Open Access Archivangelism

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I very much hope that my own will not be the only voice in favour of Fred Friend's Sense over Finch/Willetts Folly at the Westminster Forum on Implementing Open Access Policy in London on November 5th. ---- S.H.

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Bravo to Fred Friend for his trenchant account of the UK/OA saga:
"How did the UK government manage to spoil something as good as open access?"

(Only one item was missing from Fred's list of 9 perverse effects of the Willetts/Finch sell-out -- that it also runs roughshod over UK authors' freedom of choice as to which journal to publish in -- but Fred has informed me that it was in his original list and had to be cut to meet the word-limit!)

Whether or not BIS and the UK goverrnment have the good sense to follow the wise and timely advice of their own 2013 BIS Select Committee on how to repair the RCUK OA Mandate, nothing prevents HEFCE and RCUK from following that advice (just as they followed the advice of the 2004 Select Committee and mandated OA even though the government rejected the advice).

And irrespective of any of this, nothing prevents UK researchers from publishing in their journal of choice and depositing their final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication, as Fred suggests, releasing the immediately deposited paper either immediately as OA, or after an embargo of 6 or 12 months. RCUK has already stated that it will not be enforcing the Green OA embargoes for at least the first five years.

(And meanwhile the repositories' facilitated copy-request Button will be making it possible for authors to provide individual copies of embargoed deposits to requestors for research purposes with one extra click per request, if they wish -- if, but only if, the paper is deposited immediately upon publication rather than after the embargo.)

For those Elsevier authors who wish to provide OA rather than continuing to agonize over what Elsevier might intend or mean:

Believe Elsevier when they state officially that "Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution’s repository, e-mailing to colleagues."

Go ahead and deposit your final draft immediately upon acceptance for publication, set access to the deposit as OA, and ignore all the accompanying Elsevier hedging completely. It means absolutely nothing.

And for those who nevertheless remain tormented by irrational doubts:

Don't stress: Deposit immediately just the same, but set access to the deposit as restricted access (only you can access it) instead of OA, and rely on the repository's copy-request Button to forward individual eprint requests to you from individual requestors: you can decide for each request, on a case by case basis, whether or not you wish to fulfill that request, with one click.

This will tide over potential user needs till either the Elsevier embargo elapses or your irrational doubts subside -- whichever comes first.

(The battle-ground for OA has now become the 1-year embargo, which publishers try to impose in order to protect their current revenue streams come what may. Publishers -- though so far not Elsevier -- have tried to redefine Green OA as access after a 1-year embargo, leaving authors who want to provide immediate access with only one option: pay extra for Gold OA. The immediate-deposit mandate plus the eprint-request Button -- not petitions, boycott threats or hand-wringing -- are the way the research community can protect the interests of research from the self-interest of publishers.)

Harnad Comments on
CANADA'S NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR DRAFT TRI-AGENCY OPEN ACCESS POLICY PROPOSAL

Executive Summary: The Canadian Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy is excellent in preserving fundees’ free choice of journal, and free choice about whether or not to use their research funds to pay to publish in an OA journal. However, deposit in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication needs to be required, whether or not the fundee chooses to publish in an OA journal and whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed for 12 months. The immediate-deposit requirement makes it possible for the fundee’s institution to monitor and ensure timely compliance with the funder OA policy. It also motivates institutions to adopt complementary OA policies of their own, for all their research output, funded and unfunded. The immediate-deposit requirement also facilitates providing individual eprints by the fundee to individual eprint requestors for research purposes during any embargo. Institutional repository deposits can then be automatically exported to any institutional-external repositories the fundee, funding agency or institution wishes. On no account should compliance with funding agency conditions be left to the publisher rather than the fundee and the fundee’s institution.

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“Grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication, either through the publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository (Option #2).”

Monitoring and Ensuring Compliance. A funding agency Open Access (AO) Policy is binding on the fundee, not on other parties. Hence it is a mistake to offer fundees the option either to comply or to leave it to another party (the publisher) to comply.

Funder Requirements Bind Fundees, Not Publishers. The fulfillment of funding agency conditions for receiving a grant is the responsibility of the fundee, and the funding agency needs a systematic and reliable means of monitoring and ensuring that the fundee has indeed complied, and complied in time.

Institutional Monitoring of Compliance. To ensure compliance (and timely compliance) with an AO requirement it is imperative that the responsibility rest fully with the fundee. The funding agency’s natural ally in ensuring compliance is the institution of the fundee, which is already very much involved and and shares a strong interest with both the fundee and the funding agency in ensuring the fulfillment of all funding agency conditions.

Immediate Institutional Repository Deposit. Hence whether or not the fundee publishes with a publisher that makes the article OA immediately, or after an embargo, the fundee should be required to deposit the final, peer-reviewed draft in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon publication. (Indeed, the most natural, effective and verifiable date is the date of acceptance, since the date of publication varies greatly, is often not predictable or known to the fundee, and often diverges from the published calendar date of the journal – if it has a calendar date at all.)

The institution of the fundee can then use the date-stamp of the deposit in the institutional repository and the date of acceptance of the article as the means of monitoring and ensuring timely compliance. (This is also the natural point in the author’s workflow to do the deposit.)

Access Delay and Research Impact Loss. The purpose of OA is to make publicly funded research accessible to all potential users and not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published. This maximizes research uptake, impact and progress. Hence this is why OA is so important and why access-denial is so damaging to the potential usage and applications of research. Studies have also shown that delayed access never attains the full usage and citations of immediate OA. Hence a mechanism for ensuring timely compliance is essential for the success of an OA Policy, and immediate institutional deposit, regardless of locus of publication, is the optimal mechanism for ensuring timely compliance.

Gentil-Beccot, A., Mele, S., & Brooks, T. C. (2010). Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics. Scientometrics 84(2), 345-355.

Conflict of Interest. It should also be noted that publisher interests are in conflict with the research community’s interests regarding OA. Except when they are receiving extra money for it, publisher interest is to embargo and delay OA as long as possible. This means that, far from being a reliable ally in ensuring that fundees comply with a funding agency OA requirement, publishers are likely to delay making articles OA as long as they possibly can.

“Option #1: Grant recipients submit their manuscript to a journal that offers immediate open access to published articles, or offers open access to published articles within 12 months.”

Fundee Freedom to Choose Journal. It is very good to leave the fundee’s choice of journal completely free to the fundee. But it is also imperative that no matter what journal the fundee chooses to publish in, the peer-reviewed final draft should always be deposited in the fundee’s institutional repository – and deposited immediately, not after a 12-month delay.

Fulfilling Eprint Requests During Embargoes. Institutional repositories have a Button with which users can request and authors can provide a single electronic copy for research purposes with one click each. This Button facilitates uptake, access and usage immediately upon deposit, rather than having to wait till the end of a publisher embargo. Hence this “Almost-OA,” made possible by the Button, is another strong reason why all papers should be required to be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. (A further reason is that engaging the institution in ensuring that the conditions of a funder OA policy are fulfilled motivates the institution to adopt an OA policy of its own, for all of its research output, funded and funded, in all disciplines.)

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

“The Agencies consider the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.”

Fundee Freedom to Choose Whether to Pay for OA. It is very good to leave it entirely up to fundees to choose whether or not to use their grant funds to pay publishers extra to make their work OA. As long as fundees retain their free choice of which journal to publish in, and all are required to deposit in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (whether or not the deposit is embargoed, and whether or not they publish in an OA journal) there is no harm in allowing grant funds to be used to pay publishers for making their article OA, if fundees wish. (Given the options, and the scarcity of research funds, it is unlikely that many fundees will choose to pay, rather than just deposit.)

“Option #2: Grant recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a digital archive where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g., institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.”

Institutional Deposit and Institution-External Export.
It is fine to leave it up to authors to sort out whether their final peer-reviewed manuscript is made immediately OA or access to the deposit is embargoed for 12 months – as long as the deposit is made immediately, and hence deposit is systematically verifiable and the institutional repository’s eprint-request Button is immediately available to allow users to request individual copies for research purposes. For this reason it is again important to require immediate institutional deposit in all cases. The deposit can be automatically exported by the reposository software, at designated dates, to designated institution-external repositories, as the fundee or funder or institution may wish.

Facilitating Verification of Compliance. But it is almost as great a mistake to allow institution-external deposit instead of institutional deposit (making it needlessly diffuse and complicated to systematically monitor and ensure compliance for both the institution and the funder) as it is to allow publisher fulfillment of funding agency requirements instead of fulfillment by the fundee (and the fundee’s institution).

CONCLUSION: The only change that needs to be made to optimize the NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy is to require immediate deposit in the fundee’s institutional repository, regardless of whether the fundee’s chooses option #1 or option #2.

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Selected Background References

BOAI10 Recommendations (2012) Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open

Gargouri, Y & Harnad, S (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. In, Rodrigues, Eloy, Swan, Alma and Baptista, Ana Alice (eds.) Ten-year Anniversary of University of Minho RepositóriUM.

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012a) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In: 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Montréal.

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In Open Access Week 2012

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5 (10) e13636

Gentil-Beccot, A., Mele, S., & Brooks, T. C. (2010). Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics. Scientometrics 84(2), 345-355.

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) 39-47.

Harnad, S. (1995) A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10 (6)

Hitchcock, S. (2013) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Suber, P. (2012) Open Access. MIT Press.

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Comments on Other OA Policies:

Harnad, S. (2004a) Memorandum to UK To UK Government Science and Technology Select Committee Select Committee on Science and Technology Written Evidence

Harnad, S. (2004b) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Select Committee on Science and Technology Written Evidence

Harnad, S. (2007). No Need for Canadian PubMed Central: CIHR Should Mandate IR Deposit.

Harnad, S. (2011) What Is To Be Done About Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research? (Response to US OSTP RFI).

Harnad, S. (2011) Comments on Open Access FAQ of German Alliance of Scientific Organisations (Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen).

Harnad, S (2012) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012.

Harnad, S. (2013). Harnad Response to HEFCE REF OA Policy Consultation. HEFCE.

Harnad, S. (2013). Harnad Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014

Harnad, S. (2013) Harnad Evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Open Access, Winter Issue, 119-123.

Harnad, S. (2013) Harnad Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access. Written Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access, Winter Issue

Harnad, S. (2013). Follow-Up Comments for BIS Select Committee on Open Access. UK Parliament Publications and Records.

Harnad, S (2013) Recommandation au ministre québécois de l'enseignement supérieur.

Multiple Comments on CIHR Open Access Policy

Multiple Comments on SSHRC Open Access Policy

Multiple Comments on OA Progress in Canada

Multiple Comments on NIH Public Access Policy

Multiple Comments on Harvard Open Access Policy

Multiple Comments on France/HAL Open Access Policy

Comments on H. Varmus's 1999 E-biomed Proposal [1] [2]

Björn Brembs (as interviewed by Richard Poynder) is not satisfied with "read access" (free online access: Gratis OA): he wants "read/write access" (free online access plus re-use rights: Libre OA).

The problem is that we are nowhere near having even the read-access that Björn is not satisfied with.

So his dissatisfaction is not only with something we do not yet have, but with something that is also an essential component and prerequsite for read/write access. Björn wants more, now, when we don't even have less.

And alas Björn does not give even a hint of a hint of a practical plan for getting read/write access instead of "just" the read access we don't yet have.

All he proposes is that a consortium of rich universities should cancel journals and take over.

Before even asking what on earth those universities would/should/could do, there is the question of how their users would get access to all those cancelled journals (otherwise this "access" would be even less than less!). Björn's reply -- doubly alas -- uses the name of my eprint-request Button in vain:

The eprint-request Button is only legal, and only works, because authors are providing access to individual eprint requestors for their own articles. If the less-rich universities who were not part of this brave take-over consortium of journal-cancellers were to begin to provide automatic Button-access to all those extra-institutional users, their institutional license costs (subscriptions) would sky-rocket, because their Big-Deal license fees are determined by publishers on the basis of the size of each institution's total usership, which would now include all the users of all the cancelling institutions, on Björn's scheme.

So back to the work-bench on that one.

Björn seems to think that OA is just a technical matter, since all the technical wherewithal is already in place, or nearly so. But in fact, the technology for Green Gratis ("read-only") OA has been in place for over 20 years, and we are still nowhere near having it. (We may, optimistically, be somewhere between 20-30%, though certainly not even the 50% that Science-Metrix has optimistically touted recently as the "tipping point" for OA -- because much of that is post-embargo, hence Delayed Access (DA), not OA.

Björn also seems to have proud plans for post-publication "peer review" (which is rather like finding out whether the water you just drank was drinkable on the basis of some crowd-sourcing after you drank it).

Post-publication crowd-sourcing is a useful supplement to peer review, but certainly not a substitute for it.

All I can do is repeat what I've had to say so many times across the past 20 years, as each new generation first comes in contact with the access problem, and proposes its prima facie solutions (none of which are new: they have all been proposed so many times that they -- and their fatal flaws -- have already have each already had their own FAQs for over a decade.) The watchword here, again, is that the primary purpose of the Open Access movement is to free the peer-reviewed literature from access-tolls -- not to free it from peer-review. And before you throw out the peer review system, make sure you have a tried, tested, scalable and sustainable system with which to replace it, one that demonstrably yields at least the same quality (and hence usability) as the existing system does.

Till then, focus on freeing access to the peer-reviewed literature such as it is.

And that's read-access, which is much easier to provide than read-write access. None of the Green (no-embargo) publishers are read-write Green: just read-Green. Insisting on read-write would be an excellent way to get them to adopt and extend embargoes, just as the foolish Finch preference for Gold did (and just as Rick Anderson's absurd proposal to cancel Green (no-embargo) journals would do).

And, to repeat: after 20 years, we are still nowhere near 100% read-Green, largely because of phobias about publisher embargoes on read-Green. Björn is urging us to insist on even more than read-Green. Another instance of letting the (out-of-reach) Best get in the way of the (within-reach) Better. And that, despite the fact that it is virtually certain that once we have 100% read-Green, the other things we seek -- read-write, Fair-Gold, copyright reform, publishing reform, perhaps even peer review reform -- will all follow, as surely as day follows night.

But not if we contribute to slowing our passage to the Better (which there is already a tried and tested means of reaching, via institutional and funder mandates) by rejecting or delaying the Better in the name of holding out for a direct sprint to the Best (which no one has a tried and tested means of reaching, other than to throw even more money at publishers for Fool's Gold). Björn's speculation that universities should cancel journals, rely on interlibrary loan, and scrap peer-review for post-hoc crowd-sourcing is certainly not a tried and tested means!

As to journal ranking and citation impact factors: They are not the problem. No one is preventing the use of article- and author-based citation counts in evaluating articles and authors. And although the correlation between journal impact factors and journal quality and importance is not that big, it's nevertheless positive and significant. So there's nothing wrong with libraries using journal impact factors as one of a battery of many factors (including user surveys, usage metrics, institutional fields of interest, budget constraints, etc.) in deciding which journals to keep or cancel. Nor is there anything wrong with research performance evaluation committees using journal impact factors as one of a battery of many factors (alongside article metrics, author metrics, download counts, publication counts, funding, doctoral students, prizes, honours, and peer evaluations) in assessing and rewarding research progress.

The problem is neither journal impact factors nor peer review: The only thing standing between the global research community and 100% OA (read-Green) is keystrokes. Effective institutional and funder mandates can and will ensure that those keystrokes are done. Publisher embargoes cannot stop them: With immediate-deposit mandates, 100% of articles (final, refereed drafts) are deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. At least 60% of them can be made immediately OA, because at least 60% of journals don't embargo (read-Green) OA; access to the other 40% of deposits can be made Restricted Access, and it is there that the eprint-request Button can provide Almost-OA with one extra keystroke from the would-be user to request it and one extra keystroke from the author to fulfill the request.

That done, globally, and we can leave it to nature (and human nature) to ensure that the "Best" (100% immediate OA, subscription collapse, conversion to Fair Gold, all the re-use rights users need, and even peer-review reform) will soon follow.

But not as long as we continue spurning the Better and just burning for the Best.

Stevan Harnad

I would be surprised if there weren't subscription journals that would have accepted the Bohannon bogus paper for publication too.

But I would be even more surprised if as high a proportion of subscription journals -- matched for field, age, size and impact-factor -- would have accepted Bohannon's bogus paper as did the pay-to-publish OA journals ("Gold OA").

Subscription journals have to maintain enough of an appearance of peer review to sustain their subscriptions. Pay-to-publish Gold OA journals just have to maintain enough of an appearance of peer review to attract authors (and maybe the lure of pay-to-publish is enough to attract many authors in our publish-or-perish world without even the appearance of peer review, especially when the journal choice is justified by the fashionable allure -- or excuse -- of the journal's being an OA journal).

This problem would not be remedied by just lowering Gold OA journal publication fees.

Nor is it a systemic problem of peer review.

It is a problem of peer review for pay-to-publish Gold OA journals at a time when there is still far too little OA and most journals are still subscription journals, most authors are still confused about OA, many think that OA is synonymous with Gold OA journals, and, most important, there are not yet enough effective mandates from research funders and institutions that require authors to make all their papers OA by depositing them in their institutional OA repositories ("Green OA"), regardless of where they were published.

If it were mandatory to make all papers Green OA, authors would simply deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in their institutional OA repositories, free for all, immediately upon acceptance for publication. They would not have to pay to publish in Gold OA journals unless they especially wished to. Once all journal articles were being made Green OA in this way, institutions would be able to cancel all their journal subscriptions, which would in turn force all journals to cut costs and convert to Gold OA publishing at a much lower fee than is being charged now by OA journals: post-Green Fair Gold instead of today's pre-Green Fool's Gold.

But, most important, the reason the Fair Gold fee would be much lower is that the only remaining service that journals (all of them having become Gold OA) would be performing then, post-Green, would be peer review. All access-provision and archiving would be done by the global network of Green OA institutional repositories (so no more print or PDF editions or their costs). And for just peer review, journals would no longer be charging for publishing (which would then just amount to a tag certifying that the article had been accepted by journal J): they would be charging only for the peer review.

And each round of peer review (which peers do for free, by the way, so the only real cost is the qualified editor who evaluates the submission, picks the referees, and adjudicates the referee reports -- plus the referee tracking and communication software) would be paid for on a "no-fault" basis, per round of peer review, whether the outcome was acceptance, rejection, or revision and resubmission for another (paid) round of peer review.

Unlike with today's Fool's Gold junk journals that were caught by Bohannon's sting, not only will no-fault post-Green, Fair-Gold peer-review remove any incentive to accept lower quality papers (and thereby reduce the reputation of the journal) -- because the journal is paid for the peer review service in any case -- but it will help make Fair-Gold OA costs even lower, per round of peer review, because it will not wrap the costs of the rejected or multiply revised and re-refereed papers into the cost of each accepted paper, as they do now.

So post-Green Fair Gold will not only reduce costs but it will raise peer-review standards.

None of this is possible, however, unless Green OA is effectively mandated by all institutions and funders first.

Harnad, S. (2013) The Science Peer-Review "Sting": Where the Fault Lies. Open Access Archivangelism 1059

________ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

______ (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

______ (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

Everything that Bob Campbell writes in his Wiley Exchanges article "Open Access in the UK – will Gold or Green prevail?" -- where he puts the emphasis, and how he spins it -- is entirely predictable. As a publisher, Bob's paramount concern is in ensuring that the cash keeps flowing, whether from subscriptions, hybrid Gold, or pure Gold. This is understandable.

The research community's paramount concern, in contrast, is with giving and getting Open Access to their refereed research. That means mostly Green OA self-archiving, and Bob has no particular interest in Green ("repositories" -- why should he?), except to conflate no-embargo publishers with one-year embargo publishers as both being "one-year-or-less embargo-publishers."

And to conflate subscription journals that offer hybrid Gold as an option with pure-Gold journals as both being "Gold-or-hybrid-Gold" journals: 70% already! We're almost there…!

Except that it's nothing of the sort (and I rather suspect that the 70% refers to publishers that offer hybrid Gold, not journals). And that means that even if only one (or not even one) of the articles in one of a publisher's fleet of (say) 2000 journals offering the hybrid option is actually paid/made hybrid Gold, then all those 2000 journals are part of the happy 70%...

Bob also slips and slides on double-dipping, saying that if publication costs are paid for via subscriptions, for institutional access, and then some of those same articles are again paid for via hybrid Gold fees, for worldwide access, then that's not double-dipping: that's just fair payment for two different products!

To be fair, though, the impatient rights-rhapsodists -- who scorn mere Green and insist instead on re-use rights, at all costs (CC-BY-all-means), right now -- do provide Bob with the ideal pretext for claiming that hybrid Gold is indeed paying for a further product after all (82%!)...

(The self-serving calculations are somewhat reminiscent of a beleaguered MP seeking re-election in a faltering constituency.)

Having formally stated since 2004 that Elsevier authors retain the right to self-archive their final, refereed, revised, accepted drafts, unembargoed, in their institutional OA repositories, Elsevier has tried to imply that the author's institution somehow does not have the right to host that draft, if it mandates self-archiving!.

And Elsevier tries to bring this up, not in its public negotiations with its authors, but in its confidential private negotiations with institutions, in the context of Big-Deal pricing agreements.

(Institutions should of course politely decline to discuss university self-archiving policy in any way, in their journal pricing negotiations with Elsevier or any other publisher.)

Just as it makes no sense (hence carries no legal force) to say to Elsevier authors that they retain the right to self-archive in their institutional repositories "voluntarily" but not "mandatorily," it makes no sense to say that if authors' institutions mandate self-archiving, then they may not host the self-archiving that their Elsevier authors formally retain the right to do in their institutional repositories.

And "systematicity" as a grounds for over-riding the Elsevier author's retained right to self-archive unembargoed is just as nonsensical (hence non-binding) at the host-institution level, particularly since Elsevier has (wisely) conceded the right of all its authors to self-archive in arXiv (as they have been doing since 1991).

Arxiv, a global repository in which close to 100% of the articles in several subdisciplines of physics, mathematics and astrophysics are accessible is indeed a systematic collection of Elsevier journal content.

But no individual institution, hosting its own tiny, arbitrary fragment of global journal output can be faintly construed as a "systematic collection" of Elsevier content, any more than any individual author's collection of his own self-archived articles can be.

So here too, Elsevier authors can and should safely ignore the FUD and double-talk and self-archive their final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon publication, just as they have been doing since 2004.

Comment on: Bohannon, John (2013) Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342 (6154) 60-65

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To show that the bogus-standards effect is specific to Open Access (OA) journals would of course require submitting also to subscription journals (perhaps equated for field, age and impact factor) to see what happens.

But it is likely that the outcome would still be a higher proportion of acceptances by the OA journals. The reason is simple: Fee-based OA publishing (fee-based "Gold OA") is premature, as are plans by universities and research funders to pay its costs:

Funds are short and 80% of journals (including virtually all the top, "must-have" journals) are still subscription-based, thereby tying up the potential funds to pay for fee-based Gold OA. The asking price for Gold OA is still arbitrary and high. And there is very, very legitimate concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards (as the Science sting shows).

What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) in their institutional OA repositories, free for all online ("Green OA").

That will provide immediate OA. And if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions), that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition), offload access-provision and archiving onto the global network of Green OA repositories, downsize to just providing the service of peer review alone (on a no-fault basis), and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs.

The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

That post-Green, no-fault Gold will be Fair Gold. Today's pre-Green (fee-based) Gold is Fool's Gold.

None of this applies to no-fee Gold.

Obviously, as Peter Suber and others have correctly pointed out, none of this applies to the many Gold OA journals that are not fee-based (i.e., do not charge the author for publication, but continue to rely instead on subscriptions, subsidies, or voluntarism). Hence it is not fair to tar all Gold OA with that brush. Nor is it fair to assume -- without testing it -- that non-OA journals would have come out unscathed, if they had been included in the sting.

But the basic outcome is probably still solid: Fee-based Gold OA has provided an irresistible opportunity to create junk journals and dupe authors into feeding their publish-or-perish needs via pay-to-publish under the guise of fulfilling the growing clamour for OA:

Publishing in a reputable, established journal and self-archiving the refereed draft would have accomplished the very same purpose, while continuing to meet the peer-review quality standards for which the journal has a track record -- and without paying an extra penny.

But the most important message is that OA is not identical with Gold OA (fee-based or not), and hence conclusions about peer-review standards of fee-based Gold OA journals are not conclusions about the peer-review standards of OA -- which, with Green OA, are identical to those of non-OA.

For some peer-review stings of non-OA journals, see below:

de Gloucester, P. C. (2013). Referees Often Miss Obvious Errors in Computer and Electronic Publications. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance 20(3), 143-166.

Harnad, S. R. (Ed.). (1982). Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in scientific quality control Cambridge University Press

Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Labbé, C., & Labbé, D. (2013). Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: How many SCIgen papers in computer science? Scientometrics 94(1): 379-396.

Newton, D. P. (2010). Quality and Peer Review of Research: An Adjudicating Role for Editors. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance 17(3), 130-145, this is available as open access:

Peters, D. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1982). Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5(2), 187-195.

Seidl, C., & Schmidt, U., & Grösche, P. (2005). The performance of peer review and a beauty contest of referee processes of economics journals. Estudios de Economía Aplicada, 23(3): 505-551

C P Chandrasekhar (2013) Only the Open Access Movement can address the adverse impact of Western domination of the world of knowlege. Frontline (Oct 4 2913)

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Interesting article, but I am afraid it misses the most important points:

1. As so often happens, the article takes "OA" to mean Gold OA journals, completely missing Green OA self-archiving and the importance and urgency of mandating it.

2. The article greatly underestimates the role of quality levels and quality control (peer review standards) in the perceived and actual importance and value of research findings, journal articles and journals -- focusing instead on over-reliance and abuse of citation metrics (which does indeed occur, but is not the central problem behind disparities in (a) user access to journals to read, (b) author access to journals publish in, or (c) researcher access to funding to do research with).

Providing OA can completely remedy (a), which will in turn help mitigate (b) and that in turn may improve (c). (OA will also greatly enrich and strengthen the variety and validity of metrics.)

But not if we instead just tilt against impact factors and press for new forms of "branding." Branding is simply the earned reputation of a journal based on its track-record for quality, and that means its peer review standards, as certified by the journal's name ("brand").

What is needed is neither new Gold OA journals, nor new forms of "branding." What is needed is Open Access to the peer-reviewed journal literature, such as it is, free for all online: peer-reviewed research needs to be freed from access-denial, not from peer review.

And the way for India and China (and the rest of the world too) to reach that is for their research institutions and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving of all their peer-reviewed research output.

That's all there is to it. The rest is just ideological speculation, which can no more provide Open Access than it can feed the hungry, cure the sick, or protect from injustice. It simply distracts from the tried and tested practical path that needs to be taken to get the job done.

Stevan Harnad

Joseph Esposito:
"Stevan Harnad engaged Rick’s comment and asserted that such a policy was a very bad thing since it would set back the advance of Green OA. This is an interesting remark, as it reveals Professor Harnad’s conviction that librarians, indeed the whole world, should view the achievement of his idiosyncratic goal as their highest priority. As far as I know, it is not the mission of Rick’s institution or any other to put Green OA at the top of a list of desiderata. Most institutions put service to their own institutions first, as one would expect. Cancelling Green OA journals will indeed set back the advance of Green OA, but that’s beside the point."

David Crotty (with 11 scholarly thumbs up from his co-cuisiniers):
"I find Dr. Harnad’s response here somewhat appalling. Progress in implementing Open Access will come from open discussion, analysis and experimentation, not from censorship, obfuscation and withholding information. When voices as disparate as Kent Anderson and Cameron Neylon are in agreement about OA reaching a new era of practical implementation, it should be a sign that Harnad is out of step here. It’s always valuable to have someone willing to point out the state of the Emperor’s clothing."

Compliments to the chefs. Some suggested recipe upgrades:

1. No suggestion made that institutions cannot or should not cancel journals if their articles are all or almost all Green.

(No such journal in sight yet, however, since Green OA is still hovering around 20-30%, apart from some parts of Physics -- but there it's already been at or near 100% for over 20 years, and no cancellations in sight. For the rest, when Green OA -- which grows anarchically, article by article, not systematically, journal by journal -- prevails universally, because Green OA mandates prevail, all or most journal articles will be Green universally, so Green OA will not be a factor in deciding whether to cancel this journal rather than that one.)

2. The issue with Rick was not about the notion of canceling journals because their articles are all or almost all Green, but about cancelling journals (60%) because they do not have a policy of embargoing Green OA.

3. And such a perverse cancellation policy would not be a setback for Green OA but for OA itself. (But not a big setback, thanks to the Liège-FNRS model immediate-deposit mandate recommended by BOAI-10, HEFCE, BIS and HOAP, which is immune to publisher embargoes.)

I notice in the SSP scullery discussion above that my suggestion that Rick should post his OA-unfriendly cancellation strategy to library lists rather than to OA lists amounts to a call for censorship over open discussion. I add only that I am not the moderator of any list, hence have no say over their content. It was an open expression, on an open list, of my opinion (together with the reasons for it) that such discussion belongs on another open list. (I do post this SK comment with some curiosity, as my own comments to SK have more than once failed to appear…)

Stevan Harnad