SPARC Europe's OA Suggestions to EC: Part Sense, Part Nonsense, Part Irrelevance

SUMMARY: Calling for Green Gratis OA Mandates makes sense. Calling for Libre OA, extra Gold OA funds, or double-standards for journal quality does not. Call for the reasonable. Grasp the reachable. And trust nature to take care of the rest.

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SPARC Europe's OA suggestions to the EC are part sense, part nonsense, part irrelevance:

Sense:

- Open Access means immediate access, without delaying mechanisms

- strive for the shortest embargo period possible

- help in increasing awareness among researchers

- Open Access via Institutional Repositories (green road) and Open Access via publishing (gold road) are complementary strategies

- extend the [EC] Open Access policies to all research areas

[assuming that what is meant here is to extend the EC Green OA self-archiving mandates]

Nonsense:

- Open Access in Institutional Open Access Policies should refer to “Libre” Open Access: free to access and free to re-use

[Libre OA asks for much more than Gratis OA (free online access) and we are nowhere near having Gratis OA yet. It is counter-productive to over-reach and ask for more when you don't even have the less. Mandating Green Gratis OA will eventually lead to Libre OA too, but demanding Libre OA now will lead nowhere for many more years to come.]

- communicate that the quality of Open Access peer-reviewed journals is equal to the quality of subscription peer-reviewed journals

[Utter, utter nonsense, parroted year in and year out by an endless succession of well-meaning know-naughts: The quality of a peer-reviewed journal is what it is, regardless of its cost-recovery model. Is the EC supposed to give a-priori quality bonuses to journals, based on whether or not they happen to be OA, rather than letting them earn it, with their peer-review standards and quality track-records, like all other journals?]

- call for subscription-based publishers to allow authors and institutions to deposit metadata into Open Access repositories and to support Creative Commons licensing of these materials

[Why call for this, since authors can already deposit their metadata? What publishers should be called upon to do is simply to endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, as over 60% of journals already do ("being on the side of the angels"]

Irrelevance:

- make funding available to cover the costs of Open Access publishing

[Does the EC have spare funds for this? What is needed is OA, not more money to pay publishers. Institutional subscriptions are paying for publication already. What is needed is to mandate Green Gratis OA self-archiving. If and when funds are needed to pay for Gold OA publishing, they will come from the release of the institutional subscription funds through cancelation.]

- call for subscription-based publishers to start the transition of subscription journals towards Open Access

["Calling on publishers to start the transition" will have no effect and is hence irrelevant. Mandating Green OA, in contrast, will generate OA, and then the publishers will start planning for a transition of their own accord as a natural matter of course if and when mandated Green OA begins causing cancelation pressure.]

- provide an infrastructure enabling publisher content to be harvested and deposited into institutional repositories

[What is needed is not an infrastructure. What is needed is a mandate to deposit.]

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship