, funders et. al... [This] GOA [mandated OA1 to articles] will encourage the deposition of full-text only [articles, not data]"

Green OA1 mandates can encourage OA1 to data and OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but they cannot mandate them, because all authors want OA1 for their articles but not all authors want OA1 for their data or OA2 for their articles and data. And pre-emptively insisting on more will only result in getting less (i.e., less consensus and compliance on OA1 for articles).

PMR: "So my major concern is that GreenOA [OA1 to articles] will lead to substandard processes for publishing scientific data. I’d be happy to find Repositories that insist on data upload [OA1 to data]."

I would be happy if we had 100% OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but I know of no realistic way to achieve that, and certainly not directly, because it is not the case that 100% of authors want it already, in principle. But 100% of authors do want OA1 to their articles already, in principle, and they can and do provide that OA1 it in practice if it is mandated.

I find it hard to imagine that the universal practice of providing OA1 to articles can fail to strengthen the inclination to provide OA1 and OA2 to data and articles as well. On the other hand, it is easy to see how insisting pre-emptively on the latter could prevent even the former from coming into universal practice.

PMR: "a GreenOA paper [OA1] may often be a cut-down, impoverished, version of what is available - for a price - on the publishers website. It may, and usually will, lack the supporting information (supplemental data). It will probably not reproduce any permissions that the publisher actually allows. So - if we concern ourselves with matters other than human eyeballs and fulltext - it is almost certainly a poorer resource than the one on the publisher site."

This point is truly perplexing. What is available on a (non-OA) publisher's website is not even OA1, so what is the point of talking about OA1's impoverishment to those would-be users who are not rich enough to afford the publisher's version?

And, yes, OA1 (free online access/use) is not OA2 (free online access/use and re-use licenses, to either article or data), because not all authors wish to provide OA2 to their articles or data, and Green OA1 mandates hence do not attempt to mandate it.

However, data too can certainly be self-archived in Institutional Repositories (IRs) if the author wishes, and IRs have the metadata tags for specifying re-use rights (OA2), if any, for all deposited articles and data.

PMR: "Many funders... require ultra-strong-OA for their archival... [OA2 to articles and data] And several [Gold OA2] publishers... also insist on CC-BY [OA2 to articles]. This is, of course, great for scientific data [OA2 to data]. But it’s a long way from GreenOA [OA1 to articles]."

Yes, some funders can and do mandate more than OA1 to articles. He who pays the piper calls the tune -- so funders are in a better position to do this than universities are (and funders do not need authors' consensus or consent, as universities do, for the conditions they attach to receiving research funding). But so far that funder-mandated OA2 applies only to articles (and usually only after an embargo period), not to data (although funders could in principle mandate data self-archiving too, and eventually will, I hope).

What Gold OA publishers provide is another matter; the OA1 problem is the problem of the 90% of journals that are non-OA, not the 10% that are OA. (Moreover, most Gold OA journals, too, provide only OA1, as Peter Suber has pointed out, not OA2.)

PMR: "Even if the IRs contained all the data appropriate to the publications how do we discover it?"

If authors self-archive their data, the IRs allow them both to link the data with the corresponding articles and to specify the re-uses licensed.

PMR: "GreenOA [OA1] is designed to be simple. Stevan Harnad argues that it can be accomplished with 'one-click'."

No, it is not OA1 self-archiving that is one-click, it is almost-OA via the "Fair Use" Button -- for deposits that are not Open Access (OA1) Closed Access.

The deposit of the full-text itself takes under six minutes' worth of keystrokes, as described in

Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) A Longitudinal Study of the Practice of Self-Archiving.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum