Tuesday, October 4. 2005How to compare research impact of toll- vs. open-access researchPrior Amsci Topic Thread:On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (SM) of ALPSP wrote in SOAF: SM: "The problem is, there is no evidence of correlation between citations and the return on research expenditure."Citations are one direct, face-valid measure of return on research expenditure. Research is funded in order to be applied and built-upon, i.e., to be used; citations are an index of that usage. Uncited, unused research may as well not have been conducted, and represents no return on the research investment. Whatever increases usage and citations, increases the return on the research investment. Any loss of such a potential increase is a loss of potential return on the research investment. Self-archiving increases citations 50%-250%. Hence the failure to self-archive loses 50%-250% of the potential return on the research investment. SM: "I haven't been able to trace many analyses which do look at this (Don King will know, if anyone does) but those I've read look at output of articles, registration of patents, and Gross Domestic Product."Article counts are a measure of the return on the research investment, but far too crude a measure, for, as noted, the articles may not be used. Patents are pertinent only to a tiny portion of the research literature, so have insufficient generality to be a useful general measure of research impact. Moreover, they are often based on unpublished research, whereas self-archiving and the OA movement are directed specifically at published research. However, patent counts and citation counts are in fact positively correlated: Gross domestic product is again too crude. Most basic research is too far from practical applications to contribute to the GDP. But one thing is certain: If a piece of research is to make a contribution to the GDP, it must be accessible to its potential appliers. Self-archiving substantially increases accessibility, as indicated by the fact that it generates substantially more citations."patent volume is positively correlated with paper citations, suggesting that patent counts may be reasonable measures of research impact" Agarwal, A. & Henderson, R. (2002) Putting Patents in Context: Exploring Knowledge Transfer from MIT. Management Science 48 (1), 44-60 I too would be interested, however, to know of studies correlating GDP with citation counts. SM: "Clearly, we are a long way off being able to analyse whether or not self-archiving (or any other form of open access) does or does not contribute to these objective output measures."I thought the question was about whether citation counts are correlated with these measures. We already know that self-archiving is correlated with increased citation counts. SM: "But to pretend that we 'know' citations are a proxy for any of them is not, to my mind, an argument that holds any water"The claim was not that citations are a proxy for GDP, but that citations are a (face-valid) measure of the return on the investment of public funds in research -- and, more particularly, that the loss of potential citations is the loss of potential returns on the investment of public funds in research (lost "value for money"). SM: "Stevan, I know what you're going to say so please don't bother - frankly, I am more interested in hearing what other people have to say"Sally, I'd be pleased to obey your request not to reply to you, if this were only a private conversation between you and me. But, you see, others are involved too, in particular, researchers and their interests. You appear to be concerned about hypothetical future losses to publishers because of self-archiving -- losses for which there exists no evidence at all to date. I am concerned about actual current losses to researchers because of not self-archiving -- losses for which the sizeable positive correlations between self-archiving and citation counts, and between citations counts and researcher revenue (in terms of both salary and research funding) constitute strong positive evidence. See, for example, the many studies showing the correlation between RAE rankings and citation counts, as cited in Harnad, Carr, Brody & Oppenheim (2003): "Mandated online RAE CVs linked to university eprint archives: Enhancing UK research impact and assessment" In particular, Eysenck & Smith (2002) write: Stevan Harnad"Correlation between RAE ratings and mean departmental citations +0.91 (1996) +0.86 (2001) (Psychology)" Sunday, September 25. 2005Letter to Times Higher Education Supplement
Laura Barnett and Hanna Hindstrom, "All research to go online," Times Higher Education Supplement, September 23, 2004
The Research Councils UK have proposed to mandate that all RCUK fundees make their articles openly accessible online by self-archiving them on the web. In a disappointingly inaccurate THES article (“ All research to go online” Sep 23), the authors get most of the important details wrong. They write: THES: “[A] benefit of online open access publishing [italics mine] would be that academics and researchers would no longer have to rely on their institutions to provide access to articles published in subscription-only journals.”Not only is it not open access publishing but open access self-archiving (of their own articles, published in subscription-only journals) that the RCUK is mandating for their researchers, but this does not mean that their researchers will no longer rely on their institutions to provide access to the journals they subscribe to: How could my giving away my own published articles online provide me with access to the articles in the journals my institution subscribes to? I give my articles away so other researchers webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journals my articles were published in can nevertheless access and use them. That is how self-archiving (1) maximises my own research impact, and, far more important, how it also (2) maximizes the return on the British public’s yearly £3.5 billion investment in research. But the THES article misquotes me on (1) THES ("quoting" SH): “if citations rose by 50 to 250 per cent because of online open-access publishing [sic, again: italics mine, but not the words] researchers could gain more than £2.5 million a year in potential salary increases, grants and funding renewals”This simply leaves out altogether (2) the far more important £1.5 billion loss in potential returns on the British public’s yearly £3.5 billion pound investment in research (in the form of at least 50% more citations). Nor is this an if/then pipe-dream: The projections are based on objective, published measurements of the degree to which self-archiving increases research impact. But by far the worst inaccuracy in the THES article – and it really does a disservice to those who pin their hopes on the RCUK policy for maximising British research impact -- is the gratuitous exaggeration of what is a real but remediable flaw in the current wording of the RCUK proposal. The current draft says RCUK: “Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.”But the THES article instead says: THES: “Under the proposals from Research Councils UK, published work would not necessarily go online immediately. Academics and publishers would be allowed a grace period, which could last anywhere from a few months up to several years. The publisher would determine the exclusion period…”This is utter nonsense, and it would make a nonsense of the RCUK policy, if this were indeed the form it took. The RCUK’s current language simply needs to be made more precise: SH: “Deposit must take place immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access should be made open at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.”.”(In the meanwhile, the article has already been made visible webwide, so the authors can already email eprints of it to all those email eprint-requesters whose institutions cannot afford to access it, thereby still maximising its impact -- but with more author keystrokes per article than altogether necessary.) The 8 co-signatories of the open letter in support of the RCUK policy, including the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, are quoted correctly on this, but the THES authors don't seem to notice that what they themselves have written in THES is contradicted by the co-signatories' quote: Berners-Lee et al.“We believe the RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate [italics mine] self-archiving mandate, without delay.”(More trivially, the THES authors name 4 universities, corresponding to one each of 4 of the 8 co-signatories, but omit Southampton, the university of all 4 of the remaining co-signatories, including Sir Tim!) The last piece of nonsense is this: THES: “Universities are not obliged to implement a repository system, which costs about £80,000 to set up and about £40,000 a year in maintenance.”This too is based on a flaw in the current wording of the policy, which actually says that the articles SH: “should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder.”But the cost of creating and maintaining a repository is in reality less than 10% of the arbitrary and inflated figures cited by THES. Stevan Harnad http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Saturday, September 24. 2005Fantasy Economics?
On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (SM), of the ALPSP, wrote, in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
SM: "Not sure there is any point continuing this but, for what it's worth, increased citations do not self-evidently equate with increased return on research investment. Those who have ears to hear have, I think, already heard. I will post no more on the topic of fantasy economics."On the topic of fantasy economics (for those with ears to hear), I quote Sally Morris when she is citing usage and citations on the subject of her own speculations about potential revenue loss for publishers: In other words, when usage and citations are being cited as evidence of hypothetical losses to publishers, they are not fantasy economics. But when they are cited as evidence of actual losses to research and researchers, they are fantasy economics.SM: "Increasingly, librarians are making use of COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide their decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics Publishing is therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not." [See reply.] As it happens, the only fantasy in all of this is Sally Morris's own fantasy "that RCUK's proposed [mandatory self-archiving] policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals." As already pointed out at length (for those with ears to hear), Sally adduces zero evidence in support of her fantasy. All objective evidence to date is for peaceful co-existence between journal publishing and self-archiving. The rest is not fantasy, but facts, among them the worth of a citation to a researcher Diamond, A., 1986. What is a citation worth? Journal of Human Resources 21, 200-215.and, still more important, the return, in number of citations, per pound spent on research by RCUK: Data-based estimate of 760,000 annual citations (on UK's 130,000 annual articles for RCUK's £3.5 billion pounds invested annually = 0.000217 citations per pound [Source: ISI Web of Science]It is a real head-shaker that Sally continues to find subjective imagination-based predictions of revenue loss to publishers as a result of self-archiving to be non-fantasy, while she finds objective data-based estimates of researcher revenue loss as well as losses of the return on research investment to researchers, research and the public to be fantasy. But as Sally will safely say no more on the subject... Stevan Harnad Saturday, September 17. 2005Press Coverage of Imminent RCUK Decision on Self-Archiving Policy Proposal
This is an update of the press coverage of the imminent decision of the UK Research Councils' (RCUK) on their self-archiving policy proposal (See also prior update.)
"Open access to research worth £1.5bn a year" Lucy Sherriff, The Register 16 September 2005. OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UARe: Maximising the Return on the UK's Public Investment in Research Prior AmSci Topic Thread:The Open Access (OA) Impact Advantage (currently 50-250%) will shrink as we approach 100% OA. Right now we are at about 15% OA self-archiving and the advantage is in part (no one can say how large a part) a competitive advantage of the minority 15% OA self-archivers (the head-start vanguard) over the laggard 85% non-OA majority. (Actually, 5% more is OA too, via OA journals, but as the impact advantage is harder to calculate for OA journals -- because we are not comparing within the same journal and year -- we leave it out of these calculations. The same reasoning applies, however.)That makes it partly a race; and clearly, the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. The competitive advantage is more reason for an individual, institution or nation (like the UK) to self-archive right now (as the RCUK will, we hope, soon be doing). The OA impact advantage arises from at least the following 6 component factors, three of them (2,3,5) temporary, three of them permanent (1,4,6): 1. EA: EARLY ADVANTAGE, beginning already at the pre-refereeing preprint stage. Research that is reported earlier can begin being used and built upon earlier. The result turns out to be not just that it gets its quota of citations sooner, but that quota actually goes up, permanently. This is probably because earlier uptake has a greater cumulative effect on the research cycle.Of these six component factors contributing to the OA impact advantage, only EA, QA, and UA remain operative in the few fields that are already close to 100% OA, such as Astrophysics and High Energy Physics. Everywhere else, however, the current 15% self-archiving rates still need to do a lot of climbing to reach 100%; so for those individuals, institutions, fields and nations the CA still matters a great deal today. (The UK hence stands to gain the biggest competitive advantage by being the first country to implement a self-archiving mandate.) Have I overestimated the UK's potential £1.5bn advantage in the longer-term, given the likelihood that other countries will follow suit, thereby cutting down on the CA component? It was partly to minimise this that I based the estimate on the most conservative end of the 50-250% OA impact advantage, underestimating it by using 50%. (It could also be 5 times as great. ) And whereas the Competitive Advantage will indeed shrink and disapper, the Early Advantage, Quality Advantage and Usage Advantage will be going strong. Michael Kurtz has shown that although articles in a 100% OA field (Astrophysics) do not have longer reference lists, hence do not cite more articles overall, they do have three times higher usage rates (UA). So authors can at last find, access, and decide which articles to cite purely on the basis of their relative merit and quality (QA), no longer biassed by the affordability (hence the accessibility) of the journal in which they happen to be published. So whereas the competitive horse-race (for who self-archives to gain the CA first) will be over at 100% OA, the cognitive horse-race (for which researcher finds what earlier: EA) will continue to favour the swift and the strong. It is hence fair to say that although the annual £1.5 billion pounds-worth of potential impact that the UK is currently losing because it only self-archives 15% of its research output will shrink (as other nations' self-archiving policies catch up), how much it shrinks will then depend only on the true merit of British research rather than either the UK's head-start in self-archiving or the current differential affordability/accessibility of journals. Wednesday, September 14. 2005Maximising the Return on the UK's Public Investment in ResearchThe United Kingdom is not yet maximising the return on its public investment in research. Research Councils UK (RCUK) spend £3.5 billion pounds annually. The UK produces at least 130,000 research journal articles per year, but it is not the number of articles published that reflects the return on the UK’s investment: A piece of research, if it is worth funding and doing at all, must be not only published, but used, applied and built upon by other researchers. This is called ‘research impact’ and a measure of it is the number of times an article is cited by other articles (‘citation impact’).Stevan Harnad, But in order to be used and built upon, an article must first be accessed. A published article is accessible only to those researchers who happen to be at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the particular journal in which it was published. There are 24,000 journals in all, and most institutions can only afford a small fraction of them. In paper days, authors used to supplement this paid access to their articles by mailing free reprints to any would-be users who wrote to request them. The online age has made it possible to provide free ‘eprints’ (electronic versions of the author’s draft) to all potential users who cannot afford the journal version by ‘self-archiving’ them on the author’s own institutional website. The online-age practice of self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact by a dramatic 50-250%, but so far only 15% of researchers are doing it. A recent UK international survey has found that 95% of authors would self-archive – but only if their research funders or their institutions required them to do it (just as they already require them to ‘publish or perish’). The solution is hence obvious: After lengthy deliberations first initiated in 2003 by the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology, RCUK have proposed to adopt a policy requiring UK researchers to deposit, on their university's website, the final author's draft of any journal article resulting from RCUK-funded research. The purpose of the proposed policy would be to maximise the usage and impact of UK research findings by making them freely accessible on the web ("open access") for any potential users in the UK and worldwide who cannot afford paid access to the published journal version. How does this maximise the return on the UK public investment in research? It is not possible to calculate all the ways in which research generates revenue. A good deal of it is a question of probability and depends on time: Although everyone thinks of an immediate cure for cancer or a cheap, clean source of energy as the kind of result we hope for, most research progresses gradually and indirectly, and the best estimate of the size and direction of its progress is its citation impact, for that reflects the degree of uptake of research results by other researchers, in their own subsequent research. Citation impact is accordingly rewarded by universities (through salary increases and promotion) and by research-funders like RCUK (through grant funding and renewal); it is also rewarded by libraries (through journal selection and renewal, based on a journal's average citation "impact factor"). Counting citations is a natural extension of the cruder measure of research impact: counting publications themselves ("publish or perish"). If citations are being counted, it is natural to ask how much they are worth. The marginal dollar value of one citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to range from $50-$1300 (US), depending on field and number of citations. (An increase from 0 to 1 citation is worth more than an increase from 30 to 31; most articles are in the citation range 0-5.) If we convert from dollars to UK pounds sterling (£27-£710) and update by 170% for inflation from 1986-2005, this yields the range £46-$1207 as the marginal value of a UK citation today. Self-archiving, as noted, increases citations by 50-250%, but, as also noted, only 15% of the articles being published are being self-archived today. We will now apply only the most conservative ends of these estimates (50% citation increase from self-archiving at £46 per citation) to the UK's current annual journal article output (and only for the approximately 130,000 UK articles a year indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information, which covers only the top 8000 of the world's 24,000 journals). If we multiply by the 85% of the UK's annual journal article output that is not yet self-archived (110, 500 articles), this translates into an annual loss of £2, 541, 500 in revenue to UK researchers for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it would have taken to self-archive their final drafts. But this impact loss translates into a far bigger one for the British public, if we reckon it as the loss of potential returns on its research investment. As a proportion of the RCUK’s yearly £3.5bn research expenditure (yielding 130,000 articles x 5.6 = 761,600 citations) , our conservative estimate would be a 50% x 85% x £3.5.bn = £1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact (323,680 potential citations lost). And that is without even considering the wider loss in revenue from potential practical applications and usage of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and it is the one the RCUK is proposing: to extend the existing universal 'publish or perish' requirement to 'publish and also self-archive your final draft on your institutional website'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and the international author survey -- plus the actual experience of the two institutions that have already adopted such a requirement (CERN and University of Southampton ECS ) -- has shown that over 90% of authors will comply. The time to close this 50%-250% research impact gap is already well overdue. This is the historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world, by showing how to maximise the return on the public investment in research in the online era. How self-archiving increases citation impact: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html How much a citation is worth: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf How much time and effort is involved in self-archiving http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ RCUK self-archiving policy proposal: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp Directory of publishers' policies on author self-archiving: http://romeo.eprints.org/ JISC user survey on self-archiving: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ Saturday, September 10. 2005Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green
In their press release the UK Green Party announces that it will vote (among other things) to "require Open Access [OA] publishing for publicly-funded academies."
Since one cannot impose a business model, but only encourage it, and try to create conditions favorable to it, this vote to require OA publishing (the "golden" road to OA) is at best only a symbolic token and at worst quixotic. It is also ironic that the Green party makes no mention of support for the "green" road to OA, which is OA self-archiving, by their own authors, of all articles published in non-OA (and OA) journals. This, unlike OA publishing itself (gold), (1) can be required, (2) has been recommended as a UK policy by the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology (but not implemented by the government), (3) is now the proposed policy of the UK research funding councils, RCUK (Research Councils UK) with a projected implementation date of October 2005, (4) would result in 100% OA for all UK research output if adopted, and (5) would serve as a model for the greening of the rest of the research world, as advocated by (6) the Berlin Declaration on Open Access and the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The publisher lobby (ALPSP and STM) is arguing for further delay in implementing this "green" policy on the grounds that (i) it may damage their revenues and (ii) it is an attempt to impose a change in business model on them. All objective evidence is contrary to i; and ii is incorrect (gold is a business model, for publishers; green is merely a condition on receiving funding, for researchers). Over 90% of journals are already green on author self-archiving; it is the authors who are the OA retardant, not the publishers: only about 15% of authors have so far bothered to go, even though the light is green. That is what the RCUK green policy is intended to remedy. It would be both foolish and churlish to try instead to force the journals to take that further step on behalf of the sluggish authors, by going gold, with all the risk and sacrifice accruing to the publishers and all the benefits accruing to the authors. The Green Party should be voting to "require OA self-archiving for [authors employed by] publicly-funded academies" -- an implementable green policy that will swiftly and certainly generate 100% OA -- rather than tilting (out of "gold fever") at imposed business models that will only lead to years more of delay and needless wrangling, meanwhile failing to achieve the desired and reachable immediate result (already long overdue). Stevan Harnad Thursday, September 8. 2005Summary of Keynote Address, EDT2005, Sydney, Australia, September 2005It is a foregone conclusion that the next generation of researchers will self archive their research output in their own Open Access (OA) Instititional Repositories (IRs) for all potential users online; they are already beginning to do it now, with their theses and dissertations. But what about the present generation of researchers? Only 15% of the 2.5 million articles being published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals is being self-archived today. Self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact 50%-250+% by making the research available to those users whose institutions cannot afford access to the official journal version. The marginal dollar value of a citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to be $50-$1300 (US). Converting to Australian dollars ($65-$1700), updating their value by 170% from 1986-2005 ($110-$2890) and using even the most conservative ends of these estimates (50% x $110) and multiplying by the 85% of Australia's annual journal article output (about 35,000 according to ISI) that is not yet OA, this translates into an annual loss of $1,933,750 in revenue to Australian researchers for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it takes to self-archive it. And that is without even considering the loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of Australian research findings in Australia and worldwide, nor the even more general loss to the progress of human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and Research Councils UK (RCUK) are on the verge of implementing it: a mandate to extend the existing universal requirement to 'publish or perish' to 'publish and also self-archive the final peer-reviewed author's draft in your OA IR'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and an international JISC author study (plus the actual experience of the two institutions -- CERN and University of Southampton ECS -- that have already adopted such a requirement) show that over 90% of authors will comply. I will present the evidence, across disciplines and countries, for the 50%-250% OA citation impact advantage.Summary of Keynote Address to be delivered at Wednesday, August 31. 2005Rebuttal to STM Critique of RCUK Research Self-Archiving Policy ProposalEXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The STM (International Society of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) have written a critique of the RCUK (Research Councils of the United Kingdom) research funding policy proposal. Like the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), whose critique of RCUK was rebutted earlier, the STM cites reasons for delaying and modifying the implementation of the RCUK research self-archiving policy. Not one of the cited reasons is valid, and most are based on simple misunderstandings. The biggest of these is that STM is arguing as if RCUK were proposing to mandate a different publishing business model (Open Access [OA] Publishing) whereas RCUK is mandating no such thing: It is merely mandating that RCUK fundees self-archive the final author's drafts of journal articles resulting from RCUK-funded research in order to make their findings accessible online to all potential users whose institutions cannot afford access to the published journal version -- so as to maximise the uptake, usage and impact of British research output. As such, the author's free self-archived version is a supplement to, not a substitute for, the journal's paid version. STM (like ALPSP) express concern that self-archiving may diminish their revenues. It is pointed out by way of reply (as was pointed out in the reply to ALPSP) that all evidence to date is in fact to the contrary. STM express concern that self-archiving will compromise peer review. It is pointed out that it is the author's peer-reviewed draft that is to be self-archived. STM express concern that self-archiving the author's version will create confusion about versions: It is pointed out that for those would-be users who cannot afford the paid journal version, the author's version is incomparably better than no version at all, and indeed has been demonstrated to enhance citation impact by 50-250%. STM express concern about the costs of Institutional Repositories (IRs): It is pointed out that IRs are neither expensive nor intended as substitutes for journal publishing, so their costs are irrelevant to STM. STM then express concern that the OA publishing business model would cost more than the current subscription-based model: It is pointed out that since the OA model is not what is being mandated by RCUK, cost comparisons are in any case meaningless. None of these misunderstandings about the nature and objectives of the policy add up to a rationale for deferring or modifying the implementation of the policy in any way at all. Point-by-point rebuttal of STM response to RCUK self-archiving policy proposal: Access to Scholarly Research: An STM Response to the RCUK Proposal(1) The RCUK access policy for the research it funds is not a business model, and hence not a publishing business model. (2) The only constituencies involved in setting the conditions on research funding are the British research community itself, plus the British public, which provides the research funds. (3) No government intervention is involved in research funding. Research funding is disbursed on the basis of peer review and the conditions on its disbursement are set by the research community, based on the interests of research and of the public that provides the research funds. (4) The decision to use the new medium (the Internet) to maximise the access to and the usage and impact of UK research, in order to maximise the return on the British public’s investment in research is a natural one, and arises from the availability and potential of the new medium. The decision is not based on ideology or belief, but on objective data demonstrating the power of the online medium to enhance research impact. (5) The mandate to self-archive research in order to maximise its accessibility, usage and impact is no more nor less of a mandate than the mandate to publish research in the first place (or “perish”: i.e., not to be further funded). That researchers should publish their research is presumably an interest of publishers. That researchers should wish to maximise their research’s accessibility, usage and impact should also be a wish of publishers. (6) Even if it should happen to turn out to be the case that maximising research accessibility, usage and impact -- which is indisputably optimal for research, researchers, research-funders and the British public that funds the funders and for whose benefit the research is being conducted – proves less than optimal for publishers (and there is no evidence that it will so turn out) – then publishers will need to adapt to the new optimum, rather than try to intervene in the conduct of UK research, the disbursement of UK research funds, or the conditions on the disbursement. STM: "STM fully supports the [RCUK’s first] fundamental principle: (1)… 'public funding should lead to publicly available outputs'”The support is much appreciated, but it is based on a misunderstanding if “publicly available” is taken to mean merely “available for purchase by the general public,” because most peer-reviewed research is not of direct interest to the general public. The British public’s interest is in maximising the impact of the research that it funds, and for that the research must be accessible to the researcher-specialists who will use it, apply it, and build upon it. Publishers are the providers of paid access to that funded research, for all those researchers and their institutions worldwide that can afford their product, and that is fine. It is fair that publishers should get free value from researchers’ (freely given) output, because they too add value to it -- by implementing the all-important peer review (which researchers themselves provide for free as referees, but publishers administer, funding the services of the expert editors who choose the referees and adjudicate the reviews and revisions) as well as by providing the print product and distribution, and the enriched online product and distribution, with copy-editing, reference-linking, mark-up and many other valuable enhancements. It is only fair that publishers should be able to recover their costs and make a fair return on their investment in exchange for the value they add. But researchers (and research) are also concerned with the potential usage and impact from those researchers whose institutions cannot afford their publishers’ value-added product. A growing body of evidence across all fields is now demonstrating that those articles for which journal access to the publisher’s value-added version is supplemented by a self-archived version of the author’s own final draft have 50-250% greater citation impact than those for which only the paid version is accessible. It is in order to close this 50-250% research impact gap that RCUK is mandating self-archiving for the research it funds; and it is in this way that the British public’s interest in maximising the return on its research investment is best served. (We will return to this when we deal with STM’s analogy to “public transport.”) STM: "the RCUK conclusions are precipitous and lack scientific rigour"On the contrary. All the scientific evidence (see bibliography) supports the RCUK’s conclusions, and the evidence is very strong: Self-archiving has been demonstrated to enhance research impact dramatically. What would be unscientific – indeed illogical – would be to imagine that the optimal conditions under which to fund research are somehow connected with publishers’ business models (one way or the other). Publishers make a valuable contribution to research communication, but research is not done in the interests of supporting the publishing business. Publishers are meant to be helping to increase the usage and impact of research, not to be trying to prevent it from being increased. Nor are the conclusions precipitous in the least. They have a long history, starting in the early 1990’s and even earlier, with various memorable milestones since then, such as Harold Varmus’s Ebiomed Proposal in 1999, the Public Library of Science Open Letter in 2001, and the UK Select Committee deliberations in 2003. All sides have been heard across these years, many times over; the optimal path has already been extensively tested and demonstrated to enhance research usage and impact dramatically; and that path has already been embarked upon by about 15% of the world research community: Self-archiving needs to be done to supplement paid access, so as to make research accessible online to 100% of its would-be users world-wide, not just the percentage who can afford paid access to the publisher's version. Those access-denied users are the cause of the 50-250% impact gap. And that gap is what the RCUK policy proposes to close for UK research output. That policy is not precipitous but obvious, optimal, and long overdue. STM: "[RCUK] appear to presuppose that there are unsolvable problems in the current scholarly information system, without debate or analysis"Not at all: The problem (providing access to British research for those researchers in the UK and worldwide who cannot afford paid access, in order to maximise British research impact and progress) is eminently solvable, and RCUK has proposed exactly the right solution. What there has been, exclusively, for too many years now is debate. The experimental testing and logical analysis have been conducted. The results are in. Self-archiving works, and it delivers what it promises to deliver: 50-250% greater research impact. And it does so within the “current scholarly information system,” without any change in business models, through just the extra few keystrokes it takes for authors to deposit their final draft when it is accepted for publication. STM: "we think… the creation of a new more routinised publishing system through RCUK-mandated repositories and systems as proposed will [1] decrease diversity in journals and the peer review process… [2] threaten the value of investments made by STM publishers… [3] improve neither access nor quality for scholars… [4] exacerbate the… problem of differing versions of research papers… with researchers unsure… which… has been subject to peer review"First, there has been no proposal for a “new, more routinised publishing system.” The RCUK is proposing a supplement to the current publishing system: self-archiving the author’s version for those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the publisher’s value-added version. (1) This does not entail any change in either the diversity of journals or the rigour of the peer review process. (Authors are to self-archive their own final drafts of articles that they continue to publish in the current peer-reviewed journals, leaving both their diversity and their peer review untouched.) (2) There is no evidence at all that self-archiving has any effect on the investments of STM publishers. Self-archiving has been practiced for nearly 15 years now, and in some subfields of physics it has even reached 100%, yet both of the major physics publishers (APS and IOPP) report that they can detect no cancellations associated with this growth. (3) There is now a great deal of incontestable evidence that self-archiving improves both access and impact for scholars. (No claims were made that it would improve research quality -- though that has not been tested: it may well be the case that enhanced access, usage and impact enhance research quality too!) (4) There is no “version problem,” there is an access problem: Those researchers who cannot afford access to the publisher’s version are not the ones raising the hue and cry about versions. Is STM proposing to speak for them, suggesting that they should rather do without than be subjected to access to the author’s version? STM: "There is substantial and compelling evidence that the current publishing and licensing systems of STM publishers [have] created a vibrant research infrastructure in the UK in which all four RCUK principles are embodied and are functioning with enormous success. There is no evidence to the contrary, although there are concerns about appropriate budgeting to support ever-increasing research outputs"The RCUK policy to supplement paid access to the journal version with free access to the author’s self-archived version for those would-be users who cannot afford the journal version does not imply that the journal version does not continue to be valuable, vibrant or successful. The evidence that we can still do much better comes from the 50-250% impact enhancement data. STM: "The Government itself, in its November 2004 response (the “UK Government Response”) to the report of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons called “Scientific Publications: Free for All?”, noted that it did not see any 'major problems in accessing scientific information', nor “any evidence of a significant problem in meeting the public’s needs in respect of access to journals…'”The government evidently did not see (or perhaps understand) the growing body of access/impact data. But the RCUK (being researchers) evidently did. STM: "[Even though] most STM member publishers permit authors to deposit their works in the authors’ institutional repositories (“IR” or “IRs”), such repositories do not appear yet to have created a substantial archive of research material."It is not clear exactly what STM mean here, but if they mean that there are not yet enough IRs in the UK and they do not yet archive most of their own institutional research output, STM are quite right, and that is one of the things the RCUK policy is intended to remedy. STM: "Only about a fifth of the CIBER survey respondents had deposited"That sounds right. Estimates of the current proportion of annual research article output that is currently being self-archived vary by field, but they all hover around 15%, as noted (though a recent JISC survey finds that 49% of authors report having self-archived at least once). The purpose of the RCUK policy is to raise that 15% to 100% for UK research output. STM: "Institutional repositories do not seem to be able to provide improved access to verified research results"Now this observation, in contrast to the preceding one, is very far from correct! Author self-archiving (whether in IRs or anywhere else on the web) has been demonstrated in field after field to improving research citation impact by 50-250%. Since citing research results is rather more than just accessing them, we can safely conclude that self-archiving must be improving access by at least that much too. What is certainly true is that providing Institutional Repositories for them is not enough to induce enough UK researchers to self-archive spontaneously: The same JISC survey that was cited above has also reported exactly what more is needed, and it was the authors who indicated what that was: an employer/funder requirement to self-archive. Of the over 1200 authors surveyed, 95% replied that they would comply with such a requirement – and the only two institutions that have already adopted such a requirement (University of Southampton’s ECS Department and CERN Laboratory in Switzerland) both report over 90% compliance, exactly as predicted by the JISC survey. (And, by way of a reminder: the author’s final, refereed, accepted draft is the “verified research results.”) STM: "the potential costs to improve such repositories to enable them to be successful have not been analysed properly to determine whether they are significantly less expensive than current publishing models."It is very thoughtful of STM to worry about IR costs for the research community (just as it worried about the risks of exposure to the author’s version) but STM will be reassured that the costs of creating and maintaining IRs are not only risibly small (amounting to less than $10 per paper), but they are irrelevant. Because what IRs need in order to be successful is not pennies but the RCUK policy itself (as the JISC study showed), requiring researchers to deposit their “verified research results.” In any case, the costs of self-archiving have nothing whatsoever to do with the costs of publishing, since self-archiving is not a substitute but a supplement, provided to those who cannot afford the costs of the published version. Self-archiving in IRs is not a competing business model for publishing, but a complement to the existing publishing system. STM: "‘public access’ does not necessarily mean ‘free access’, in the same way as ‘public transport’ does not mean ‘free transport’, even though in this country tax payers seem to contribute as significantly to the latter as they do to scientific research."“Public access” does not mean free access, but “open access” does. And open access is concerned with goods from which (unlike the products and services of the public transport industry) one of the two co-producers (and the primary one) seeks and receives no sales revenue whatsoever: The researchers give their writings to their publishers, without asking any royalties or fees, in exchange for the peer review and publication they receive, which in turn brings them a certain measure of research impact, which is what they really seek. But in the online age it turns out that researchers are losing 50-250% of their potential impact if they do not, in addition to giving away their research to their publishers for free, also give it away online for free. Moreover, there is in a sense a third co-producer, or at least a co-investor in the “product,” along with the researcher and the publisher, and that is the British public, the tax-payer who funds the research: Like the researcher and the researcher’s institution, the public’s interest is in maximising the degree to which its research investment is used, applied and built-up, in other words, maximising its impact, which in turn depends on maximising access to it. The publisher is a co-producer, having added value, and is fully entitled to seek revenue for that contribution. (The publisher, after all, unlike the researcher, is not publishing merely for impact – although the publisher too co-benefits from enhanced impact.) But the researcher (and the third co-producer, the public) are just as entitled to supplement the impact that their research receives from the publisher’s version with the potential impact from the self-archived supplement, provided for those who cannot afford access to the publisher’s version (exactly as reprints were provided by authors to reprint-requesters in paper days). (Now please find a counterpart for all that in the “public transport industry” analogy!) STM: "The concept of ‘reasonable access’ is probably more appropriate in this case."What is reasonable is that when a new medium is invented that makes it possible to increase research access and impact substantially, no one should try to restrict research impact simply because such a possibility had not existed in paper days. Or, more succinctly, it is not reasonable to expect research and researchers and the public that funds them to renounce potential research impact in the online era. STM: "Researchers report a high level of trust in existing peer-reviewed journals."Indeed they do. And it is the articles published in those trusted peer-reviewed journals of which the author’s versions are now to be self-archived in order to maximise their research impact, in accordance with the RCUK policy. STM: "Quality can always be improved, but it is difficult to imagine how author-pays business models or repositories will be more effective with respect to quality than existing publishing systems."That may well be, but it is absolutely irrelevant to the matter at hand, since the RCUK is not proposing to mandate author-pays business models, but author self-archiving. And it is not mandating self-archiving primarily to improve quality but to improve impact. And in this respect the IRs are a means (to improve impact), not an end in themselves (although IRs have other institutional uses too). STM: "Mandating a centralised peer review system for repositories will not be an improvement on the current journal-based and highly diverse review procedures."That is absolutely correct, and no one is proposing to mandate a centralised peer review system for repositories. RCUK is proposing to mandate the self-archiving of the author’s version of peer-reviewed journal articles. STM: "the argument has often been made (and never successfully refuted) that the mixing of scientific and financial barriers to an author accessing the journal of his/her choice may lead to unintended consequences with respect to reviewing standards."The argument may (or may not) be sound, but it is absolutely irrelevant to the matter at hand, since the RCUK is not proposing to mandate the mixing of scientific/financial values, nor to mandate the author’s choice of journal. RCUK is proposing to mandate the self-archiving of the author’s version of peer-reviewed journal articles. STM: "Many reports have now indicated that major research institutions would have to pay more for author-pays business models than in the traditional subscription models."That may (or may not) be true, but it is absolutely irrelevant to the matter at hand, since the RCUK is not proposing to mandate author-pays business models, but self-archiving STM: "The cost of maintaining a large number of independent repositories…is likely to be significantly higher and less cost-effective than current publisher-hosted systems."It is again gratifying that STM is so concerned about RCUK and university IR costs, but let them be reassured that not only are those costs happily low, but IRs are not intended to be substitutes for publisher-hosted systems but supplements to them, to end the access-denial for (and resulting impact loss from) those researchers who cannot afford the publisher’s version. Hence there is not even any point in comparing their costs, which are orthogonal. STM: "STM agrees that there are significant and important concerns about the ever-increasing gap between the relatively high level of research funding, resulting in ever-increasing output of research results, and the relatively static level of library funding. This issue deserves serious debate and consideration, but the RCUK proposals do not seriously address these issues, if at all."That is correct. The RCUK policy is not intended to generate more revenue to pay for more paid access, but to supplement the existing paid access, such as it is, for those would-be users who cannot afford it, in order to maximise the impact of the research that the RCUK funds. STM: "The British Library maintains one of the most complete academic libraries in the world, and the university research library community is similarly focused on preservation. Many UK university libraries now have access to very large collections of STM journals… The cost of duplicating such archives in digital form on various e-repositories, as appears to be suggested by the RCUK, is daunting and unnecessary."Journals are not to be duplicated; authors’ drafts are to be self-archived, to maximise their impact. The costs, such as they are, are not pertinent to STM, so it is unnecessary for STM to be daunted by them. STM: "we welcome new publishers and new business models to our markets. We see nothing new in the RCUK proposal other than unfunded mandates that arbitrarily favour some models over others."The RCUK proposal is not about new publishers or new business models, nor does it favour any model. It is about self-archiving RCUK-funded research in order to maximise UK research impact. (It is unfunded because both IRs and keystrokes are distributed and cheap, and that’s all that’s needed.) STM: "STM submits that the research community, and the four RCUK principles, are well served by the many dynamic business models that are currently in existence and experimented with, as a result of competition and innovation, in the marketplace."STM may well be right. But well-served as they are, the British research community would quite like to improve this excellent service with the 50-250% impact that the 85% of British research that is not yet self-archived is still currently losing, needlessly, daily, monthly, and yearly. STM: "In summary, STM believes that it would be in the interest of the research community and the broader community as a whole if STM and RCUK start a serious and systematic dialogue, based on the mutually agreed “four principles”, by jointly assessing and evaluating areas where the research information infrastructure can be improved and working with both the publishing and research communities to achieve this, including by the development of mediation and investigative bodies for research ethics issues, the support of the development of technical standards to identify versions and forms of research papers, and the like. This way we can all avoid the trap of prematurely promoting solutions that are based on unproven assumptions."It is an excellent idea for STM to confer and collaborate with RCUK on ways to improve things over and above the long-overdue self-help policy that the RCUK is already planning to adopt for British research output. Such collaboration would be very useful – but certainly not instead of implementing the self-archiving policy, as and when planned. None of the above misunderstandings about the nature and objectives of the policy, nor all the irrelevant points about alternative business models, add up to any sort of rationale for deferring or diverting the implementation of the policy in any way at all. Stevan Harnad Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of STM Critique
31 August 2005
Professor Ian Diamond Chair, RCUK Executive Group Councils UK Secrerariat Polaris House North Star Ave Swindon SN2 1ET UK Dear Ian, The STM have written a response to the RCUK proposal in which they too, like the ALPSP a few weeks ago, adduce reasons for delaying and modifying the implementation of the RCUK self-archiving policy. As in the (short and long) replies to ALPSP, the STM points are very readily rebutted: Most are based on rather profound (and surprising) but easily corrected misunderstandings about the policy itself, and its purpose. A few points are based on a perceived conflict of interest between what is demonstrably best for British research and the British public's investment in it and what STM sees as best for the STM publishing industry. The principal substantive misunderstanding about the RCUK policy itself is that the STM is arguing as if RCUK were proposing to mandate a different publishing business model (Open Access [OA] Publishing) whereas RCUK is proposing to mandate no such thing: It is merely proposing to mandate that RCUK fundees self-archive the final author's drafts of journal articles resulting from RCUK-funded research in order to make their findings accessible to all potential users whose institutions cannot afford access to the published journal version -- in order to maximise the uptake, usage and impact of British research output. As such, the author's free self-archived version is a supplement to, not a substitute for, the journal's paid version. STM (like ALPSP) express concern that self-archiving may diminish their revenues. It is pointed out by way of reply (as was pointed out in the reply to ALPSP) that all evidence to date is in fact to the contrary. STM express concern that self-archiving will compromise peer review. It is pointed out that it is the author's peer-reviewed draft that is being self-archived. STM express concern that self-archiving the author's version will create confusion about versions: It is pointed out that for those would-be users who cannot afford the paid journal version, the author's version is incomparably better than no version at all, and indeed has been demonstrated to enhance citation impact by 50-250%. STM express concern about the costs of Institutional Repositories (IRs): It is pointed out that IRs are neither expensive nor intended as substitutes for journal publishing, so their costs are irrelevant to STM. STM then express concern that the OA publishing business model would cost more than the current subscription-based model: It is pointed out that the OA model is not what is being mandated by RCUK. The point-by-point rebuttal follows [next blog entry]. It is quite clear that the STM has no substantive case at all for delaying or modifying the RCUK policy proposal in any way. I would close by suggesting that it would help clarify the RCUK policy if the abstract ideological points, which currently have no concrete implications in practice, were either eliminated or separated from the concrete policy recommendation (which is to require self-archiving and perhaps to help fund OA publication costs). The 'preservation' components are also misplaced, as the mandate is to self-archive the author's draft, not the publisher's version (which is the one with the preservation problem). It would also be good to remove the confusing mumbo-jumbo about 'kite-marking' so that ALPSP and STM cannot argue that RCUK is proposing to tamper with peer review. And the less said about publishing models, the better, as that is not what RCUK is mandating. Best wishes, Stevan Harnad Professor of Cognitive Sciences Department of Electronic and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton UK SO17 1BJ Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: "ALPSP Response to RCUK Policy Proposal" (began Jul 2005) -- 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 "Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal" (began Nov 2004) "STM Talk: Open Access by Peaceful Evolution" (began Feb 2003) "Book on future of STM publishers" (began Jul 2002)
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