Thursday, May 3. 2012Nature News Blog on OA, UK and Jimmy Wales
I would like to answer some questions and clarify some points in Richard Van Noorden's Nature newsblog posting (NN):
"[T]he [RCUK] agencies which fund UK scientists [have] required [researchers]… to make their research papers free [online] since 2006; but now they’re going to enforce it…"The UK has indeed led the world in mandating Open Access (OA). The UK is the first country in which all the national research funding agencies have formally required OA. (Before its funder mandates, the UK was also where the world's first OA mandate was adopted within a University, in 2002.) But adopting an OA mandate is not enough. The real challenge is in formulating and implementing the mandate in a way that ensures compliance. That is where attention is focused right now. "[W]ill research papers be instantly open, or will publishers get to impose a delay?…[S]ome [publishers] let authors put up a free copy of the published manuscript after an embargo period. This is known as ‘green’ open access… RCUK open-access policies currently permit this embargo, with a six-month delay."There are two ways to provide OA: Green OA is provided by publishing in any suitable peer-reviewed journal, and then making the paper OA by self-archiving it in the author's institutional OA repository (or an institutional-external repository). Gold OA is provided by publishing in an OA journal that makes the paper OA. The majority of journals (over 60%, including the top journals in most fields) endorse the author providing immediate (unembargoed) Green OA. A minority of journals (less than 40%) embargo Green OA. To accommodate this, some mandates have allowed an OA embargo of 6 months (or longer). To fulfill would-be users' immediate research needs during the embargo, however, institutional repositories have a semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button: The user can request an eprint with a click and the author can comply with a click. "[T]he recommendation will be for a mixed green-gold model… ultimately we will see a transition to gold – so the real question is how long this will take."Among the implementation problems of some of the OA mandates today is precisely this mixture of Green and Gold. Only Green OA can be mandated. (Authors cannot be forced to choose a journal based on the journal's cost-recovery model rather than its quality and suitability.) Funds (if available) can be offered to pay the Gold OA publishing fee, if there is a suitable Gold OA journal in which the author wishes to publish; but Green OA self-archiving needs to be mandated first, cost-free. My own view is that it is a mistake to press too hard for Gold OA now, while subscriptions are still paying the costs of publication, the top journals are not Gold OA, the price of Gold OA is still high, and Green OA mandates (cost-free) are still too few. Once Green OA mandates by funders and institutions have made OA universal, the resulting availability of Green OA to everything will drive the transition to Gold OA publishing, at a much lower price, as well as releasing the subscription funds to pay for it. "British universities could end up paying twice – once to make their research open access, and again for subscriptions to the journals that they will still need to buy, because those journals will contain 94% non-British, non-open-access, research."This is precisely why the mixed Green/Gold model is not a good idea. The press should be for Green OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and institutions worldwide. The transition to Gold OA will then take place naturally of its own accord -- and meanwhile the world will already have 100% OA. "[T]he UK could challenge the US for global leadership on open access."It's the other way 'round! The UK is in the lead, but if the US passes the FRPAA, then the US will have taken over the UK's lead. "Just being able to read a free PDF isn’t actually open access."Yes it is. Gratis OA means free online access and Libre OA means free online access plus certain re-use rights. Just as Green OA has to come before Gold OA, Gratis OA has to come before Libre OA. The barriers are much lower. (All the OA mandates are for Gratis OA.) "[R]esearchers and institutions would be forced to comply with open access…. mak[ing] open access a requirement for future grants… asking institutions to sign a statement that papers published under its grants are compliant with its open access policy; and if not… hold back a final instalment… of the grant funding."And the most important implementation detail of all: All mandates (funder and institutional) should be convergent and collaborative rather than divergent and competitive: (1) Both funders and institutions should require author self-archiving in the author's institutional repository (not in an institutional-external central repository). Central repositories can then harvest from the institutional repository, authors only have to deposit once, institutions can monitor and ensure compliance with funder OA mandates and they will also be motivated to adopt OA mandates of their own, for all of their research output, funded and unfunded, in all discipline. (2) Both funders and institutions should require immediate deposit (not just after an allowable embargo period). (3) The deposit mandate should be fulfilled by the mandatee (the author), not by publishers (3rd parties who have an interest in delaying OA and are not bound by the mandate). This will also make the monitoring of compliance much easier and more effective. "What Wales will add here is not clear… Some celebrity involvement is to be welcomed."OA means Open Access to peer-reviewed research. Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed research and indeed it is rather negative on expertise and answerability. So Wales has a lot to learn. But if he does learn what needs to be done to make Green OA mandates effective, he may be able to see to the adoption of the implementation details that are needed, if he has David Willetts' confidence… Wednesday, May 2. 2012On Open Access Broth and Cooks
The UK government has engaged Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to help make UK tax-payer-funded research available online for all.
Open Access to peer-reviewed research (OA) is an important, timely and even urgent goal, and the UK's commitment to providing OA is extremely welcome and commendable. But turning to Jimmy Wales to help make it happen makes almost as little sense as turning to Rupert Murdoch. Wikipedia is based on the antithesis of peer review. Asking JW to help make sure peer-reviewed research is available to all is like asking McDonalds to help the UK Food Standards Agency make sure that wholesome food is available to all. The way to make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to all is already known: Make it a mandatory condition of funding that the fundees make it available online to all (OA). Britain (RCUK) has already gone a long way toward trying to mandate just that -- a much longer way than any other country so far. But there are still some crucial implementational details that need tweaking in order to make those mandates work: 1. The requirement has to be to deposit in the fundee's institutional repository (rather than an institution-external repository).That way the fundee's institution will be empowered to monitor and ensure compliance with the funder mandate. In addition, when there is an allowable publisher embargo on making the immediate-deposit OA immediately, the institution's email-eprint-request Button can tide over immediate research usage needs during the embargo on an automated, accelerated individual-request basis. Institutional deposit will also motivate institutions to mandate OA for all of their research output, not just the RCUK-funded portion. But these are all implementational details that could be fixed by just updating the language of the RCUK mandates -- making it explicit that research that is not institutionally deposited immediately loses its funding. Each institution's research grant support office, already so solicitous about complying with all conditions on applying for, receiving and retaining grants will equally assiduously see to it that institutional fundees understand and comply. But JW does not know any of this. And if he did, he would be no better able to implement it than anyone else. It's the implementation that's needed, to make the broth edible and available to all -- not more cooks (and especially not from McDonalds' kitchens)! Friday, April 27. 2012Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access
The claim is often made that researchers (peers) have as much access to peer-reviewed research publications as they need -- that if there is any need for further access at all, it is not the peers who need it, but the general public.
1. Functionally, it doesn't matter whether open access (OA) is provided for peers or for public, because OA means that everyone gets access.Stevan Harnad Enabling Open Scholarship Postscript: The list of recommendations I made was strategic. The objective was to maximize OA deposits and maximize OA deposit mandates. The issue is not about how many members of the general public might wish to read how many peer-reviewed journal articles. The issue is strategic: What provides a viable, credible, persuasive reason for researchers to provide OA and for institutions and funders to mandate providing OA in all fields of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines. My point was that providing access for the the general public is a viable, credible, persuasive reason for providing and mandating OA in some fields (notably health- related research, but there may be other fields as well) -- but it is not a viable, credible, persuasive reason for providing OA in all fields, nor for all research. It is not difficult to find anecdotal evidence of nonspecialist interest in specialized research; one's own interests often go beyond one's own area of expertise. But that is user-based reasoning, whereas providing OA and mandating OA require reasons that are viable, credible and persuasive to providers of research -- and not some providers, sometimes, but all providers, for all research. The only reason for providing OA to research that is valid, credible and persuasive for all research and researchers is in order to ensure that it is accessible to all of its intended users -- primarily peers -- and not just to those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published. The issue is strategic. It is a great mistake to construe giving priority to reasons for providing peer access over reasons for providing public access as somehow implying that public access should be denied: Public access automatically comes with the territory with OA. So public access denial is not the issue. The strategic issue is whether researchers (and their institutions and funders) are more likely to be induced to provide and mandate OA by the argument that the public wants and needs access or by the argument that peers want and need access. Peer access provides research progress and impact. It is an appeal to researchers' self-interest to stress the beneficial effects of OA on the uptake and impact of their research. Most researchers of course also have a secret yearning that their research should appeal not only to their peers, but to the general public. But they also know that that is probably just wishful thinking in most cases. And in any case, public access does not have the direct affect on their careers, funding, and research progress that peer access has. So it is not that the enhancement of public access should not be listed among the reasons for providing OA. It is just that it should not be promoted as the first, foremost, or universal reason for providing OA, because it is not: for many or most researchers, that argument simply will not work. Ditto for the argument that researchers need to provide OA because journal subscriptions cost too much. The eventual solution to the journal affordability crisis will probably also come from providing and mandating OA. But, like public access, journal affordability is not a sufficiently compelling or universal rationale for providing OA. The public access rationale for providing OA appeals to politicians and voters. Good. Use it in order to help get OA mandate legistlation adopted by research funders. But the rationale is much less convincing to researchers (peers) themselves, and their institutions. The journal affordability rationale for providing OA appeals to librarians and institutions, but it is much less convincing to researchers (peers). In contrast, providing OA in order to maximize research progress and impact, by maximizing researcher (peer) uptake, usage, applications and citations -- if backed up by evidence -- is the way to convince all researchers, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines, that it is in their own best interests to provide OA to their research. Stevan Harnad Thursday, April 12. 2012Why PMC & UKPMC Should Harvest From Institutional Repositories
PubMed & PubMed Central are wonderful resources, but not nearly as resourceful or wonderful as they easily could be.
(1) PMC & UKPMC should of course be harvesting or linking institutional repository (IR) versions of papers, not just PMC/UKPMC-deposited and publisher-hosted papers. (2) Funders should be mandating IR deposit and PMC harvesting rather than direct PMC/UKPMC deposit. By thus making funder mandates and institutional mandates convergent and collaborative instead of divergent and competitive, this will motivate and facilitate adoption and compliance with institutional mandates: institutions are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded. (3) IRs should mandate immediate deposit irrespective of publisher OA policy: If authors wish to honor publisher OA embargoes, they can set access to the deposit as Closed Access during the embargo and rely on providing almost-OA via the IR's email eprint request button (4) Funder mandates should require deposit by the fundee -- the one bound by the mandate -- rather than by the publisher, who is not bound by the mandate, and indeed in conflict of interest with it. (5) Publishers (partly to protect from rival publisher free-loading, partly to discourage funder mandates, and partly out of simple misunderstanding of network capability) are much more likely to endorse immediate institutional self-archiving than institution-external deposit. This is yet another reason funders should mandate institutional deposit and metadata harvesting instead of direct institution-external deposit. Friday, April 6. 2012Alma Swan: UNESCO Open Access Policy Guidelines
Policy Guidelines FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF OPEN ACCESS by Alma Swan
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Communication and Information Sector EXCERPTS: ...Policies can require ‘green’ Open Access by self-archiving but to preserve authors’ freedom to publish where they choose policies should only encourage ‘gold’ Open Access through publication in Open Access journals... Evidence has unequivocally demonstrated that to have real effect policies must be mandatory, whether institutional or funder policies.... Evidence shows that researchers are quite happy to be mandated to act in this way... The optimum arrangement, one that accommodates the needs of all stakeholders, and has the potential to collect the greatest amount of Open Access content, is for a network of institutional repositories to be the primary locus for deposit and for centralised, subject-specific collections to be created by harvesting the required content from that network of distributed repositories... Wednesday, March 28. 2012Why "Public Access" vs. "Research Access" Matters
Practically speaking, public access (i.e., free online access to research, for everyone) includes researcher access (free online access to research for researchers).
Moreover, free online access to research, for everyone, includes both public access and researcher access. So what difference does it make what you call it? The answer is subtle, but important: The goal of providing "public access to publicly funded research" has a great deal of appeal (rightly) to both tax-paying voters and to politicians. So promoting open access as "public access" is a very powerful and effective way to motivate and promote the adoption of open access self-archiving mandates by public research funders such as NIH and the many other federal funders in the US that would be covered by the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). That's fine for publicly funded research. But not all research -- nor even most research -- is publicly funded. All research worldwide, however, whether funded or unfunded, originates from institutions: The universal providers of research are the world's universities and research institutes. To motivate institutions to adopt open access self-archiving mandates for all of their research output requires giving them and their researchers a credible, valid reason for doing so. And for institutions and their researchers, "public access to publicly funded research" is not a credible, valid reason for providing open access to their research output: Institutions and their researchers know full well that apart from a few scientific and scholarly research areas (notably, health-related research), most of their research output is of no interest to the public (and often inaccessible technically, even if accessible electronically). Institutions and their researchers need a credible and valid reason for providing open access to their research output. And that credible and valid reason is so as to provided access for all of the intended users of their research -- researchers themselves -- rather than just those who are at an institution that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published. Subtle, but important. It has become obvious that the >75% of researchers who have not been providing open access to their research for over two decades now -- despite the fact that the Web has made it both possible and easy for them to do so -- will not do so until and unless it is mandated. That's why mandates matter. The rationale for the mandate, however, has to be credible and valid for all research and all researchers. "Public access to publicly funded research" is not. But "maximize researcher access to maximize research uptake and impact" is. And it has the added virtue of not only maximizing research usage, applications and progress -- to the benefit of the public -- but public access to publicly funded research also comes with the territory, as an added benefit. So Mike Rossner (interviewed by Richard Poynder) is quite right that the two are functionally equivalent. It is just that they are not strategically equivalent -- if the objective is to convince institutions and their researchers that it is in their interest to mandate and provide open access. Thursday, March 22. 2012Hopeful Ad Hoc Critiques of OA Study After OA Study: Will Wishful Thinking Ever Wane?Comment on Elsevier Editors' Update by Henk Moed:No study based on sampling and statistical significance-testing has the force of an unassailable mathematical proof. But how many studies showing that OA articles are downloaded and cited more have to be published before the ad hoc critiques (many funded and promoted by an industry not altogether disinterested in the outcome!) and the special pleading tire of the chase? There are a lot more studies to try to explain away here. Most of them just keep finding the same thing... (By the way, on another stubborn truth that keeps bouncing back despite untiring efforts to say it isn't so: Not only is OA research indeed downloaded and cited more -- as common sense would expect, since it accessible free for all, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford a subscription -- but requiring (mandating) OA self-archiving does indeed increase OA self-archiving. Where on earth did Henk get the idea that some institutions' self-archiving "did not increase when their OA regime was transformed from non-mandatory into mandatory"? Or is Henk just referring to the "mandates" that state that "You must self-archive -- but only if and when your publisher says you may, and not if your publisher says 'you may if you may but you may not if you must'"...? Incredulous? See here and weep (for the credulous -- or chuckle for the sensible)...)
Tuesday, March 20. 2012Estimating the True Costs of Gold Open Access Publishing
Many estimates have been made of the true costs of Gold Open Access (OA) publishing (e.g., by Claudio Aspesi, in the discussion of Richard Poynder's recent article), but the estimates are rather arbitrary and unrealistic if the other causal factors that could raise or lower them are not taken into account.
The two most important causal factors are (1) Green OA and (2) institutions' subscription budgets. Institutions cannot cancel essential journals if their contents are not otherwise accessible to their users. If Green OA is universally mandated, then authors' final, peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles are deposited in institutional repositories and freely accessible to all users whose institutions cannot afford subscriptions to the journals in which they appeared. This makes it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions, eventually making the subscription model unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of publication. Subscription cancelations force journals to cut inessential costs. With the refereed final drafts of all articles accessible to all through Green OA, journals no longer need to (1) provide the print edition, (2) provide the online edition or (3) provide access or archiving: The distributed network of Green OA repositories provides all that is needed. The rest are all obsolete products and services in the universally mandated Green OA era. When the costs of (1), (2), and (3) are unbundled from publication products and services made obsolete by universal Green OA, the only essential cost remaining is that of implementing peer review. Peers review for free, so the cost of peer review is just the cost of managing the peer review process, including the editorial expertise and judgment in choosing referees, adjudicating referee reports, and adjudicating revised drafts. If peer review is provided as a "no fault" service to the author's institution, per submitted draft, regardless of whether the outcome is rejection, revision, or acceptance, the cost of rejected articles can be unbundled from the cost of accepted articles; this not only lowers and distributes the cost of peer review, but it removes the risk of lowered peer review standards and over-acceptance for the sake of making more money through Gold OA. This much lower cost of post-Green OA no-fault Gold OA -- my guess is that it would be between $200 and $500 per submitted draft -- would not only be incomparably more affordable than today's pre-Green OA fees for Gold OA, but the money to pay for it would be available, many times over, from a fraction of institutions' permanent annual windfall subscription savings released by the cancelations made possible by universally mandated Green OA. The only essential element for having Gold OA at this much more realistic and affordable price is one cost-free act on the part of the universal providers of all research output: Institutional Green OA mandates (reinforced by research funder Green OA mandates). Without taking these costs and causal factors into account, estimates of the costs of OA are arbitrary and the wait for universal OA will continue to be long. Harnad, S. (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. Wednesday, March 14. 2012Recommendations on RCUK OA Draft Policy
Research Councils UK are seeking public comments on their draft new OA policy.
Please send any comments to communications@rcuk.ac.uk and use "Open Access Feedback" in the subject line. Here are my own comments and recommendations to RCUK: 1. It is excellent that RCUK is reducing the allowable embargo period (to 6 months for most research councils). 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 Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) ______ (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41. 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.) Green OA, Grown Seed By Seed: Not OZ's Lag But UK's LeadRe: Richard Poynder: Open Access, brick by brick. Open and Shut? Tuesday, March 13, 2012Let universities and research funders follow the UK's lead, not Australia's lag (apart from QUT!): Forget about Gold OA publishing for now and mandate the researcher keystrokes that would have given us 100% [Green] OA 20 years ago, had they only been done, unmandated, 20 years ago. The reward will not only be 100% [Green] OA at long last, putting an end to 20 years of needlessly lost research impact globally, but Gold OA at a fair price soon thereafter. (Apart from desperate and appallingly maladroit (and doomed) lobbying efforts with governments (and closed-door bargaining efforts with customers) to try to deter or delay Green OA mandates, Elsevier has nothing to do with it, one way or the other: Providing OA is entirely -- repeat: entirely -- in the research community's hands (at their fingertips), once they awaken from their insouciant slumber and realize at last that it is -- and has been all along. 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
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