Open Access Archivangelism

Bravo to Danny Kingsley for her invaluable antipodean OA advocacy!

I think Danny is spot-on in all the points she makes, so these are just a few supplementary remarks:

1. The publishing industry is using Green OA embargoes and lobbying to try to hold OA hostage to its current inflated revenue streams as long as possible-- by forcing the research community to pay for over-priced, double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid) Fools Gold if it wants to have OA at all.

It's time for the research community to stop stating that it will stop mandating and providing Green OA if there's ever any evidence that it will cause subscription cancelations. Of course Green OA will cause cancelations, eventually; and so it should.

Green OA will not only provide 100% OA but it will also force publishers to phase out obsolete products and services and their costs, by offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide nework of Green OA repositories.

Once subscriptions are made unsustainable by mandatory Green OA, journals will downsize and convert to post-Green Fair-Gold, in place of today's over-priced, double-paid (and double-dipped, if hybrid) Fools-Gold.

Green OA embargoes have one purpose, and one purpose only: to delay this optimal, inevitable, natural and obvious outcome for as long as possible.

Research is not funded, conducted, peer-reviewed and made public in order to provide or guarantee revenues for the publishing industry, but to be used, applied and built upon, to the benefit of the public that funds it.

Globally mandated Green OA will not only provide OA, but it will also force publishers to cut obsolete costs and downsize to just managing peer review. All access-provision and archiving will be done by the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories.

It's in order to delay that outcome that publishers are using every means at their disposal -- embargoing Green OA and lobbying against Green OA mandates with PRISM, the Research Works Act, the Finch Report and CHORUS -- to fend off Green OA as long as possible and force the research community instead toward over-priced, double-paid (and, if hybrid, double-dipped) Fools Gold if they want to have any form of OA at all.

2. There is a powerful tactical triad -- tried, tested and proven effective -- to moot publisher delay tactics (embargoes and lobbying) -- and that triad is for both funders and insitutions to

(i) mandate immediate deposit in institutional repositories, whether or not the deposit is made immediately OA,

(ii) implement the institutional repository's facilitated eprint request Button to tide over research access needs during any embargo, and

(iii) designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publictions for institutional performance review (or national research assessment).

3. The research community should resolutely resist publishers' attempt to imply that "Green OA" means "Delayed (embargoed) OA." It does not. OA means immediate, unembargoed access. It is publishers who are trying to impose embargoes, in order to delay OA and preserve their current inflated revenue streams for as long as possible, forcing authors to pay for grotesquely overpriced Fools Gold if they want immediate OA.

The immediate-deposit mandate (with the Button) immunizes against those tactics. "Delaying OA" is publishers' objective, against the interests of research, researchers, their universities, their funders, the vast R&D industry, students, teachers, the developing world, journalists, and especially the general public who is funding the research. Immediate-deposits mandates are the way for the research community to ensure that the interests of research. Otherwise (I have said many times), it is the publishing tail continuing to wag the research dog.

4. OA Metrics will follow, not precede OA. The reason we do not have 100% OA yet is not because of bias against Gold OA journals. It is because of researcher passivity, publisher activism (embargoes and lobbying) and lack of clear information and understanding about OA and how to make it happen.

It is normal and natural that journals' quality and importance should be based on their prior track-record for quality and importance (rather than their cost-recovery model). New journals (whether OA or non-OA) first need to establish a track record for quality and importance. Besides the journal's track record and citation impact, however, we also have citation counts for individual authors and articles, and we are slowly also developing download counts and other metrics of research usage and impact. There will be many more OA metrics too -- but for that to happen, the articles themselves need to be made OA! And that is why mandating Green OA is the priority.

Stevan Harnad

The cynical, self-serving spin of Springer's replies to Richard Poynder is breathtaking: Is it a sign of Springer's new ownership?

Despite the double-talk, applying a 12-month embargo where the policy has been to endorse unembargoed immediate-Green for 10 years could hardly be described (or justified) as "simplifying" things for the author, or anyone. It would be a pure and simple bid to maintain and maximize revenue streams from both subscriptions and Gold OA. (Note that I say "would" because in fact Springer is still Green and hence still on the Side of the Angels: read on.)

Green OA means free, immediate, permanent online access; hence a 12-month embargo hardly makes Green OA sustainable, as Springer suggests! It's not OA at all.

As stated previously, the distinction between an author's institutional repository and an author's "personal website" (which is of course likewise institutional) is a distinction between different sectors of an institutional disk. The rest is a matter of tagging.

The purpose of research, and of tax-payer funding of research, and of the online medium itself, is certainly not to make the subscription model sustainable for publishers.

The only service from publishers that needs to be sustained is the management of peer review. Researchers already do all the rest for free (write the papers and peer-review the papers); if they can now also archive their peer-reviewed papers and provide online access to them for all users, what justification is there for saying that the subscription model needs to be sustained?

Paying for Gold OA today, at its current arbitrarily inflated price for a bundle of no longer necessary products and services (print, PDF, archiving, access-provision), is paying for Fools-Gold.

And paying for it while subscriptions continue to be sustainable -- hence while paying for them continues to be essential for institutions -- is double-payment: Subscription fees plus Fools-Gold OA fees.

If, in addition. the payment is to the very same hybrid-Gold publisher, then it's not just double-paid Fools-Gold: it also allows double-dipping by the publisher.

Nor is double-dipping corrected if (mirabile dictu) a publisher really does faithfully lower annual subscription fees by every penny of its total annual hybrid Gold revenues, because if an institution (as one subscriber out of, say, 2000 subscribing institutions) pays $XXX in Fools-Gold OA fees, over and above its subscription fees, then its own share of the subscription rebate is just 1/2000th of the $XXX that it has double-paid the hybrid Gold publisher. The rest of the rebate goes to the other 1999 beneficieries of that institution's hybrid-Gold Fools-Gold double-payment.

And this disparity for the hybrid double-payer would perist until (as Springer hopes), all institutions are paying today's Fools-Gold instead of subscriptions. That would be a perfect way for publishers to sustain today's revenue streams, come what may -- and that's exactly what Springer hopes to do, by holding Green OA hostage to embargoes, and thereby holding institutions hostage to subscriptions untill they are all coughing up the same amount for Fools Gold instead, its price determined by whatever sustains today's subscription revenues rather than what institutions and researchers actually need -- and what it actually costs.

This is why Green OA is anathema to publishers, even as they purport to be "all for OA." For Green OA is the only thing that would force publishers to downsize to the true essentials of peer-reviewed research publishing in the online era, instead of continuing to exact vastly inflated prices for mostly obsolete products and services, just in order to sustain their current revenue streams and their current M.O..

(Of course Springer changed its policy in part because of Finch/RCUK: Green OA and Green OA mandates were already anathema, but Green publishers back-pedalling on that alone would have looked very bad: all stick and no carrot. Finch/RCUK provided the perfect carrot: UK government funds to pay for Fools-Gold, including hybrid Fools-Gold -- with the UK government not only funding the Fools-Gold option, but explicitly preferring it over cost-free Green. An offer no publisher could refuse, and a perfect cover for taking it, under the pretext of complying with government mandates, simplifying things for authors, and facilitating OA -- in the form of lucrative Fools-Gold OA.)

But it's not that easy to keep holding the entire worldwide research community hostage to an obsolete technology and outrageous, unnecessary prices, simply by embargoing Green OA.

First, as noted, the distinction between an author's institutional repository and the author's institutional website won't wash: The difference is just in what we name them. Springer authors can go ahead and provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA based on Springer's current policy.

But even if Springer were then to go on to bite the bullet, embargo all OA self-archiving, and admit that it has stopped being a Green publisher (iin order to protect its current revenue streams come what may), authors could still deposit immediately; and if they wished to comply with Springer's embargo, they could set access to the immediate-deposit as Closed Access. The institutional repository's facilitated reprint request Button can then allow any would-be user to request -- and the author to provide -- an eprint with just one click each, almost-immediately.

This "Almost-OA" will not only serve research needs almost as well as OA itself during the embargo, but it will also have the same effect, almost as quickly, as immediate Green OA, in forcing publishers to cut costs, downsize, and convert to Fair-Gold, at an afforable, sustainable price, precisely because it make the subscription model unsustainable.

This is why it is so important that all institutional and funder mandates should be immediate-deposit mandates (regardless of whether the deposit is immediately-OA or embargoed).

Springer: "there is widespread, if not universal, acceptance that systematic and widespread author manuscript deposit (“green” open access) of subscription-based journal articles in repositories requires an embargo period in order to ensure the sustainability of the journals"

The sustainability at issue for Springer is not the sustainability of journals but the sustainability of the subscription model (or an equal-sized revenue stream for publishers).

And the only ones convinced that the subscription model or an equal-sized revenue stream needs to be sustained at all costs are publishers.

Springer: "Springer, which has been committed to open access in deeds, not just words, for almost 10 years, is focused on offering two models which we believe to be stable and sustainable: embargoed green open access, and immediate gold open access."

That's two models that are designed to sustain Springer's current revenue streams: charging for Fools Gold and embargoing cost-free Green, so that Green cannot provide immediate OA and force down the price of pre-Green Fools Gold to post-Green Fair Gold.

Springer: "We modified the [former Springer unembargoed Green] policy to make it simple and consistent for our authors, for funders and for our employees, as all forms of open access continue to grow."

Translation: We embargoed Green in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

Springer: "In order to ensure that green open access deposit remains sustainable on a large scale, we are standardizing the embargo period for all repository archiving to 12 months."

Translation: We embargoed Green in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

Springer: "this means that Springer authors can deposit into a funder repository after a 12-month embargo period even if the funder does not require the author to do so."

Whereas formerly Springer authors could deposit immediately upon publication.

Springer: "www.eprints.org describes institutional repositories, e.g. hosted by Eprint, as "a collection of digital documents [… which] share the same metadata, making their contents interoperable with one another." Author websites on the other hand serve various purposes and are not specifically created for document collection."

All websites have metadata. Interoperability allows the metadata to be harvested by service-providers. Interoperability is a matter of degree. All websites are harvestable (e.g., by google). What is Springer's point? That there is a threshold on degree of interoperability that distinguishes an "institutional website" from an "institutional repository"? There is no such threshold point. And if there were, it would be arbitrary and irrelevant to the justification of a Green OA embargo, which would, as always, rest purely on the publisher's attempt to hold OA hostage to its current revenue streams.

Springer: "We have eliminated from our policy the distinction between institutional repositories and others, such as subject and funder repositories, and created one simple rule that applies across the board -- authors may deposit in any repository they like, and regardless of whether they are required by a mandate or not, as long as the embargo period is observed."

Translation: Formerly we endorsed immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving, now we are embargoing it in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

Springer: "This supports green OA by making it sustainable, and therefore making it possible for Springer as a publisher to actively encourage and facilitate it. It also helps to clarify the respective benefits of the Green and Gold models, each of which is likely to have a place going forward."

Translation: We embargoed Green in order to hold OA hostage to our current revenue streams.

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

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

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. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

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)

Summary: The findings of Eric Archambault’s (2013) pilot study on the percentage of OA that is currently available are very timely, welcome and promising. The study finds that the percentage of articles published in 2008 that are OA in 2013 is between 42-48%. It does not estimate, however, when in that 5-year interval the articles were made OA. Hence the study cannot indicate what percentage of articles being published in 2013 is being made OA in 2013. Nor can it indicate what percentage of articles published before 2013 is OA in 2013. The only way to find that out is through a separate analysis of immediate Gold OA, delayed Gold OA, immediate Green OA, and delayed Green OA, by discipline, by year publication year, by OA year.

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“This paper re-assesses OA availability in 2008”

For papers that were published in 2008 -- but when were those articles made available OA?

8% of all articles published in 2008 (or 1/5 of the 42% that were OA) were made OA via Gold, which means they were made available OA in 2008.

But 34% (or 4/5 of the 42% that were OA) were either Green or hybrid Gold or delayed Gold [it is not at all clear why these were all conflated in the analysis]:

Of this 4/5 of what was made OA, it is likely that the largest portion was Green. But when each article was made Green OA is unknown. Some was made Green OA immediately in 2008; but some was delayed Green – potentially up to any point in the interval between 2008 and the date the sampling was done.

For the proportion of the 4/5 OA that was delayed Gold OA (i.e., made OA by the subscription publisher after 6-12 months or longer) that delay has to be calculated. (Bjork and Laakso found that the second largest portion of OA was delayed Gold. The names of the delayed Gold journals are known, and so are their delay periods.)

The portion of the 4/5 OA that was hybrid Gold was made Gold OA immediately in 2008 by the publisher, but hybrid Gold represents the smallest portion of the 4/5 OA. The names of the hybrid Gold journals are known. Whether the articles were hybrid Gold or Green needs to be ascertained and separate calculation need to be made.

Until all this is known, it is not known what proportion of 2008 articles was OA in 2008. The rest of the findings are not about OA at all, but about embargoed access through some indeterminate delay between 2008 and 2013 (5 years!).

“the tipping point for OA has been reached and… one can expect that, from the late 2000s onwards, the majority of published academic peer-reviewed journal articles were available for free to end-users. ”

But when? What publication date was accessible as of what OA date for that publication? Otherwise this is not about OA (which means immediate online access) but about OA embargoes and delays. This is not what is meant by a “tipping point.”

“The paper presents the results for the pilot phase of a study that aims to estimate the proportion of peer-reviewed journal articles which are freely available, that is, OA for the last ten years (the pilot study is on OA availability in 2008). ”

This study seems to be on OA availability of 2008 articles, not OA availability in 2008. And availability somewhere within 10 years is not OA.

“An effective definition of OA for this study is the following: ‘OA, whether Green or Gold, is about giving people free access to peer-reviewed research journal articles. ”

(Free online access. But to be OA, the access must be immediate, not delayed, and permanent, not temporary.)

“OA is rarely free”

This is not quite the point: It is publication that is not free. Its costs must be paid for -- either via subscriptions, subsidies or publication charges.

Subscription fees cover publication costs by charging subscribers, for access. Author publication fees cover publication costs by charging authors, for publication.

OA is simply toll-free online access, irrespective of whether publication is paid for via subscriptions, subsidies, or publication fees.

“Thus, the term toll-access, to distinguish the non-OA literature, is avoided here. ”

Toll access is the correct term when access must be paid for. This should not be conflated with how publication costs are paid for.

“The core use of Ulrich in this project was to calibrate the proportion of papers from each of 22 disciplines used to present disaggregated statistics. ”

But were the disciplines weighted also by their proportion of total annual article output?

(Treating disciplines as equal had been one of our mistakes, resulting in some discrepancies with Bjork & Laakso. When disciplines are properly weighted, our figures agree more with Bjork & Laakso’s. -- The remaining discrepancy is more challenging, and it is about the uncertainty of when articles were made OA, in the case of Green: the publication date is not enough; nor the sampling date, unless it is in the same year! We are now conducting a study on publication date vs OA date, to estimate the proportion of immediate-Green vs the average latency of delayed Green compared to immediate Gold and delayed Gold.)

“When selecting journals to be included for an article-level database such as Scopus, deciding whether to include a journal has a direct impact on production costs and partly because of this, database publishers tend to have a bias towards larger journals”

True, but WoS and SCOPUS also have quality criteria, whereas Ulrichs does not. Ulrich can and does cover all.

“Despite a 50% increase in journal coverage, Scopus only has about 20% more articles. A sensitivity analysis was performed”

There is still the question of quality: Including more probably journals may mean lowering average quality.

And there is also the question of discipline size: Estimating overall and average %OA cannot treat 22 disciplines as equal if some publish much more articles than others.

“For gold articles, an estimate of the proportion of papers was made from the random sample by matching the journals that were known to be gold in 2008. ”

This solves the problem of the potential discrepancy between publication date and OA date for Gold OA -- but not for Green OA, of which there is about 3 times as much as Gold. Nor for delayed Gold OA.

“ [Articles] were selected by tossing the 100,000 a few more times using the rand() command in Excel, then proceeding to the selection of the required number of records. ”

This presumably provided the articles in the 22 disciplines, but were they equal or proportionate?

“A test was then conducted with 20,000 records being provided to the Steven Harnad team in Montreal. ”

But what was the test? To search for those 20,000 records on the web with our robot? And what was the date of this OA test (for articles published in 2008)?

“the team led by Harnad measured only 22% of OA in 2008 overall ‘out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson Reuters using a robot that trawled the Web for OA full-texts’ (Gargouri et al., 2012) ”

Our own study was %OA for articles published in 2008 and indexed by WoS, as sampled in 2011: The Archambault pilot study was conducted two years later, and on articles indexed by SCOPUS. There may have been more 2008 articles made OA two years later; and more indexed by SCOPUS than WoS.

It is also crucial to estimate both the %OA and the latency of the OA, in order to estimate the true annual %OA and also its annual growth rate (for both Green and delayed Gold). And it has to be balanced by discipline size, if it is to be a global average of total articles, rather than unweighted disciplines.

“a technique to measure the proportion of OA literature based on the Web of Science produces fairly low recall and seriously underestimates OA availability. ”

Agreed, if the objective is a measure of %OA based indiscriminately on total quantity of articles.

But the WoS/SCOPUS/Ulirichs differences could also be differences in quality -- and definitely differences in the degree to which researchers need access to the journals in question. WoS includes all the "must have" (“core”) journals, and then some; SCOPUS still more; and Ulrichs still more. So these four layers and their %OA should be analyzed and interpreted separately too.

“This extensive analysis therefore suggests that 48% of the literature published in 2008 may be available for free. ”

Yes, but when were those 2008 articles made available free?

“one can infer that OA availability very likely passed the tipping point in 2008 (or earlier) and that the majority of peer-reviewed/scholarly papers published in journals in that year are now available for free in one form or another to end-users. ”

It's not clear what a "tipping point" is (50%?). And a tipping point for what: OA? Or eventual delayed OA after an N-year embargo?

What the pilot study’s result shows is not that OA reached the 50% point for 2008 in 2008! It reached the 50% point for 2008 somewhere between 2008 and when the sampling was done!

What we need to know now is how fast %OA per year for that year (or the immediately preceding one) reaches 50%.

“These results suggest that using Scopus and an improved harvester ‘to trawl the Web for OA full-texts’ could yield substantially more accurate results than the methods used by Björk et al. and Harnad et al. ”

But why bundle hybrid and delayed Gold with Green, immediate and delayed? They are not at all the same thing!

Hybrid Gold is immediate Gold.

“Embargo” is ambiguous – it can be "delayed Gold," provided by the publisher after an embargo, or it can be embargoed Green, provided by the author after an embargo.

These mean different things for OA and need to be calculated separately.

For hybrid Gold and delayed Gold, the OA dates can be known exactly. For Green they cannot. This is a crucial difference, yet Green is the biggest category.

“Pay-per-article OA, journals with embargo periods and journals allowing partial indexing following granting agencies’ OA policies are considered hybrid, and these data are bundled here with green OA (self-archiving). ”

"Journals with embargo periods" is ambiguous, because there are subscription journals that make their own articles free online after an embargo period (“delayed Gold”), and there are subscription journals that embargo how long before their authors can make their own papers Green OA.

And some authors do and some authors don't make their articles Green OA.

And some authors do and don't comply with the Green embargoes.

And some authors are mandated to make their articles Green OA by their funders or institutions.

And allowable embargo lengths vary from mandate to mandate.

And mandates are growing with time.

What is needed is separate analysis (by discipline, weighted) for Gold, hybrid Gold, Delayed Gold and Green. And Green in particular needs to be separately analyzed for immediate-Green and delayed Green.

Only such an analysis will give an estimate of the true extent and growth rate for immediate Gold, immediate Green, and delayed Gold and delayed Green (per 6-month increment, say), by discipline.

“It seems that the tipping point has been passed (OA availability over 50%) in Biology, Biomedical Research, Mathematics & Statistics, and General Science & Technology”

Much as I wish it were some I am afraid this is not yet true (or cannot be known on the basis of the results of this pilot study).

50% has only been reached for 2008 articles some time between 2008 and the time the study’s sample was collected. And the fields are of different size. And the dates are much surer for Gold, hybrid Gold than for delayed Gold and Green, both immediate and delayed.

“many previous studies might have included disembargoed papers and pay-per-article OA, which is not the case here”

But both hybrid Gold and Delayed Gold should be analyzed separately from Green because their respective OA dates is knowable. And as such, the results should be added to pure Gold, to estimate overall Gold OA, immediate and delayed.

Green OA, though bigger, has to have estimates of Green OA latency, by the field: i.e., the average delay between publication date and OA date, in order to estimate the percentage of immediate Green and various degrees of delayed Green.

“These data present the relative citation rate of OA publications overall, Gold OA and hybrid OA forms relative to publications in each discipline. ”

First, it has to be repeated that it is a mistake to lump together Green with Hybrid and Delayed Gold, for the reasons mentioned earlier (regarding date of publication and date of OA), but also because the Gold OA vs non-OA citation comparison (for pure Gold as well as Delayed Gold) is a between journal comparison – making it hard to equate for content and quality -- whereas the Green OA vs non-OA citation comparison is a within journal comparison (hence much more equivalent in content and quality).

(Hybrid Gold, in contrast, does allow within-journal comparisons, but the sample is very small and might also be biased in other ways.)

“many Gold journals are younger and smaller”

Yes, but even more important, many Gold OA journals are not of the same quality as non-OA journals. Journals are hard to equate for quality. That is why within-journal comparisons are more informative than between-journal comparisons for the citation advantage.

“Gold journals might provide an avenue for less mainstream, more revolutionary science. ”

Or for junk science (as you note): This speculative sword can cut both ways; but today it's just speculation.

“the ARC [citation impact] is not scale-invariant, and larger journals have an advantage as this measure is not corrected sufficiently for journal size”

This is another reason the OA citation advantage is better estimated via within-journal comparisons rather than between-journal comparisons.

“the examination of OA availability per country”

Again, country-differences would be much more informative if clearly separated by Gold, Hybrid Gold, Delayed Gold and Green, as well as by levels of journal quality, from WoS core, to rest of WoS, to SCOPUS, to Ulrichs.

“Finding that the tipping point has been reached in open access is certainly an important discovery”

If only it were sure!

By the way, "tipping point" is a pop expression, and it does not particularly mean 50%. It means something like: the point at which growth in a temporal process has become unstoppable in its trajectory toward 100%. This can occur well before 50% or even after. It requires other estimates rather than just one-off total percentages. It needs year to year growth curves. What we have here is the 50% point for 2008 papers (in some fields), reached some time between 2008 and today!

“This means that aggressive publishers such as Springer are likely to gain a lot in the redesigned landscape”

It is not at all clear how this pilot study finding of the 50% point for free access to 2008 articles (via Gold, and even more via Green OA) has now become a message about "aggressive" publishers (presumably regarding some form of Gold OA)? The finding is not primarily about Gold OA publishing!

“green OA only appears to move slowly, whereas Gold OA and hybrid toll before the process as opposed to toll after are in the fast lane”

It is even less clear how these results – concerning year 2008 articles, made OA some time between 2008 and now, about one third of them Gold OA and about 2/3 of them Green, with no year by year growth curves -- show that Green grows slowly and Gold is in the fast lane?

(There has probably indeed been a growth spurt in Gold in the past few years, most of it because of one huge Gold mega-journal, PLOS ONE: But how do the results of the present study support any conclusion on relative growth rates of Gold and Green? And especially given that Green growth depends on mandate growth, and Green mandates are indeed growing, with 20 new US major funding agencies mandating Green just this year [2-13]!)

“The market power will shift tremendously from the tens of thousands of buyers that publishers’ sales staff nurtured to the millions of researchers that will now make the atomistic decision of how best to spend their publication budget”

Where do all these market conjectures come from, in a study that has simply shown that 50% of 2008 articles are freely accessible online 5 years later, partly via Gold, but even more via Green?

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Archambault, Eric (2013) The Tipping Point - Open Access Comes of AgeISSI 2013 Proceedings of 14th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference, Vienna, Austria, 15-19 July 2013

announces:

"Remaining a fair player, The Royal Society ensures that published open access articles bearing a publication fee are deducted from subscription prices through its Transparent Pricing Mechanism"

The Royal Society thereby pledges that it will not "double-dip" for hybrid Gold OA. The RS continues to collect subscription fees from institutions worldwide, but whatever additional revenue if gets from individual authors for hybrid Gold OA, it pledges to return as a subscription rebate to all subscribing institutions.

But does this mean the RS is a "fair player" insofar as OA is concerned?

Hardly.

Yet this is not because the hybrid Gold OA rebate amounts to individual authors' full payments for Gold OA subsidizing the subscription costs of institutions worldwide. (The author's own institution only gets back a tiny fraction of its authors' Gold OA fee in its tiny portion of the worldwide subscription rebate.)

No. Whether the RS is indeed a fair player depends on whether RS authors have the choice between providing Gold OA by paying the RS that additional cost -- over and above what the world's institutions are already paying the RS in subscriptions -- or providing Green OA at no additional cost, by self-archiving their own article free for all online.

For if the RS does not give its authors this choice, then it is certainly not a "fair player": It is holding RS authors who want to provide OA hostage to the payment of an additional hybrid Gold OA fee.

From 2005-2010, the RS had a chequered history with OA.

In 2010, however, the RS came down squarely on "the side of the angels", endorsing immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving of the author's final refereed draft.

But now -- perhaps -- the RS seems to have adopted a 12-month embargo on Green OA (under the fell influence -- perhaps -- of the new Finch/RCUK OA policy?):

"You are free to post…the “Author Generated Postprint” - Your personal copy of the revised version of the Article as accepted by Us… on Your personal or institutional web site and load it onto an institutional or not for profit repository no earlier than 12 months from the date of first publication of the Definitive Published Version."

Or is this just another (silly) attempt to distinguish between authors posting on their "institutional website" (unembargoed) versus posting in their "institutional repository" (embargoed) -- in which case RS authors can happily ignore this empty pseudo-distinction, knowing that their institutional repository is indeed their institutional website.

But the RS would do itself a historic favour if it dropped all this double-talk, unworthy of such a venerable institution, and lived up to its decree that:

"In keeping with its role as the UK's national academy of science, The Royal Society is committed to the widest possible dissemination of research outputs."

by not trying to hold Green OA self-archiving hostage to sustain the RS's subscription revenues at all costs.

There will be time for the RS to go Gold at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, single-paid instead of over-charged and double-paid, as now (with or without double-dipping) -- after Green has prevailed worldwide and made subscriptions no longer sustainable.

But that will be post-Green Fair-Gold. What the RS (and other publishers, less venerable) are trying to use OA embargoes for today is to force authors to pay pre-emptively for pre-Green Fools-Gold if they want to provide OA, so as to ensure that their revenue streams do not shrink either way (subscription or Gold).

But shrink they must, because in the imminent post-Green PostGutenberg era, the only service the RS or any other research journal publisher will need to perform is the management of peer review. The global network of Green OA institutional repositories will do all the rest (access-provision and archiving) at not extra cost to the publisher (hence no grounds for an extra charge to authors or users either).

Caveat Emptor. And peer review alone costs only a fraction of what -- whether subscription, Gold or hybrid) are being paid now (with or without double dipping).

Hence the RS "Membership Programme" is -- like all hybrid Fools-Gold -- a Trojan Horse. Caveat Emptor

Ring 1: 2012: Fidesz Government (i.e., Mr. Viktor Orban, P.M.) decides to use parliamentary supermajority power (yet again), this time to reduce the number of tobacco concession licenses countrywide from 40,000 to about 5,500.

Ring 2: Ostensible pretext: To reduce smoking

Ring 3: Owners of about 40,000 tobacco shops ("Trafiks") countrywide, some of them decades-old family businesses, are informed that all of them will lose their right to sell tobacco and must apply to a nationwide assessment  that will distribute the 5,500 licenses that will remain.

Ring 4: The assessment takes place, and the recipients almost all turn out to be Fidesz supporters and their families, some families and individuals being awarded multiple concessions (one each to the husband and wife in one family, 9 to the cleaning lady of another family,).

Ring 5: Almost none of the original 40,000 concessionaires were awarded licenses; almost all those who did win them had no prior experience in the trade: their only common attribute was their Fidesz connection.

Ring 6: News of the outcome emerges; Fidesz denies bias: licenses were awarded to the best qualified.

Ring 7: Testimony as well as tapes emerge of the deliberations in selecting the winners, and the explicit criterion is Fidesz fidelity.

Ring 8: The public demands to see the data on the deliberations.

Ring 9: Orban uses Fidesz supermajority power (yet again), to make the data inaccessible to the public; for good measure, evidence also being systematically destroyed.

Ring 10: July 1 2013: Fidesz preparing to declare its anti-smoking campaign a great success, and to declare Hungary again a model for the rest of the world, as it is in so many other things: finance, governance, justice, constitutionality, and anti-corruption measures.

Ring 11: July 3, 2013: EU votes to put Hungary's government under monitoring for breaching fundamental rights: EU vote is bipartisan, supported by both the left and the right.

Ring 12: Orban uses Fidesz supermajority power (yet again) in a Hungarian parliamentary vote that declares the EU parliamentary vote a biassed, illegal and anti-Hungarian conspiracy of the EU Green/liberal/left under the influence of the international business and bank lobby opposed to Fidesz's utility expense rebate to Hungarian voters...

Mike Taylor is to be commended for his zeal, but there a few points on which I think he is very mistaken:

MT: "Immeasurable confusion has resulted from people proposing alternative [definitions of OA] – either through ignorance or malice."

There have definitely been attempted distortions of the definition of OA, from ignorance or malice, "Delayed OA" being perhaps the worst of them. (OA means immediate, permanent free online access.)

But the original BOAI definition of OA was elaborated into two components or degrees -- not contradicted -- by Peter Suber and myself: free online access (Gratis OA) and free online access plus various re-use rights (Libre OA).

Gratis OA is urgent, all research and researchers need it, and it's fully within reach (of mandates) already; Libre OA is not urgent, not all research and researchers need it, and it's not fully within reach already.

Libre OA advocates have unfortunately delayed and complicated the progress of Gratis Green OA as surely as publishers have, by insisting pre-emptively on Libre Gold OA:

MT: "Green articles in the RCUK sense can be encumbered by non-commercial clauses, stripping them of much of their value to the taxpayer, and can be delayed by embargoes of up to two years… So in the context of RCUK specifically, Green is virtually useless, and the only way to obtain actual open access is by paying for Gold. Which I don’t doubt is exactly what the publishers wanted. It's to RCUK's eternal shame that they rolled over and allowed this, after having made such a strong opening statement."

The term "non-commercial clauses" here refers to Libre OA re-use rights. Green OA embargoes were ratcheted up by publishers because Finch/RCUK kept treating Green as if it were "Delayed OA" and because of Finch/RCUK's readiness to pay pre-emptively for Libre Gold OA.

Green Gratis OA (free online access) is certainly not "virtually useless," and embargoes can be surmounted by the institutional repository's facilitated eprint request Button.

But this is the way Libre Gold advocates delay and complicate the progress of Gratis Green OA.

MT: "[W]e have to end to the childish notion that the value of a piece of research is dependent on what journal publishes it."

Yes. But what it does depend on is the quality standards and track-record of the journal that publishes it.

MT: "I do hope this year will see a decision made on how to implement the White House OSTP's OA recommendation, and I hope that it will elect to do this by expanding its own PubMed Central system rather than by acquiescing to land-grab attempts by either publishers (CHORUS) or libraries (SHARE)."

I hope OSTP will not elect to mandate direct deposit in institution-external repositories but will instead mandate institutional deposit (followed by automated institution-external harvesting, inporting or exporting, where desired).

This will minimize publisher inteference (with embargoes and other constraints), engage institutions in monitoring and ensuring timely compliance with the mandate, and give institutions the incentive to adopt mandates of their own, for their non-funded output.

CHORUS should certainly be rejected, and library SHARE only accepted if it's to make institutional OA repositories more interoperable, not to allow publishers to assume the function of Green OA access-provision or archiving.

MT: "[Through Gold OA] we'll be able to save more than nine tenths of what we're spending now."

True, but this will not happen through pre-emptive pre-Green Fools-Gold, only through post-Green Fair-Gold.

"OA is cheaper, but that's not why it matters. What counts is not that it has lower cost, but that it has higher value."

OA does not have lower or higher cost. OA (Open Access) is about access. What will have lower cost is post-Green Fair-Gold OA.

But the real value of OA is in the access: OA maximizes research uptake, usage, applications, impact, productivity and progress, to the benefit fo research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, teachers, students, journalists, and the tax-paying public that funds the research.

Rebecca Marsh, Director of External Relations and Services, Emerald Group Publishing Limited & Tony Roche, Publishing Director of Emerald Group Publishing Limited have posted their defence of the Emerald policy changes reported by Richard Poynder: "Open Access: Emerald's Green Starts to Fade".

First, a paraphrase of what Marsh & Roche wrote:

(1) All Emerald authors may do immediate, unembargoed Open Access self-archiving if they wish, but (2) not if they must. If they must self-archive, they must wait 24 months or ask individually for permission.

The sensible Emerald author will self-archive immediately, and ignore clause (2) completely. It is empty, unverifiable, unenforceable, pseudo-legal FUD that has been added as a perverse effect of the folly of the UK Finch Committee recommendations.

The Emerald policy tweak is obviously to cash in on the money that the UK has decided to squander on pre-emptive "Fools Gold" OA, as well as to try to fend off universal Green OA as long as is humanly possible.

Below I reproduce the Emerald representatives' posting's text, cutting out the empty verbiage, to make the double-talk clearly visible and comprehensible.

Emerald:
"...Emerald has had a Green Open Access [OA] policy for over a decade. [All Emerald] authors who personally wish to self-archive the pre- or post-print version of their article on their own website or in a repository... can do this immediately upon official publication of their paper. This principle continues to underpin our Green OA policy and remains unchanged....

"...[Emerald] has provided an alternative route to OA for researchers who are mandated to make their papers Open Access immediately, or after a specified period. We also set the Article Processing Charge (APC) at a relatively low level to assist authors...

"Emerald has... requested that authors wait 24 months before depositing their post-prints if a mandate is in place. Where a mandate exists for deposit immediately on publication or with a shorter mandate but no APC fund is provided, we invite all authors to contact us..."

Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Gold OA pre-emptively today are premature.

Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA. Hence, for institutions, paying pre-emptively for Gold OA today means double-paying -- subscriptions for their incoming articles plus APCs for their outgoing articles-- and in the case of "hybrid Gold," when both sums are paid to the very same journal, it also means double-dipping by publishers.

Even apart from double-paying and double-dipping, the asking APC price per article for Gold OA today (whether "pure" or "hybrid") is still inflated; and there is concern that paying to publish may also inflate acceptance rates as well as lower quality standards to maximize revenue in the case of "pure Gold" OA.

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

That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA goes on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (phasing out the print edition and online edition, offloading access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay this residual service cost.

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.

This is the difference between today's pre-emptive pre-Green double-paid, double-dipped over-priced pre-Green "Fools Gold" and tomorrow's affordable, sustainable, post-Green Fair Gold.

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).

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)

Jack Stilgoe ("Open Access Inaction," Guardian 18 June 2013) has the indignation but not the information:

1. UCL has a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate:

In May 2009, UCL Academic Board agreed two principles to underpin UCL’s publication activity and to support its scholarly mission:

-- That, copyright permissions allowing, a copy of all research outputs should be deposited in the UCL repository in Open Access

-- That individual UCL academic researchers should be directly responsible for providing and maintaining details of their publications in relevant UCL databases so as to support both Open Access and the requirement for UCL to keep an accurate record of its research outputs

UCL, therefore, has a ‘Green’ Open Access policy, by which copies of UCL research are deposited in UCL Discovery, UCL’s Open Access repository. This UCL policy informs UCL’s approach to the open access requirements of research funders.

2. Elsevier's self-archiving policy is "Green," meaning all Elsevier authors retain the right to make their final, refereed drafts OA immediately (without embargo) by self-archiving them in their institutional repository.

3. The Elsevier self-archiving policy contains double-talk to the effect that "authors may self-archive without embargo if they wish but not if they must":

"Accepted author manuscripts (AAM): Immediate posting and dissemination of AAM’s is allowed to personal websites, to institutional repositories, or to arXiv. However, if your institution has an open access policy or mandate that requires you to post, Elsevier requires an agreement to be in place which respects the journal-specific embargo periods."

The "agreement" in question is not with the author, but with the author's institution. Unless UCL has been foolish enough to sign such an agreement (in order to get a better deal on Elsevier subscription prices), authors can of course completely ignore this absurd clause.

4. Even if UCL has foolishly signed such an agreement with Elsevier, the refereed final draft can nevertheless be deposited immediately, with access set as Closed Access instead of Open Access during the embargo. During that period, the UCL repository's facilitated eprint request Button can provide Almost-OA almost-instantly with one click from the requester and then one click from the author.

5. Surely even double-clicking is preferable to double-paying Elsevier (subscription plus Gold OA fees), as RCUK/Finch foolishly prefers? Even if "robust knowledge is expensive to curate" (which is false) surely it needn't be that expensive...

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).

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).

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.)

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Didier Pélaprat wrote on GOAL:

"Springer, which defined itself some months ago as a "green publisher" in an advertisement meeting to which they invited us (they call that "information" meeting) and did not ask any embargo for institutional open repositories (there was only an embargo for the repositories of funders with a mandate), now changed its policy (they call this a "new wording") with a 12-month embargo for all Open repositories.

This is now displayed in Sherpa/Romeo. It was stated that this new policy was settled "in reaction to the US, Europe and RCUK policy".

I figured out that this would make some "buzz", but for the moment I did not see any reaction. Did you hear of one?"

---

No buzz, because the change is inconsequential:

"Authors may self-archive the author’s accepted manuscript of their articles on their own websites. Authors may also deposit this version of the article in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later."

1. There is no difference between the authors' "own websites" and their own institution's "repository."

Authors' websites are sectors of their own institution's diskspace, and their institutional repository is a sector of their own institution's diskspace. Way back in 2003 U. Southampton had already laid this nonsensical pseudo-legal distinction to rest pre-emptively by formally declaring their authors' sector of their institutional repository their personal website:

"3e. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department's infrastructure for your personal homepage."

2. As to institution-external OA repositories, many green publishers try to forbid them, but this too is futile nonsense: External repositories can simply link to the full-text in the institutional repository.

Indeed this has always been the main reason I have been strongly advocating for years that self-archiving mandates should always stipulate institutional deposit rather than institution-external deposit. (Springer or any publisher has delusions, however, if they think any of their pseudo-legal double-talk can get physicists who have been self-archiving directly in Arxiv for over two decades to change their ways!)

3. But, yes, Finch/RCUK's persistence in its foolish, thoughtless and heedless policy is indeed having its perverse consequences, exactly as predicted, in the form of more and more of this formalistic FUD from publishers regarding Green OA embargoes.

Fortunately, HEFCE/REF has taken heed. If their proposed immediate-(institutional)-deposit mandate is adopted, not only is all this publisher FUD mooted, but it increases the likelihood that other OA mandates. too, will be upgraded to HEFCE's date-stamped immediate-deposit as the mechanism for submitting articles to institutional research performance review or national research assessment.

4. If a publisher says you may self-archive without embargo if you do it voluntarily, but not if your funder requires you to do it: Do it, and, if ever asked, say, hand on heart, "I did it voluntarily."

This ploy, which Springer too seems to have borrowed from Elsevier, consisting of pseudo-legal double-talk implying that
"you may deposit immediately if you needn't, but not if you must" is pure FUD and can and should be completely ignored. (Any author foolish enough to be taken in by such double-talk deserves all the needless usage and impact losses they will get!)

If there's to be "buzz," let the facts and contingencies at least be got straight!

---

Off-line query from [identity removed]:

"This email expresses my current confusion about green open access and Springer. Forgive my concreteness, but I don’t “get it.” I now self-archive my publications on sites such as ResearchGate and academia.edu.

"I simply don’t understand the Springer mandate! Can you refer me to some text somewhere which expresses all of this in really plain English?"

Springer says you can self-archive your final, refereed draft on your own website (which includes your institutional repository) immediately, without embargo.

Springer also says that in institution-external repositories you can only deposit it after a 12-month embargo.

This means, technically and formally, that ResearchGate or academia.edu can link to the full text in the institutional repository, but they cannot host the full text itself till after the 12-month embargo.

(In principle, RG/AE could also link to the Closed Access deposit during the embargo, thereby enhancing the scope of the institutional repository's eprint-request Button.)

But the practical fact is that there's nothing much that Springer or anyone can do about authors sharing their own papers before the embargo elapses through social sharing sites like RG or AE or others. Publishers' only recourse is to send individual take-down notices to RG/AE, with which RG/AE can duly comply -- only to have the authors put them right back up again soon after.

OA is unstoppable, if authors want it, and they do. They're all just being too slow about realizing it, and doing it (as the computer scientists and physicists saw and did 20 years ago, no questions asked).

That's why the OA mandates are needed. And they're coming...