Thursday, September 8. 2011Self-Archive Institutionally, Harvest CentrallyIn the Hedda Blog, Chris Maloney (Contractor for PubMed Central) asked: "Assuming the article is in the biomedical field, can authors simultaneously put a copy of their manuscript in their institution’s repository, and upload it to PMC through the NIHMS? Or does the article have to be funded by the NIH for them to do this?… The reason I ask question #2 is that I am wondering if just putting a manuscript [in]to an IR is enough to truly make the article visible and accessible. Just because something’s on the web doesn’t mean it will be found. Just because something’s indexed by Google doesn’t mean it will have high rank in their search results. Putting a manuscript on PMC, through NIHMS or other channels, means that it would be indexed in PubMed, which would make it more accessible."This an extremely important practical issue, and at the moment it is not being properly implemented. The short answer is, yes, a document deposited in the author's institutional repository (IR) can be uploaded to PMC through NIHMS, regardless of whether NIH has funded the research (and, a fortiori, regardless of whether NIH has funded extra "gold" OA publication fees). But those extra author self-archiving steps should not be necessary! The reason it became apparent that green OA self-archiving mandates (from both institutions and funders) would be necessary was that spontaneous, unmandated self-archiving rates remain low (about 20%), even when recommended or encouraged by institutions and funders. That's why the first NIH OA policy, a request, failed until it was upgraded to a requirement. But the practical implementation of the NIH mandate was still short-sighted: It required direct deposit in PMC, and allowed this to be done by either the author or the publisher. The result was not only (1) uncertainty about who needed to deposit what, when, not only (2) a partial reliance on a 3rd party other than the fundee, not bound by the grant, namely, the publisher, to fulfill the conditions of a grant to the fundee, but it also (3) imposed a double burden on fundees if their own institutions were to mandate self-archiving too: They had to deposit in their own IRs and also in PMC. This did not help either with encouraging more institutions to adopt self-archiving mandates (even though institutions are the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines) nor with encouraging authors, already sluggish about self-archiving at all, to comply with self-archiving mandates (since they might be faced with having to deposit the same paper many times). Yet in reality, the problem is merely a formal one, not a technical one. Software (e.g., SWORD) can import and export the contents of one repository to another automatically. More important: There is no need for institutional authors ever to have to self-archive directly in an institution-external (central) repository like PMC: The contents of IRs are all OAI-compliant and harvestable automatically by whatever central repositories might want them. So institutional and funder mandates need to be collaborative and convergent, not competitive and divergent, as some (including NIH's) are now. And the convergence needs to be on institution-internal deposit, followed by central harvesting (e.g. to PMC) where desired -- certainly not the reverse. "Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally." This not only encourages institutions to adopt their own mandates, to complement funder mandates and cover the entire OA target corpus, but it also puts institutions in a position to monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates. (Ensuring that all funder grant fulfillment conditions are met is something that institutions are always very eager to do!) (The visibility/accessibility worry is, I think, a red herring: OAI-compliant institutional repositories are harvested by Google, Google Scholar, BASE. citeseerx and many other search engines, including OAI-specific ones. And besides, IR metadata and documents can also be harvested into central repositories like PMC and UK-PMC. The only real factor in visibility and accessibility is whether or not an article has been made green OA at all! Where it is made OA matters little, and it matters less and less as more and more is made OA.) See: "How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"Summary: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing: Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog. Publisher OA Embargoes, ID/OA Mandates and the "Almost-OA" ButtonIn the Hedda Blog, Chris Maloney (Contractor for PubMed Central) asked: "Can/do journal publishers put stipulations on authors, as a condition of publication, that their self-archiving have an embargo period (i.e. not be available for a period such as six months)?"Yes they can and do. See SHERPA Romeo. But over 60% of them (including most of the top journal publishers) do not, and instead endorse immediate "green" OA self-archiving of authors' refereed final drafts, in the author's institutional repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. For the minority of journals that still do embargo OA, there is nevertheless a work-around: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate still requires immediate deposit, but allows the author to set access to the deposit as Closed Access instead of OA during the embargo. Would-be users web-wide can still access the bibliographic metadata, and can then use the IR's automated "email eprint request" Button to request a copy. (This is not OA but "Almost-OA" and can tide over researcher needs while hastening the natural, inevitable and well-deserved demise of the remaining publisher embargoes.) 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.) ABSTRACT: We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access. Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog. Wednesday, September 7. 2011Fourteen Recommendations and Fourteen Objections
Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.
1. Open access (OA) is not synonymous with OA publishing (gold OA). OA means free online access, and its primary target content is the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals. Currently, these articles are only accessible to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published. Research is hence losing potential usage and impact. 2. There are two ways to provide OA: The authors of the 2.5 million articles can self-archive their peer-reviewed final drafts online, free for all, in their institutional OA repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication (green OA); or the world’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals can convert to OA publishing (gold OA), publishing all their articles free for all online, with the author’s institution or funder paying the cost of publication.. 3. Providing green OA to the final drafts of their published articles is entirely in the hands of the research community, the providers of the content; providing gold OA is in the hands of the publishing community, the purveyors of the content. 4. A transition to universal green OA can be mandated by the research community (its research institutions and research funders); a transition to gold OA cannot be mandated by the research community: it depends on the publishing community. 5. The costs of publishing today are being paid for, in full, by research institutions, through journal subscriptions. 6. That means the potential funds to pay for gold OA are locked into institutional journal subscriptions today. 7. It is hence an unnecessary waste of increasingly scarce research funds to pay pre-emptively for gold OA today. 8. What the research community — research institutions and research funders — accordingly need to do today is to mandate green OA. 9. As green OA becomes universal, it provides universal OA, solving the research access problem; it does not solve the journal affordability problem, but it makes it far, far less important and urgent, since universal online access is available to all, whether or not they can afford the journal subscription. 10. If and when users find universal green OA sufficient for their usage needs, institutions will be able to cancel the subscriptions in which they were locked as long as the contents were accessible to subscribers only. 11. If green OA-induced subscription cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of recovering the essential costs of publication, publishers will cut costs, downsize and convert to the gold OA cost-recovery model and institutions will have the annual windfall savings from their subscription savings out of which they can then pay the gold OA publishing costs for their individual outgoing articles, instead of paying for access to the incoming articles from other institutions, in the form of bundled journal subscriptions, as they do now. 12. The gold OA publication cost per article, however, post-green-OA, will be far lower than the asking price for pre-emptive gold OA today, because in converting from subscription publishing to gold OA publishing under the cancellation pressure of universal green OA, publishers will have downsized substantially, phasing out their print editions (and their costs) entirely and offloading all access provision and archiving (and their costs) onto the distributed worldwide network of institutional repositories and harvesters, with the green OA version now becoming the canonical version of record. 13. Hence post-green-OA gold-OA publishing costs will have scaled down to just the cost, per paper, of managing peer review (since the peers review for free), its outcome certified by the title and track-record for quality-standards of the journal that publishes the paper (exactly as now). 14. But all of this is contingent on institutions and funders mandating green OA first, rather than paying even more for gold OA, at today’s still-inflated asking prices, while still unable to cancel the subscriptions that are essential to their users. So what needs to be lobbied for today is the adoption of green OA self-archiving mandates by research institutions (mostly universities) and funders instead of just the spending of scarce funds on paying pre-emptively for gold OA (and fulminating against inflated journal subscription prices). This is what Southampton ECS was the first in the world to do (and urge the rest of the research community to do) in 2002. Carr, L., Swan, A. and Harnad, S. (2011) Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution. In: Curating the European University. Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) FOURTEEN PRIMA FACIE OBJECTIONS FOR REFLECTION[ANSWERS SOON: COMMENTS WELCOME -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog] Post-Peer-Review Open Access, Commentary and Metrics versus Post Hoc "Peer Review"
David Colquhoun (2011) is quite right on practically every point he makes: There is too much pressure to publish and too much emphasis on journal impact factors. Too many papers are published. Many are not worth publishing (trivial or wrong). Peer reviewers are overworked. Refereeing is not always reliable. There is a hierarchy of journal peer review quality. The lower levels of the quality hierarchy are practically unrefereed.
But the solution is not to post everything publicly first, and entrust the rest to post hoc "peer review," including anonymous peer review. First, the situation is not new. Already a quarter century ago Stephen Lock (1985), former editor of the British Medical Journal, noted that everything was getting published, somewhere, in the hierarchy of journals. And journals' positions in the hierarchy serve a purpose: Their names and public track-records for quality are important filters for potential users, helping them decide what to invest their limited time in reading, how much to trust it, and whether to risk trying to apply or build upon it. This is especially true in medicine, where it is not just researchers' time and careers that are at risk from invalid results. Classical, prepublication peer review is answerable: The submitted paper is answerable to the referees. The referees are answerable to the editors. The editors and journal are answerable to the readership. In the higher quality journals, if revisions cannot be made to bring a paper up to its standards, it is rejected. Peer review is a means of raising paper quality, for authors, and of filtering paper quality, for users. Self-appointed post hoc peer review is not answerable. No editor's or journal's public track record is at stake to ensure that qualified referees assess the papers, nor that their recommendations for revision are valid, heeded or followed. And referee anonymity is a two-edged sword. Yes, it protects junior researchers and rivals from vindictiveness, but it also allows anyone to say anything about anything, immunized by anonymity. (Look at the unevenness in the quality of the comments on Professor Colquhoun's article here in the Guardian. This is not peer review.) Journal referees are anonymous to authors, but not to editors. No, the solution is not that everything should be publicly posted, unrefereed, and then to hope that open commentary will somehow take care of the rest. The solution is to post all peer-reviewed, revised and accepted papers online, free for all (Open Access) and to allow postpublication open peer commentary (anonymous and onymous) to complement and supplement classical peer review. And to end the arbitrary tyranny of journal impact factors (which just means the journal's average number of citations per article), let 1000 new Open Access metrics bloom -- a metric track-record, public and answerable. Colquhoun, D. (2011) Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science Guardian September 5 2011. Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292. Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [Web Matters] Harnad, S. (2003) Valedictory Editorial. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Journal of Open Peer Commentary) 26(1): 1 Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Lock, Stephen (1985) A difficult balance : editorial peer review in medicine London : Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust. Sunday, September 4. 2011PogOA: "We have met the enemy, and he is us..."
Dana Roth (CalTech Library) wrote:
"Stevan: In fairness to responsible publishers, I think it would be appropriate to call George Monbiot to task for not differentiating between commercial and society journals. Wiley is especially egregious in increasing prices while publishing fewer and fewer articles (e.g. Biopolymers)."Dana, I think it's wrong to demonize publishers at all, whether commercial or learned-society. Let them charge whatever subscription prices they can get. The real culprits (to paraphrase Pogo) are researchers -- the 80% of them that don't yet make their refereed final drafts freely accessible online immediately upon acceptance for publication. It's for that reason that "green" open-access self-archiving mandates from institutions and funders are the natural solution to the problem of making sure that refereed research is accessible to all potential users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they are published. But apart from not demonizing publishers, it's also important to name and laud those publishers that have endorsed immediate, un-embargoed green open-access self-archiving. On the side of the angels in this respect are most of the major commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer and, yes, Wiley. (In contrast, some of the major society publishers -- notably the American Chemical Society -- are not yet on the side of the angels, and for that they deserve to be named and shamed. -- There are, however, work-arounds, even for such regressive cases.) No, green OA self-archiving does not solve the journal affordability/over-pricing problem. But what gives that problem its urgency -- what makes it indeed a serials crisis -- will be completely remedied once green OA self-archiving is universally mandated by institutions and funders worldwide: For once the final drafts are accessible free for all, it becomes a far less critical matter to a university whether it can still afford to subscribe to any particular journal. What they cannot afford, their users can access in its green OA version. The real underlying problem -- research accessibility -- is completely solved by mandating green OA, even if the problem of journal affordability is not. Let me close with the pre-emptive re-posting of the abstract of the paper that answers the habitual rebuttal to what I have just said, namely, that green OA self-archiving is "parasitic" on journal publishers: Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access Is a Research Community Matter, Not a Publishing Community Matter. Lifelong Learning in Europe, XVI (2). pp. 117-118.Dixit,ABSTRACT: It is ironic that some publishers are calling Green OA self-archiving “parasitic” when not only are researchers giving publishers their articles for free, as well as peer-reviewing them for free, but research institutions are paying for subscriptions in full, covering all publishing costs and profits. The only natural and obvious source of the money to pay for Gold OA fees – if and when all journals convert to Gold OA -- is hence the money that institutions are currently spending on subscriptions -- if and when subscriptions eventually become unsustainable. Your Weary Archivangelist (gone quite long of tooth during the past two wasted decades of inaction), Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Friday, August 19. 2011Getting Excited About Getting Cited: No Need To Pay For OAWhat the Gaulé & Maystre (G&M) (2011) article shows -- convincingly, in my opinion -- is that in the case of paid hybrid gold OA, most of the observed citation increase is better explained by the fact that the authors of articles that are more likely to be cited are also more likely to pay for hybrid gold OA. (The effect is even stronger when one takes into account the phase in the annual funding cycle when there is more money available to spend.)Gaulé, Patrick & Maystre, Nicolas (2011) Getting cited: Does open access help? Research Policy (in press)G & M: "Cross-sectional studies typically find positive correlations between free availability of scientific articles (‘open access’) and citations… Using instrumental variables, we find no evidence for a causal effect of open access on citations. We provide theory and evidence suggesting that authors of higher quality papers are more likely to choose open access in hybrid journals which offer an open access option. Self-selection mechanisms may thus explain the discrepancy between the positive correlation found in Eysenbach (2006) and other cross-sectional studies and the absence of such correlation in the field experiment of Davis et al. (2008)… Our results may not apply to other forms of open access beyond journals that offer an open access option. Authors increasingly self-archive either on their website or through institutional repositories. Studying the effect of that type of open access is a potentially important topic for future research..." But whether or not to pay money for the OA is definitely not a consideration in the case of Green OA (self-archiving), which costs the author nothing. (The exceedingly low infrastructure costs of hosting Green OA repositories per article are borne by the institution, not the author: like the incomparably higher journal subscription costs, likewise borne by the institution, they are invisible to the author.) I rather doubt that G & M's economic model translates into the economics of doing a few extra author keystrokes -- on top of the vast number of keystrokes already invested in keying in the article itself and in submitting and revising it for publication. It is likely, however -- and we have been noting this from the very outset -- that one of the multiple factors contributing to the OA citation advantage (alongside the article quality factor, the article accessibility factor, the early accessibility factor, the competitive [OA vs non-OA] factor and the download factor) is indeed an author self-selection factor that contributes to the OA citation advantage. What G & M have shown, convincingly, is that in the special case of having to pay for OA in a hybrid Gold Journal (PNAS: a high-quality journal that makes all articles OA on its website 6 months after publication), the article quality and author self-selection factors alone (plus the availability of funds in the annual funding cycle) account for virtually all the significant variance in the OA citation advantage: Paying extra to provide hybrid Gold OA during those first 6 months does not buy authors significantly more citations. G & M correctly acknowledge, however, that neither their data nor their economic model apply to Green OA self-archiving, which costs the author nothing and can be provided for any article, in any journal (most of which are not made OA on the publisher's website 6 months after publication, as in the case of PNAS). Yet it is on Green OA self-archiving that most of the studies of the OA citation advantage (and the ones with the largest and most cross-disciplinary samples) are based. I also think that because both citation counts and the OA citation advantage are correlated with article quality there is a potential artifact in using estimates of article or author quality as indicators of author self-selection effects: Higher quality articles are cited more, and the size of their OA advantage is also greater. Hence what would need to be done in a test of the self-selection advantage for Green OA would be to estimate article/author quality [but not from their citation counts, of course!] for a large sample and then -- comparing like with like -- to show that among articles/authors estimated to be at the same quality level, there is no significant difference in citation counts between individual articles (published in the same journal and year) that are and are not self-archived by their authors. No one has done such a study yet -- though we have weakly approximated it (Gargouri et al 2010) using journal impact-factor quartiles. In our approximation, there remains a significant OA advantage even when comparing OA (self-archived) and non-OA articles (same journal/year) within the same quality-quartile. There is still room for a self-selection effect between and within journals within a quartile, however (a journal's impact factor is an average across its individual articles; PNAS, for example, is in the top quartile, but its individual articles still vary in their citation counts). So a more rigorous study would have to tighten up the quality equation much more closely). But my bet is that a significant OA advantage will be observed even when comparing like with like. Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Monday, August 15. 2011The Green Open Access Blues: Fervent Plea to SHERPA Romeo for Colour Reform
Across the eight years since its launch in 2003, SHERPA Romeo's importance and value as a resource have been steadily increasing. The most recently announced upgrade covers 18,000 journals and is (1) More up to Date, with (2) More Accurate Journal Level Searching, (3) More Search Options, (4) Electronic ISSNs, and (5) Faster Performance.
In addition to congratulating SHERPA Romeo, let me use this occasion to repeat the plea I made eight years ago to adjust the colour code to provide the information that users need the most (and at the same time bring the colour coding in line with the terminology that has since gained wide currency: "Green OA"): Although the distinction between journals that endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of both the refereed postprint and the pre-refereeing preprint (P+p) and journals that endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint but not the pre-refereeing preprint (P) is not completely empty, it is of incomparably less importance and relevance to OA than the distinction between journals that do and do not endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint (P vs. not-P). It is OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint that the OA movement is about and for. And it is OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint that is meant by the term "Green OA." And yet SHERPA Romeo continues to code P+p as "green" and P as "blue"! There is no "Blue OA." And the over 200 funders and institutions that have already mandated Green OA have not mandated "Blue OA": They could not care less whether the journals endorse the self-archiving of the unrefereed preprint in addition to the refereed postprint: Green OA only concerns the refereed postprint. It is for this reason that EPrints Romeo has steadfastly generated a colour-corrected version of the SHERPA Romeo summary statistics pie-chart across these eight years -- in addition to generating the statistics for journals as well as for publishers. (SHERPA Romeo originally covered only publishers, but the statistics for journals are much more informative -- and positive -- than the statistics for publishers, since one publisher might publish one journal and another might publish 2000!.) To see the immediate gain in clarity and consistency from suppressing the P+p/P ("green"/"blue") distinction in the summary statistics, compare the SHERPA Romeo and EPrints Romeo summary pies for publishers below. (Note that the EPrints Romeo data are static, because they have not been updated for several years. The eye will show that for publishers the proportions are much the same, but have gotten somewhat better in recent years.) I beg SHERPA Romeo to add the simplified, colour-corrected pie alongside its particoloured one (with the explanation that in the OA world, "Green" means P, not just P+p.). It would make a world of difference for user understanding. In addition, now that SHERPA is covering the data at the individual journal level, I urge providing the journal-level pie too, for it not only gives a more realistic picture, but an even more positive one. SHERPA Romeo's current "Green = Green" & "Blue = Green" publisher pie-chart (based on proportions of publishers): EPrints Romeo's colour-corrected publisher pie-chart, in which Green = Green OA (and preprints-only endorsements are coded as "pale green") (based on proportions of publishers, but out of date by several years): EPrints Romeo's colour-corrected journals pie-chart, in which Green = Green OA (and preprints-only endorsements are coded as "pale green") (based on proportions of journals). Note that the overall proportions are even better (but these data are out of date by several years, hence need updating, though they will not change much, as they already covered most of the big publishers, with the largest number of journals): Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Saturday, August 13. 2011Arxiv's Funding Pains May Be A Wake-Up Call: Distributed Versus Central ArchivingComments on:Anonymous FTP archives. Arxiv (1991) was an invaluable milestone on the road to Open Access. But it was not the first free research-sharing site: That began in the 1970's with the internet itself, with authors making their papers freely accessible to all users net-wide by self-archiving them in their own local institutional "anonymous FTP archives."Ginsparg, Paul (2011) Arxiv at 20. Nature 476: 145–147 doi:10.1038/476145a Distributed local websites. With the creation of the world wide web in 1990, HTTP began replacing FTP sites for the self-archiving of papers on authors' institutional websites. FTP and HTTP sites were mostly local and distributed, but accessible free for all, webwide. Arxiv was the first important central HTTP site for research self-archiving, with physicists webwide all depositing their papers in one central locus (first hosted at Los Alamos). Arxiv's remarkable growth and success were due to both its timeliness and the fact that it had emerged from a widespread practice among high energy physicists that had already predated the web, namely, to share hard copies of their papers before publication by mailing them to central preprint distribution sites such as SLAC and CERN. Central harvesting and search. At the same time, while physicists were taking to central self-archiving, in other disciplines (particularly computer science), distributed self-archiving continued to grow. Later web developments, notably google and webwide harvesting and search engines, continued to make distributed self-archiving more and more powerful and attractive. Meanwhile, under the stimulus of Arxiv itself, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created in 1999 -- a metadata-harvesting protocol that made all distributed OAI-compliant websites interoperable, as if their distributed local contents were all in one global, searchable archive. No need for direct central deposit in google! Together, google and OAI probably marked the end of the need for central archives. The cost and effort can instead be distributed across institutions, with all the essential search and retrieval functionality provided by automated central "overlay" services for harvesting, indexing, search and retrieval (e.g., OAIster, Scirus, Base and Google Scholar). Arxiv continues to flourish, because two decades of invaluable service to the physics community has several generations of users deeply committed to it. But no other dedicated central archive has arisen since. Like computer scientists, whose local, distributed self-archiving is harvested centrally by Citeseerx, economists, for example, self-archive institutionally, with central harvesting by RepEc. Mandating self-archiving. In biomedicine, PubMed Central looks to be an exception, with direct central depositing rather than local. But PubMed Central was not a direct author initiative, like anonymous FTP, author websites or Arxiv. It was designed by NLM, deposit was mandated by NIH, and deposit is done not only by authors but by publishers. Institutions are the universal research providers. Open Access is still growing far more slowly than it might, and one of the factors holding it back might be notional conflicts between institutional and central archiving. It is clear that Open Access self-archiving will have to be universally mandated, if all disciplines are to enjoy its benefits (maximized research access, uptake, usage and impact, minimized costs). The universal providers of all research paper output, funded and unfunded, are the world's universities and research institutions, distributed globally across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, all languages, and all national boundaries. Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally. Hence funder self-archiving mandates like NIH's and institutional self-archiving mandates like Harvard's need to join forces to reinforce one another rather than to complete for the same papers, and the most natural, efficient and economical way to do this is for both institutiions and funders to mandate that all self-archivingshould be done locally, in the author's institutional OAI-compliant repository. The contents of the institutional repositories can then be harvested automatically by central OAI-compliant repositories such as PubMed Central (as well as by google and other central harvesters) for global indexing and search. Distribute the archiving, rather than the cost. In this light, Arxiv's self-funding pains may be a wake-up call: Why should Cornell University (or a "wealthy donor") subsidize a cost that institutions can best "sponsor" by each doing (and mandating) their own distributed archiving locally (thereby reducing total cost, to boot)? After all, no one deposits directly in Google… Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship
Thursday, August 11. 2011No Need to Wait for Universal Gold OA: Green OA Can Be Universally Mandated Today
Re: "Research intelligence - 'We all aspire to universal access'" Times Higher Education 11 August 2011
The publishing community can afford to be leisurely about how long it takes for open access (OA) to reach 100% (it's 10% now for Gold OA publishing, plus another 20% for Green OA self-archiving). But the research community need not be so leisurely about it. Research articles no longer need to be accessible only to those researchers whose institution can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published, rather than to all researchers who want to use, apply and build upon it. Lost research access means lost research progress. Research is funded, conducted and published for the sake of research progress and its public benefits, not in order to provide revenue to the publishing industry, nor to sustain the subscription model of cost-recovery. The publishing community is understandably "wary" about Green OA self-archiving, mindful of its subscription revenue streams. But the transition to Green OA self-archiving, unlike the transition to Gold OA publishing, is entirely in the hands of the research community, which need not wait passively for the "market" to shift to Gold OA publishing: Springer publishers' projections suggest that at its current growth rate Gold OA will not reach 100% till the year 2029. The research community need not wait, because it is itself the universal provider of all the published research, and its institutions and funders can mandate (i.e., require) that their authors self-archive their peer-reviewed final drafts (not the publishers' version of record) in their institutional Green OA repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. And a growing number of funders and institutions (including all the UK funding councils, the ERC, EU and NIH in the US, as well as University College London, Harvard and MIT) are doing just that. Green OA self-archiving mandates generate 60% OA within two years of adoption, and climb toward 100% within a few years thereafter. The earliest mandates (U. Southampton School of Electrons and Computer Science, 2003, and CERN, 2004 are already at or near 100% Green OA. Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93 / Sunday, August 7. 2011Comments on Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen OA FAQs
Comments on Open Access FAQ of Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (German Alliance of Scientific Organisations)
The ADW OA FAQs are very timely and welcome, but they need a little more work to make them fully accurate and authoritative. All the comments are jointly archived here. 1: Definition OA comment: GRATIS AND LIBRE OPEN ACCESS 2: Vorteile von Open Access comment: DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RESEARCH ARTICLES AND RESEARCH DATA 3: Open Access und Qualitätssicherung comment: POSTPUBLICATION OPEN PEER COMMENTARY ≠ OPEN PEER REVIEW 5: Goldener Weg comment: GOLD OA GROWTH RATE 6: Grüner Weg comment: GREEN OA SELF-ARCHIVING: NOT REPUBLICATION BUT ACCESS PROVISION 7: Verlage und Grüner Weg comment: NO COPYRIGHT OBSTACLE TO MANDATING IMMEDIATE DEPOSIT 8: Rechtliche Probleme beim Grünen Weg comment: NO LEGAL OBSTACLES TO MANDATING GREEN OA 9: unabdingbares Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht comment: BASIC ACCESS NEEDS PRECEDE REPUBLICATION RIGHTS 10: Vorteile des Zweitveröffentlichungsrechts comment: DISADVANTAGES OF DEMANDING MORE RATHER THAN LESS 11: Wissenschaftsdisziplinen und Open Access comment: ALL AUTHORS AND ALL DISCIPLINES WANT MAXIMAL UPTAKE AND USAGE 12: Embargofristen comment: OA EMBARGOES AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE SUBSCRIPTION MODEL 13: Deutsche WissenschaftlerInnen und Open Access GREEN OA IS NOT A "PUBLISHING MODEL" 14: Wissenschaftliches Publizieren comment: MANDATE IMMEDIATE DEPOSIT BEFORE TRYING COPYRIGHT RETENTION 15: Geschäftsmodelle und Open Access comment: NEEDED NOW: GREEN OA MANDATES, NOT GOLD OA MODELS 16: Kosten von Open Access-Modellen comment: COST/BENEFIT RATIO OF MANDATING GREEN OPEN ACCESS 17: Open Access und kommerzielles Publizieren comment: GREEN IS THE ECONOMICAL PATH TO OA AS WELL AS TO GOLD OA 19: Bedeutung für Wissenschaftsverlagswesen comment: GREEN IS THE ROAD TO BOTH OA AND GOLD OA 20: internationale Verlage comment: PRACTICAL OA STRATEGY NEEDED, NOT ECONOMIC SPECULATION class="p7"> 21: Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht und internationale Verlage comment: OA ≠ GOLD OA PUBLICATION AND GREEN OA ≠ REPUBLICATION class="p8"> 23: Alternativen zu unabdingbarem Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht comment: MANDATE GREEN OA FIRST, SECONDARY PUBLICATION RIGHTS SECOND 24: Rolle der Wissenschaftsorganisationen comment: SIGNING THE BERLIN DECLARATION IS NOT ENOUGH 26: Informationen zu Open Access comment: FURTHER INFORMATION ON OPEN ACCESS POLICY MAKING 27: Unterstützung durch Wissenschaftsorganisationen comment: THE BEST INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT IS A GREEN OA MANDATE Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship
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