Saturday, June 12. 2010
Oxford University Press Journals has issued a highly misleading press release -- " Open Access Uptake: Five Years On," not making it clear that it is not Open Access (OA) uptake that is declining, but merely the uptake of OUP's pricey "Oxford Open (OO)" paid hybrid-Gold OA option.
OUP offers its authors the option of paying (a sizeable sum) to have an article that has been published in OUP's subscription journals made OA (freely accessible online). Each OUP journal continues to collect subscription income, and the rest of its articles continue to be non-OA, but the paid-up OO articles are made OA by OUP -- along with a promise to lower OUP journal subscription costs proportionately, as hybrid Gold uptake increases. So this OUP press release is really just telling us that the uptake for the OO option is not increasing, but decreasing.
What is stated, however, is that it is OA uptake itself that is decreasing, which is the very opposite of the truth.
Globally, across all journals, "Green OA" self-archiving, by authors, of their own articles in OA repositories -- already 2-3 times the uptake of OUP's paid hybrid Gold OA option -- is increasing, not decreasing, in no small part because Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors' institutions and funders, requiring them to deposit their articles in OA repositories, are increasing.
The existence of the Green OA option is also the obvious explanation of why OUP's OO hybrid Gold uptake is low: Why should authors pay for Gold OA when they can provide Green OA for free (especially while subscriptions are still paying the costs of publication -- as well as tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA)?
But OUP does not mention Green OA. Nor does it mention that OUP is among the minority of major publishers that have not yet given their green light to their authors to provide Green OA immediately upon acceptance for publication, instead attempting to impose an embargo of 12 to 24 months on Green OA (perhaps in the hope of forcing their authors to resort to paying for the OO option instead).
OUP is definitely not giving a good account of itself as the history of OA is writing itself today. Cambridge University Press (CUP), for example, among university publishers, The American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Science magazine), among learned-society publishers, and even Elsevier and Springer, among commercial publishers are among the majority that are behaving far more responsibly and progressively than OUP, being on the " side of the angels" insofar as endorsing the immediate Green OA option for their authors is concerned.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, June 10. 2010
Stuart Shieber's recommendations in his "A proposal to simplify the University of North Texas open-access policy" are very good and their spirit should be followed, because that would indeed simplify and clarify the UNT policy, currently somewhat longer and more complicated than it needs to be.
But there is an even simpler way to put it (though it does involve three components, not just two): (1) Immediate deposit required. (2) Immediate OA strongly recommended, but not required. (3) Rights retention and license strongly recommended, but not required. That's all.
Stuart's recommendations for simplifying the rights reservation and licensing details are well taken; and they do make the policy as a whole more consistent and coherent. But (1) and (3) alone, leaving out (2), would not make it clear enough to authors what the real contingencies are, even though Stuart is quite right that, by implication, (2) is in a sense implicit in (3). Waiving (3), however, does not entail waiving (2), any more than waiving (2) or (3) implies waiving (1).
There is no "Harvard-style" vs "Harnad-style" approach. That initial difference vanished completely as soon as the Harvard mandate was upgraded to add an immediate-deposit requirement, without waiver, to its original license requirement, with waiver.
The rest is just about clarifying the contingencies. (1) Yes, you have to deposit immediately, no matter what. (2) No, you don't have to make the deposit OA immediately, if you have reason not to; it is just strongly recommended. (3) No, you don't have to reserve the specified rights and grant the license if you have reason not to, it is just strongly recommended.
I think the current Harvard version still does not make the three contingencies sufficiently clear and explicit (although they are latent in the Harvard FAQ), whereas the UNT version does. Streamlined along the lines Stuart suggests, UNT will do so even better.
Ceterum censeo, I am confident that the extra rights that Harvard seeks in (3) (basically amounting to " Libre OA") will eventually come with the IDOA territory, following as a natural matter of course, with time, once the IDOA version of the OA mandate becomes widely adopted. IDOA guarantees only about 63% immediate Gratis OA plus 37% " Almost-OA" today. But once it is universally adopted, the rest of the dominoes will fall, leading first to 100% Gratis OA, and then to as much Libre OA as authors and institutions want and need. The trick is to come up with a policy model, today, that is strong enough to do the trick -- not so strong as to impede or retard universal adoption, but strong enough to ensure compliance: I think the UNT version (with Stuart's recommended tightening) will prove to be that optimal model.
See: " Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?"
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Wednesday, June 2. 2010
The Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University in Montreal on Monday May 31 featured a symposium on The Age of Open Access: New paradigm for universities and researchers. To see the web-stream of the session, click here.
John Willinsky ( Stanford University) and Heather Joseph ( Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Washington) reported on the progress and promise of OA; Michael Geist ( University of Ottawa) discussed the more general question of copyright in the digital age, and Gerald Beasley ( Concordia University) reported on the very productive faculty consultations that led up to the adoption in April of the Concordia mandate, Canada's first university-wide Green Open Access mandate (motivated in part to coincide with this very Congress, and strongly encouraged by the Congress's Academic Convenor, Ronald Rudin, Professor of History at Concordia).
Most of the subsequent discussion from the audience focused on the funding of Gold OA publishing rather than on the mandating of Green OA self-archiving that has been spearheaded among US universities by Harvard's Robert Darnton (who also spoke at Congress) and Stuart Shieber and among Canadian universities by Concordia's Ronald Rudin and Gerald Beasley. Yet it is Green OA Mandates that will usher in "The Age of Open Access" -- which, all the presenters agreed, has not yet arrived!. On Wednesday, June 2, there are two further OA events at Congress:
"Open Access: Transforming research in the developing world"
Access to knowledge is fundamental to all aspects of human development, from health to food security, and from education to social capacity building. Yet access to academic publications is severely restricted for many developing countries. As well, the prohibitive cost of publishing and distributing journals in the developing world means much of the research done there remains ‘invisible’ to the rest of the world. This panel will bring together experts to explore the potential impact of Open Access on the developing world.
Moderated by Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Trent University), this panel will bring together Buhle Mbambo-Thata (UNISA Library, South Africa), Leslie Chan (University of Toronto) and Hebe Vessuri, (Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research). It will be followed by a celebration of Concordia University’s commitment to Open Access at the Libraries, 5pm - 7pm, at the Webster Library (LB Building 2nd Floor)
Tuesday, June 1. 2010
U Liege's Rector, Bernard Rentier, reports that over the past year deposits to the U. Liege repository ( ORBi) have grown from 10 to 40 thousand publications, 25 thousand of them full-text. According to ROAR, this is the 3rd highest growth rate among the world's thousand identified institutional repositories. Viewed 650 thousand times and downloaded 61 thousand times, these 40 thousand deposits coincide with the first year in which, as a part of U Liege's Open Access Mandate, ORBi has served as U Liege's sole official means of submitting publications for performance review for academic promotion.
Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University has given a splendid (if a trifle US-centric, indeed Harvard-centric!) talk at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University.
Caveat 1: Journal Articles Versus Books. Professor Darnton's three jeremiads (one on journal articles, two on books) are all spot-on -- but best kept separate, partly because only journal articles are, strictly speaking, Open Access (OA) issues, but mostly because the journal article access problem already has a straightforward solution -- and Harvard was the first university in the US (though only the 16th worldwide!) to adopt it: Mandating "Green" OA self-archiving of all journal articles published by its authors.
In contrast, book OA cannot be mandated, for the simple reason that all journal article authors already wish to give away their articles free for all users online, rather than leaving them accessible only to users at universities that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published; this is far from being true of the authors of all or even most books. Hence trying to treat or even conceptualize journal article access and book access as the same problem would handicap the journal article access problem -- which already has a simple, immediate, and complete solution (OA mandates) -- with the complications of the book access problem, which does not.
Caveat 2: The "Give-Away/Buy-Back" Argument. Nor does it diminish the importance and effectiveness of the mandate solution to the journal article access problem which Harvard has so successfully championed that one of the arguments many (including Professor Darnton) have invoked in its favour happens to be specious. The need and wish on the part of the authors of refereed journal articles (for the sake of both research progress and the progress of their own careers) to make them accessible to all would-be users -- rather then leaving them accessible only to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe -- is already decisive. There is no need to add to it the " we give it to publishers for free and then we have to buy it back" argument, because it's just not valid:
When a university subscribes to a journal, it does not do so in order to buy back its own published research articles: It does so in order to buy in the research articles published by other universities! In that respect, the transaction is the same as it is with books -- except that book authors may be seeking royalties whereas journal articles are not.
So this specious argument -- though it does well express the frustrations of university libraries because of the way their swelling annual serials budgets keep cannibalizing their book budgets -- is not needed in order to make the case for mandating journal article OA: The fact that mandating journal article OA is feasible and effective, that it maximizes article usage and impact, and that it is beneficial and desirable to all journal article authors is already argument enough, and decisive.
Caveat 3: Funding Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA. Similarly unnecessary is continued worry about university journal budgets -- once universities universally follow Harvard's example and mandate Green OA self-archiving. For once all journal articles are freely accessible online, whether and when to cancel unaffordable journals is no longer the agonizing problem it is now: The inelastic need is satisfied by the Green OA version, hence the subscription demand (and the resultant cannibalization of book budgets by journal budgets) is no longer inelastic.
In addition to its Green OA self-archiving mandate, Harvard has also launched the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity ( COPE), a commitment to provide some money to pay the costs of Harvard authors who wish to publish in "Gold" OA journals (journals that make their articles OA). The purpose of funding COPE is to encourage publishers to make a transition to Gold Open Access publishing. This is commendable, but it needs to be noted that it is not really urgent or necessary at this time, when journal publication is still being abundantly funded by universities' annual subscriptions -- which cannot be cancelled until and unless Green OA first prevails!
So committing spare funds that Harvard may have available to pay for Gold OA for some of Harvard's article output is of course welcome, given that Harvard has already mandated Green OA for all of its article output. But alas COPE has now inspired membership by other universities that are emulating Harvard only in committing funds to pay for Gold OA, not in mandating Green OA, thinking that they are thereby doing their bit for OA! The Harvard model would be much more useful for the universities worldwide that are keen to emulate it if it were made clear that COPE should only be committed as a supplement for a Green OA mandate, not as a substitute for it. (See some of my own jeremiads on this matter.)
Fortunately, Concordia University, the host for this Congress, has adopted a Green OA mandate before even thinking about whether or not it has any extra cash to commit to COPE!
(If and when universal Green OA frees universities to cancel journals, it will by the same token free that windfall cancellation cash to pay for Gold OA.)
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Sunday, May 23. 2010
Corrigendum: False alarm. The Reuss article is not new. Peter Suber has since noted (May 23 2010): "Though I tagged the Reuss article yesterday, thinking it was new, I removed the tag soon afterwards. I believe the article is the same one he published in February 2009, framed with a new advertisement and current date -- apparently the newspaper's way of highlighting stories from its archive..." But the critiques still bear repeating till the "Heidelberg Appeal"'s repealed and the author corrects its canards...
Roland Reuss "Eine heimliche technokratische Machtergreifung"
Same old tune. Same false notes: Green-OA/Gold-OA conflated.
Books/articles conflated.
Imaginary "authors' rights violations" absurdly alleged.
Newspapers clearly have no peer review for either facts or logic...
See: "Heidelberg Appeal Peeled."
Friday, May 21. 2010
SH: "Benjamin Geer suggests [requiring OD] immediately upon publication (presumably the publication of a refereed journal article based on the data in question). But the first of the [data-] collector's articles based on that collection or the last? How many are allowed with exclusivity? and how long?... What if [the data-collector has] gathered a lot of time-consuming data, amenable to a lot of time-consuming analysis?" BG: "What if they've gathered enough data for a lifetime of analysis? Should they have the right to hoard their data for the rest of their life? Where do you draw the line? Does it make any difference, ethically, whether they collected that data using public funds?"
It's not for me (or anyone) to draw the line uniformly, a-priori. The length of time researchers may need to embargo access to the data they have gathered is something that depends on the field and data, and hence OD needs to be negotiated with the funder, possibly on a case by case basis.
This is notably not the case with OA to published research, in which, without exception, research, researchers, their funders and their institutions all benefit most from OA being provided immediately upon acceptance for publication (and the only conflict of interest is with a 3rd-party service-provider: the publisher).
Benjamin Geer proposes, simply, that research data should be made OD immediately upon publication. I am pointing out the genuine complications that this is failing to take into account. I am not at all suggesting that OD, as soon as possible, is not a good and desirable thing. It is simply far from being as straightforward as OA, especially insofar as mandating (i.e., requiring) is concerned, because there is no conflict with the researcher's interest in the case of OA, whereas there may well be considerable conflict with the researcher's interest in the case of OD. And it is all about timing.
As a consequence, it is very important to keep OA and OD separate, especially as regards mandates. Because of the conflict of interest, this is not a matter to be settled by a-priori ideology or edict, but by realism, fairness and pragmatics.
(By way of an indication that I am fully cognizant of (and opposed to) authors sitting unnecessarily long on their database, there was in my own field a case in which a team of researchers had been funded to collect data worldwide for a global color perception database. There was considerable controversy and consternation in the field after the data-gathering because of delays in publication and release. Many researchers in the field felt that the delays in both had slowed rather than advanced research progress. Here was a case where an advance negotiation between the funders and the researchers on the permissible length of the access embargo would have been helpful, would probably have speeded the research, and would probably have resulted in greater research progress. But the punchline from such cases is certainly not that for all data the embargo should therefore be of length zero, either between data of collection and date of publication or between data of publication and date of data-release as OD. The punchline is that OD parameters need to be negotiated in advance, on a case by case basis, with an emphasis on publication as well as release as soon as fair and practicable. There is nothing like this with OA.)
In summary, unlike the case of open access to refereed research articles, the case of open access to data, like the case of open access to books, is not an open and shut one. OD mandates are desirable, and justifiable, but their parameters will have to be negotiated field by field, case by case. And the terrain will be much better prepared for the more complicated case of mandating OD once we have successfully reached the simpler (and more urgent) goal of universally mandating OA.
Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, May 20. 2010
Anon: "I hope you don’t mind my asking you for guidance – I follow the IR list and you are obviously expert in this area. I am having a debate with a colleague who argues that forcing researchers to give up their data to archives and repositories breeches their autonomy and control over intellectual property. He goes so far as to position the entire open access movement in the camp of the neoliberal agenda of commodifying knowledge for capitalist dominated state authority (at the expense of researchers – often very junior team members – who actually create the data).". It is important to distinguish OA (Open Access to refereed research journal articles) from Open Data (Open Access to research data, OD).
All researchers, without exception, want to maximise access to their refereed research findings as soon as they are accepted for publication by a refereed journal, in order to maximise their uptake, usage and impact. Otherwise they would not be providing access to them, by publishing them. The impact of their research findings is what their careers, as well as research progress, are all about.
But raw data are not research findings until they have been data-mined and analysed. Hence, by the same token (except in rare exceptions), researchers are not merely data-gatherers, collecting data so that others can go on to do the data-mining and analysis: In science especially, their data-collection is driven by their theories, and their attempts to test and validate them. In the humanities too, the intellectual contributions are rarely databases themselves; the scholarly contributions are the author's analysis and interpretation of their data -- and these are often reported in books (long in the writing), which are not part of OA's primary target content, because books are definitely not all or mostly giveaway content, written solely to maximise their uptake, usage and impact (at least not yet). [See Figure, below.]
In short, with good reason, OD is not immediate, exception-free author give-away content, whereas OA is. It may be reasonable, when data-gathering is funded, that the funders stipulate how long the data may be held for exclusive data-analysis by the fundee, before it must be made openly accessible. But, in general, primary research data -- just like books, software, audio, video, and unrefereed research -- are not amenable to OA mandates because there may be good reasons why their creators do not wish to make them OA, at least not immediately. Indeed, that is the reason that all OA mandates, whether by funders or universities, are very specifically restricted to refereed research journal publications.
In the new world of OA mandates, which is merely a PostGutenberg successor to the Gutenberg world of "publish-or-perish" mandates, it is critically important to distinguish carefully what is required (and why) from what is merely recommended (and why). Anon: "I agree there is a risk of misuse and appropriation of the open access agenda, but that is true for any technology, or any social change more generally". Researchers' unwillingness to make their laboriously gathered data immediately OA is not just out of fear of misuse and misappropriation. It is much closer to the reason that a sculptor does not do the hard work of mining rock for a sculpture only in order to put the raw rock on craigslist for anyone to buy and sculpt for themselves, let alone putting it on the street corner for anyone to take home and sculpt for themselves. That just isn't what sculpture is about. And the same is true of research (apart from some rare exceptions, like the Human Genome Project, where the research itself is the data-gathering, and the research findings are the data). Anon: "And I believe researchers generally have more to gain than lose from sharing data but hard evidence on this point – again for data, not outputs, is almost non-existent so far. If you can direct me to any articles or arguments, I would be grateful". There is no hard evidence on this because -- except in exceptional cases -- it is simply not true. The work of science and scholarship does not end with data-gathering, it begins with it, and motivates it. If funders and universities mandated away the motivation to gather the data, they would not be left with an obedient set of data-gatherers, duly continuing to gather data so that anyone and everyone could then go ahead and data-mine it immediately. They would simply be mandating away much of the incentive to gather the data in the first place.
To put it another way: The embargo on making refereed research articles immediately OA -- the access delay that publishers seek in order to protect their revenue -- is the tail wagging the dog: Research progress and researchers' careers do not exist in the service of publishers' revenues, but vice versa. In stark contrast to this, however, the "embargo" on making primary research data OD is necessary and justified (in most cases) if researchers are to have any incentive for gathering data (and doing research) at all.
The length of the embargo is another matter, and can and should be negotiated by research funders on a field by field or even a case by case basis.
So although it is crucial not to conflate OA and OD (thereby needlessly eliciting author resistance to OA when all they really want to resist is immediate OD), there is indeed a connection between OA and OD, and universal OA will undoubtedly encourage more OD to be provided, sooner, than the current status quo does. Anon: "An important point in addition is that the archives I work with, while aspiring to openness, cannot adopt full and unqualified open access. Issues of sensitive and confidential data, and consent terms from human research subjects, have to be respected. We strive to make data as open and free as possible, subject to these limits. Typically, agreeing to a licence specifying legal and ethical use is all that is required. So in fact, researchers do retain control, to some extent, over the terms and conditions of reuse when they deposit their data for sharing in data archives". Yes, of course even OD will need to have some access restrictions, but that is not the point, and that is not why researchers in general have good reason not be favorably disposed to immediate mandatory OD -- whereas they have no reason at all not to be favorably disposed to immediate mandatory OA.
It is also important to bear in mind that the fundamental motivation for OA is research access and progress, not research archiving and preservation (although those are of course important too). Data must of course be archived and preserved as well, but that, again, is not OD. Closed Access data-archiving would serve that purpose -- and to the extent that researchers store digital data in any form, closed access digital archiving is what all researchers do already. Proposing to help them with data-preservation is not the same thing as proposing that they make their data immediately OD.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Sunday, May 16. 2010
It's too quick to see my relentless insistence on the priority of Green OA self-archiving by authors as monomaniacal!
The reasoning is this (and it's partly practical, partly ethical):
An AAA publications manager would be perfectly entitled and justified to say: "If authors who purport to care so much about OA to their work do not even bother to provide OA by self-archiving it -- despite the fact that AAA has given them the green light to do so -- and their institutions and funders don't even bother to mandate it, then why on earth is the finger being pointed at AAA at all (and why should we regard their cares as credible)? Is AAA supposed to be the one to sacrifice its revenues to provide something that its authors don't even care about enough to sacrifice a few keystrokes to provide for themselves?"
As long as we keep focussing on where the key to providing OA isn't (i.e., the publisher-lamp-post) our research will remain in the dark.
We have to get the priorities straight. It is not enough to be ideologically "for" Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates. It is not even enough to do the keystrokes to self-archive one's own work (though that's a good start, and I wonder how many OA advocates are actually doing it? the global rate hovers at about 5-20%). One has to make sure that one's own institution adopts a Green OA mandate. Then, and only then, can one go on to the next step, which is to try to persuade one's publisher to go Gold (though persuading one's funder to mandate Green would probably help more; Gold OA will come of its own accord, once we have universal Green OA).
But perhaps the most egregious misconstrual of OA priorities is not authors impugning their publisher for not going Gold before they and their institutions (and funders) go Green. That dubious distinction is reserved for institutions (and funders) who commit pre-emptively to funding Gold without first mandating Green!
PS No need for yet another central repository either! Institutional repositories are enough. Fill them. Mandate filling them. And central collections can then be harvested from them to your hearts' content. Fussing about central collections, like fussing about publishers going Gold, or about finding funds to pay for Gold (or, for that matter, fussing about copyright reform, peer review reform, publishing reform or preservation) are all all an idle waste of time, energy and attention when institutional repositories are still gapingly empty and authors' fingers are still idle...
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