Sunday, March 8. 2009U. Edinburgh: Scotland's 6th Green OA Mandate, UK's 22nd, Planet's 67th
(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.)
Note that Edinburgh's is the optimal ID/OA Mandate. (Let us hope Edinburgh will also implement the automatized Request a Copy Button for Embargoed or Closed Access Deposits!) University of Edinburgh (UK* institutional-mandate)The University of Edinburgh has adopted an OA mandate. Here's an excerpt from the Open Access Publications Policy (January 27 - February 4, 2009), the proposal which the university's Electronic Senate approved on February 18, 2009: This... Publications Policy... requires researchers to deposit their research outputs in the Publications Repository, and where appropriate in the Open Access Edinburgh Research Archive in order to maximise the visibility of the University’s research.... This policy will be implemented [i.e. become mandatory] from January 2010, and in the meantime, researchers are encouraged to deposit outputs.... The Publications Repository (PR) is a closed repository for use only within the University of Edinburgh and is an internal University tool for research output management, while Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) is a public open access repository, making content available through global searching mechanisms such as Google. This policy requires each researcher to provide the peer reviewed final accepted version of a research output to deposit. The policy encourages the deposit of an electronic copy of nonpeer reviewed research, particularly where this may be used for national assessments. Researchers (or their proxies, eg research administrators) will deposit these research outputs in the PR, and at the same time provide information about whether the research output can be made publicly available in ERA. It will then be automatically passed into ERA, where this is allowable, with no further input from the researcher or their agent.... There are several strong reasons for pursuing the requirement for the deposits of such research outputs at the moment: 1. The impact of research is maximized because there is growing evidence that research deposited in Open Access repositories is more heavily used and cited 2. The deposit of outputs in ERA will support compliance with Research Council and other funding agency requirements that research outputs are available openly. 3. This will ensure that each research output has consistent metadata and ensures longevity which, for example, a researcher’s own website does not. 4. Items which are already in Edinburgh Research Archive are well used. The average number of times each item was downloaded during 2008 was 228, with the top countries downloading Edinburgh research being: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, China, Iran and India. 5. Researchers, research groups or Schools can use the PR to provide automatically generated output for their own websites, or for their curriculum vitae. 6. Future possible metrics based research assessment will require us to ensure that Edinburgh’s research be cited as much as possible, and this means that it must be as visible as possible.... 9. This will become a competitive tool for Edinburgh’s research by enhancing its reputation and branding as a good place to carry out research.... 11. The world of scholarly communication is changing—adopting this policy in Edinburgh will help us move forward within this changing environment. Other universities require their researchers to deposit research outputs. Harvard University, Stirling University—the first in the UK to do so, and very recently the University of Glasgow, have adopted institutional requirements for such deposit. 12. Such a deposit requirement is in line with other UoE policies on knowledge exchange, public accountability and serving the public good.... Since this initiative requires changed patterns of work from researchers, there will be many questions some of which are addressed in this section.... -- What happens if I don’t want to make the research output public? There will always be a variety of circumstances where it is not possible to deposit, for example where a researcher does not wish to go public with their research immediately, because they wish to publish further, or where commercial reasons exist or where there are copyright issues (considered below). In these cases the research output should be deposited but only the metadata will be exposed in the PR the item will not be passed into ERA until permission is given. -- What happens if the publisher does not agree? You should try to avoid assigning the copyright to the publisher or granting them an exclusive license. Rather, you should aim to grant a nonexclusive licence which leaves you with the ability to deposit the work in the University Repositories and possibly make it available in other digital forms. -- How should I communicate this with the publisher? There will be advice and guidance on how to achieve this and template forms to show how you can amend Publisher copyright forms. -- What about research outputs which are not journal articles? The PR and ERA can accept most research output types including books, book chapters, conference proceedings, performances, video, audio etc. In some cases – for example books not available electronically – the PR/ERA will hold only metadata, with the possibility of links to catalogues so that users can find locations.... -- What about my research data? Data supporting research outputs is also required by RCs to be made available? and this can be included where requested. IS is establishing a working group to consider research data issues.... -- I would like to publish in an author-pays Open Access journal. Does this mean that I also have to deposit? Yes, please deposit the research output in the normal manner.... Saturday, March 7. 2009Conyers Bill H.R. 801 Has Nothing to Do With Open-Access Journals
Unfortunately, far too much of what is stated in "coglanglab's" well-meaning blog posting about Conyers' Bill H.R. 801 is simply incorrect, starting with its title:
"Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals"No, the Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is not considering killing open-access journals; it is considering killing NIH's right to mandate that its fundees must deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that have been published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. The Bill has nothing to do with open-access journals. "A recent movement has led to the creation of open-access journals, which do not charge access fees. This movement has gained traction at universities (e.g., Harvard) and also at government agencies."The "open-access journal movement" has indeed been gaining some traction, but this has next to nothing to do with either the Conyers Bill or the Harvard and NIH mandates, which have nothing to do with open-acesss journal publishing: Harvard and NIH mandate that faculty and fundees deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that are published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. "NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication."No, the NIH did no such thing. It required the researchers they fund to deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals -- and to make those deposits openly accessible within a year of publication." Fortunately for the for-profit journal system, Congress is considering H.R. 801, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies."The issue has nothing to do with for-profit vs. nonprofit journal publication. The publishers lobbying against the NIH policy include not only for-profit publishers but nonprofit publishers such as the American Chemical Society and the American Physiological Society. "The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works. Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication."The "conceit" of Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is that the government should not be allowed to require researchers to make their research open access even when the research has been supported by public funds because that could interfere with the publishers' right to make a return on their investment. (The Conyers Bill will fail because the public investment in research is incomparably greater than the publisher's, because the government's contractual conditions on that funding predate any agreement the fundee makes with the publisher, and because repository deposit can be mandated even without requiring that access to the deposit be immediately made open access: The repositories' semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can tide over would-be users access needs during any embargo.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Rep. John Conyers Explains his Bill H.R. 801 in the Huffington Post
Reply to: Conyers, John (2009) A Reply to Larry Lessig. The Huffington Post. March 6, 2009.
Congressman John Conyers (D. Mich) is probably sincere when he says that his motivation for his Bill is not to reward contributions from the publishers' anti-OA lobby: He pretty much says up front that his motivation is jurisdictional. Here are the (familiar, and oft-rebutted) arguments Rep Conyers refloats, but I think he is raising them less out of conviction that they are right than as a counterweight against the jurisdictional outcome he contests because it is his committee that he feels ought to have decided the outcome of the NIH Public Access Bill. (By the way, the original Bill was anything but secret as it made its way through the House Appropriations Committee, then the House, then the Senate, as Peter Suber's many OA News postings archived along the way will attest.) Rep. John Conyers:(1) Not a Copyright Policy: There is a longstanding federal policy of not allowing federal employees to transfer copyright for research that they do as part of their paid job. It would be quite natural, and no "reversal" at all, to extend this to federal fundees as well. (2) A Self-Archiving Precondition: But in fact the NIH Public Access Policy does not even do that! It doesn't extend or reverse anything with respect to copyright. It simply requires NIH fundees to make their published articles OA as a (prior) condition of receiving NIH funding, by self-archiving their final drafts free for all online. (3) Evidence of Positive Consequences: The actual consequences of self-archiving to date have all been positive ones, for research progress: enhanced visibility, access, uptake, usage, applications and impact for research findings. (4) No Evidence of Negative Consequences: The "significant negative consequences" to which Mr. Conyers alludes (on the prompting of the publishing lobby) are the hypothetical possibility -- for which there so far exists no actual evidence whatsoever -- that OA self-archiving will cause subscriptions (largely institutional) to be cancelled catastrophically, making them unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer review. (5) Subscription Collapse Would Itself Free the Institutional Windfall Savings to Pay for Peer Review: But the answer to that hypothetical conjecture is that if and when institutional subscriptions were ever to collapse unsustainably, the costs of peer review would be paid for out of the same institutions' self-same subscription cancellation savings -- per outgoing published article instead of per incoming subscribed journal (and with a lot of money saved all round, for products and services that would no longer need to be provided or paid for if the market for subscription was no longer there, such as the print-on-paper edition and its distribution, as well as the online edition): The premise of subscription collapse, after all, is that users will prove so satisfied with the final peer-reviewed drafts self-archived worldwide by their authors under global self-archiving mandates, that there will no longer be any market for subscriptions to the publisher's print or PDF version; hence only the peer review itself would be left to pay for out of all the windfall cancellation savings. (6) Peer Review Alone Costs Far Less: Nor are those peer-review costs high, since not only do researchers give their papers to publishers for free to sell, but researchers also perform the peer reviewing for publishers for free! So all that's left in the online age is a competent specialist (editor) to choose the peer-reviewers and to adjudicate the referee reports and revisions to ensure they meet the journal's quality standards, plus software to track referee reports, send reminders, and manage the correspondence with the referees. Once it is found acceptable for publication, the author's final draft is simply certified as having been published by that journal. Rep. John Conyers:All true. But no argument at all against Open Access self-archiving mandates! As long as subscriptions remain sustainable to cover the peer review costs, along with all the other products and services that are currently bundled in with it (producing and distributing the print-on-paper edition as well as the online PDF edition), things continue exactly as they do now (and as they have done for over a decade in the few fields, such as high energy physics, where OA self-archiving has been going on spontaneously at close to 100% levels already with no detectable effect on subscriptions). And if ever subscriptions fail, peer review will be paid on the OA publication-fee model that some OA journals such as PLoS and BMC already use today -- but paid for out of the universal windfall cancellation savings, instead of out of extra funds, poached from somewhere else (often scarce research funds themselves!), as now. In other words, the ominous talk about a threat to peer review is patent nonsense. Rep. John Conyers:The reason this is patent nonsense is that it invokes catastrophic subscription cancellations as the threat, but completely ignores the fact that the ones who are saving money on the incoming journal subscription cancellations are the researchers' institutions -- the very same ones who would then have the money to pay for the (far lower) costs of peer review alone for their own researchers' outgoing articles' peer-review costs, after the hypothetical collapse of subscriptions. Regardless of whether journals are for-profit or nonprofit, it is clear that research is not an activity that is being funded and conducted in order to provide revenue for those journal publishers! The journals are produced to provide a service to research, researchers, and especially the public who funds the research and for whose benefit the research is being conducted -- a service currently being paid for in full by institutional subscriptions. If and when the only publisher service there is a market left for is peer-review alone, and not the other products and services it is co-bundled with today (and has been ever since Gutenberg), then the peer review will simply be paid for up front, and there will be plenty of saved money out of which to pay for it. To try instead to keep holding back OA, now that the online medium has made it not only possible, but optimal and inevitable -- and to hold OA back despite its demonstrated direct benefits to research, just in order to indemnify publishers' current subscription revenues and modus operandi against hypothetical risk is rather like trying to keep coal-fed steam engines or horse-drawn carriages in service in order to insure the revenues of stokers and the hay industry -- except it's more like trying to do that with hospital ambulances. (And that's no less true when it is "Learned Society Publishers' 'Good Works'" that are being invoked as the justification for holding up the ambulance than when it's just commercial publishers' purported greed.) Reference Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Harvard Medical School Proposes Harvard's 3rd Green OA Mandate(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.) Note that the Harvard proposal is to deposit institutionally and export centrally. Bravo!Harvard Medical School (US* proposed-institutional-mandate) http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/home.asp Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives [growth data] http://repository.countway.harvard.edu/xmlui/handle/cr1782/137 Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/2009/030609/publishing.shtml Thursday, March 5. 2009More OA Somnambulism: Conflating the Journal Affordability and Research Accessibility Problems, AgainThe universities just keep sleep-walking. It would be amusing if it weren't so appalling: (1) U of C-1 (University of California), conflating completely the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (as so many others have done), triumphantly bundles extra payment for optional Gold OA publishing charges for its own researchers' article output into its "Big Deal" subscription contract with Springer, thereby throwing still more money at publishers -- instead of simply mandating (as 66 universities and research funders have already done) that their own researchers make their own (published) journal articles Green OA by self-archiving them in U of C-1's own Institutional Repository (and, entirely independently, subscribing to whatever journals U of C-1 needs and can afford). And they think this is somehow a "Good Deal" and a big step forward for OA! (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate.) (2) U of C-2 (University of Calgary) does the same sort of thing (having first cancelled an earlier Badder Deal along much the same lines), triumphantly earmarking scarce funds -- which could have been far better spent (especially in today's financial crunch) on things that U of C-2 really needed and could not get otherwise -- to pay for Gold OA publishing charges for its own researchers's article output. This, again, instead of simply mandating that their own researchers make their own (published) journal articles Green OA by self-archiving them in U of C-2's own Institutional Repository. (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate.) (3) Harvard (one of the 66) did the far more sensible thing, and mandated Green OA self-archiving instead (but only if the author is willing and able to negotiate rights-retention with his publisher -- otherwise the author can opt out of self-archiving). Over 90% of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving in some form, 63% for the refereed final draft. If Harvard adds to its current mandate a clause that requires the no-opt-out deposit of all articles, without exception, immediately upon acceptance for publication, whether or not the author elects to opt out of the rights-retention clause, then Harvard has the optimal policy.(Access to embargoed deposits and deposits whose authors have opted out can simply be stored in Closed Access instead of Open Access during the embargo, or indefinitely; the Repository's semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can provide Almost-OA to Closed Access deposits almost immediately, with just one click from the requester plus one click from the author, until universal OA inevitably prevails.) (4) It is not clear whether Boston University's "University-Wide" policy (Harvard's mandate is so far only for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Law) is indeed a mandate at all: If not, it will fail, as all other nonbinding request/encourage policies have failed -- beginning with NIH's policy, which was upgraded to a requirement after two years of abject failure as a mere request. (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate. Ditto for Griffiths University and Nottingham...) To make all the OA dominoes fall, all it takes is universal deposit mandates; the rest is just (to mix metaphors) treading water and somnambulism. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, March 4. 2009Lawrence Lessig's Critique of the Conyers Bill (H.R. 201) to Overturn the NIH OA Mandate
Lawrence Lessig (LL) has just written "John Conyers and Open Access," a trenchant and useful critique of the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn the NIH OA mandate. But there is one crucial error in LL's critique: It conflates (1) (Gold) OA publishing (in OA journals) with (2) (Green) OA self-archiving (of articles published in conventional non-OA journals).
What the NIH is mandating is Green OA, not Gold OA. So what the Conyers Bill is trying to overturn is Green OA self-archiving mandates (of which there are 65 others, besides NIH's), not Gold OA publishing mandates (of which there are none). It is hence somewhat misleading to write in this context, as LL does, that "Open access journals... have adopted a different publishing model... [and] NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge."What both NIH and FRPAA are and were exploring is mandating Green OA as the better way to spread knowledge. Once Green OA becomes universal, we already have OA. Whether or not -- and if so when -- this will in turn lead to a transition to the Gold OA publishing model is another question, and a hypothetical one. And it is certainly not what NIH is mandating and the Conyers Bill is attempting to unmandate. It is true, of course, as LL states, that "[p]roprietary publishers, however, didn't like it" [i.e., the NIH OA Mandate], but not because Gold OA was being mandated: Publishers would be perfectly happy if NIH were foolish enough to take some of the scarce funds it uses to support research itself and redirect them instead to paying publishers for Gold OA publishing fees (especially at today's going rates). (In fact, I believe publishers even did some lobbying in that direction, trying to persuade NIH to mandate Gold OA instead of Green OA). But what it was that publishers were actually unhappy with was mandatory Green OA self-archiving. The majority of journals have already formally endorsed elective Green OA self-archiving by their authors, because of the growing pressure from the worldwide research community for OA. But only about 10-15% of authors actually bother to take them up on it, by self-archiving of their own accord, whereas Green OA mandates by funders and institutions will eventually raise that percentage to 100%. And that's the real reason publishers are lobbying against Green OA mandates: They feel it might one day make the subscription/license model unsustainable, and may hence eventually induce downsizing and transition to the Gold OA model for the recovery of the (much reduced) costs of publication. And it might. But that is all just hypothetical. Treating the actual NIH mandate (and the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it) as if it were a mandate to convert to Gold OA publishing (rather than just a mandate to self-archive papers published in non-OA journals, so as to make them [Green] OA) not only mischaracterizes what it is that NIH is actually mandating, but it upgrades a mere hypothetical conjecture into what then looks as if it were an actual, current, direct effect! Talking about Green OA as if it were tantamount to making subscription/license publishing unsustainable is actually playing into the hands of the anti-OA lobby. This doomsday scenario has often been used as a scare-tactic by anti-OA publishers themselves (sometimes with temporary success) to blur the difference between Green and Gold OA as well as the difference between hypothesis and reality. But in most cases this only succeeds as a temporary delaying tactic. Eventually the illogic is reversed, and the optimal and inevitable prevails. I think it is both a factual and a strategic mistake for the pro-OA lobby to (inadvertently) reinforce this doomsday tactic on the part of the anti-OA lobby by conflating Green and Gold OA along much the same lines, especially with respect to what the NIH mandate is actually mandating (and even if one's heart is really with Gold OA!). Yes, universal Green OA might eventually lead to a transition to Gold OA. Or it might not. But that is not what the NIH mandate is about, or for. And it certainly is not what the NIH is mandating. The NIH is mandating that its fundees provide (Green) OA, now, not in some hypothetical golden future, so that all research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the R&D industry, teachers, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit most research is being funded and conducted -- rather than, as now, just those who can afford subscription/license access to the publisher's proprietary version -- may access, read, use, apply and build upon the research that research funders fund, research institutions conduct, and tax-payers' money pays for. Research is not funded or conducted to provide revenues to the publishing industry. Publishers are service-providers for the research community and they are currently being paid in full through subscriptions. Perhaps one day they will instead be paid through publication fees, perhaps not. That is not what is at issue with the NIH mandate: OA is. The publishing tail is trying to wag the research dog with the Conyers Bill, by treating research as if it were no different from Disney cartoons. The tax-paying public needs to reassert mastership. [See also James Boyle's brilliant spoof on the Conyers Bill in the Financial Times: "Misunderestimating open science."] Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Switzerland's 4th Green OA Mandate, Planet's 66th: U. St. GallenRegistry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)OA Self-Archiving Policy: University of St. Gallen Wednesday, February 25. 2009Perils of Press-Release Journalism: NSF, U. Chicago, and Chronicle of Higher EducationIn response to my critique of his Chronicle of Higher Education posting on Evans and Reimer's (2009) Science article (which I likewise critiqued, though much more mildly), I got an email from Paul Basken asking me to explain what, if anything, he had got wrong, since his posting was based entirely on a press release from NSF (which turns out to be a relay of a press release from the University of Chicago, E & R's home institution). Sure enough, the silly spin originated from the NSF/Chicago Press release (though the buck stops with E & R's own vague and somewhat tendentious description and interpretation of some of their findings). Here is the NSF/Chicago Press Release, enhanced with my comments, for your delectation and verdict: NSF/U.CHICAGO:(1) If you offer something valuable for free, people will choose the free option unless they've already paid for the paid option (especially if they needed -- and could afford -- it earlier). (2) Free access after an embargo of a year or more is not the same "something" as immediate free access. Its "value" for a potential user is lower. (That's one of the reasons institutions keep paying for subscription/license access to journals.) (3) Hence it is not in the least surprising that immediate (paid) print-on-paper access + online access (IP + IO) generates more citations than immediate (paid) print-on-paper access (IP) alone. (4) Nor is it surprising that immediate (paid) print-on-paper access + online access + delayed free online access (IP +IO + DF) generates more citations than just immediate (paid) print-on-paper + online access (IP + IO) alone -- even if the free access is provided a year or longer after the paid access. (5) Why on earth would anyone conclude that the fact that the increase in citations from IP to IP + IO is 12% and the increase in citations from IP + IO to IP + IO + DF is a further 8% implies anything whatsoever about people's preference for paid access over free access? Especially when the free access is not even immediate (IF) but delayed (DF) and the 8% is an underestimate based on averaging in ancient articles: see E & R's supplemental Figure S1(c), right [with thanks to Mike Eisen for spotting this one!]. NSF/U.CHICAGO:What on earth is an "open source outlet"? ("Open source" is a software matter.) Let's assume what's meant is "open access"; but then is this referring to (i) publishing in an open access journal, to (ii) publishing in a subscription journal but also self-archiving the published article to make it open access, or to (iii) self-archiving an unpublished paper? What (many) previous studies had measured (not "postulated") was that authors (ii) publishing in a subscription journal (IP + IO) and also self-archiving their published article to make it Open Access (IP + IO + OA) could more than double their citations, compared to IP + IO alone. NSF/U.CHICAGO:No, Evans & Reimer (E & R) did nothing of the sort; and no "theory" was tested (nor was there any theory). E & R only analyzed articles from subscription access journals before and after the journals made them accessible online (to paid subscribers only) (i.e., IP vs IP + IO) as well as before and after the journals made the online version accessible free for all (after a paid-access-only embargo of up to a year or more: i.e., IP +IO vs IP + IO + DF). E & R's methodology was based on comparing citation counts for articles within the same journals before and after being made free online (by the journal) following delays of various lengths. NSF/U.CHICAGO:In other words, the citation count increase from just (paid) IP to (paid) IP + IO was 12% and the citation count increase from just (paid) IP + IO to (paid) IP + IO + DF was a further 8%. Not in the least surprising: Making paid-access articles accessible online increases their citations, and making them free online (even if only after a delay of a year or longer) increases their citations still more. What is surprising is the rather absurd spin that this press release appears to be trying to put on this decidedly unsurprising finding. NSF/U.CHICAGO:We already knew that OA increased citations, as the many prior published studies have shown. Most of those studies, however, were based on immediate OA (i.e., IF), not embargoed OA. What E & R do show, interestingly, is that even delaying OA for a year or more still increases citations, though (unsurprisingly) not as much as immediate OA (IF) does. NSF/U.CHICAGO:A large portion of the citation increase from (delayed) OA turns out to come from Developing Countries (refuting Frandsen's recent report to the contrary). This is a new and useful finding (though hardly a surprising one, if one does the arithmetic). (A similar analysis, within the US, comparing citations from America's own "Have-Not" Universities (with the smaller journal subscription budgets) with its Harvards might well reveal the same effect closer to home, though probably at a smaller scale.) NSF/U.CHICAGO:And it will be interesting to test for the same effect comparing the Harvards and the Have-Nots in the US -- but a more realistic estimate might come from looking at immediate OA (IF) rather than just embargoed OA (DF). NSF/U.CHICAGO:It would be interesting to hear the authors of this NSF/Chicago press release -- or E & R, for that matter -- explain how this paradoxical "preference" for paid access over free access was tested during the access embargo period... Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, February 24. 2009The Evans & Reimer OA Impact Study: A Welter of Misunderstandings
Basken, Paul (2009) Fee-Based Journals Get Better Results, Study in Fee-Based Journal Reports. Chronicle of Higher Education February 23, 2009(Re: Paul Basken) No, the Evans & Reimer (E & R) study in Science does not show that "researchers may find a wider audience if they make their findings available through a fee-based Web site rather than make their work freely available on the Internet."This is complete nonsense, since the "fee-based Web site" is immediately and fully accessible -- to all those who can and do pay for access in any case. (It is simply the online version of the journal; for immediate permanent access to it, an individual or institution pays a subscription or license fee.) The free version is extra: a supplement to that fee-based online version, not an alternative to it: it is provided for those would-be users who cannot afford the access-fee. In E & R's study, the free access is provided -- after an access-embargo of up to a year or more -- by the journal itself. In studies by others, the free access is provided by the author, depositing the final refereed draft of the article on his own website, free for all (usually immediately, with no prior embargo). E & R did not examine the latter form of free online access at all. (Paul Basken has confused (1) the size of the benefits of fee-based online access over fee-based print-access alone with (2) the size of the benefits of free online access over fee-based online-access alone. The fault is partly E & R's for describing their findings in such an equivocal way.) (Re: Phil Davis) No, E & R do not show that "the effect of OA on citations may be much smaller than originally reported."E & R show that the effect of free access on citations after an access-embargo (fee-based access only) of up to a year or longer is much smaller than the effect of the more immediate OA that has been widely reported. (Re: Phil Davis) No, E & R do not show that "the vast majority of freely-accessible scientific articles are not published in OA journals, but are made freely available by non-profit scientific societies using a subscription model."E & R did not even look at the vast majority of current freely-accessible articles (per year), which are the ones self-archived by their authors. E & R looked only at journals that make their entire contents free after an access-embargo of up to a year or more. (Cumulative back-files will of course outnumber any current year, but what current research needs, especially in fast-moving fields, is immediate access to current, ongoing research, not just legacy research.) See: "Open Access Benefits for the Developed and Developing World: The Harvards and the Have-Nots" Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, February 21. 2009Depot's Time is Coming: Please Help Keep It Ready To Play Its Role
16 February 2009Consultation on Role of the Depot The role of the Depot must change before the end of 2009. We have come to the view that we should not decide upon the future of the Depot without first consulting wider among those who are working to promote and enable sharing of research through Open Access (OA) self-archiving, both in the UK and internationally. For the first part of that consultation process we approached a small number of individuals and we are grateful for their comments; those have helped frame the options we are considering. We now seek your input in a short period of consultation over the next four weeks. The initial role of the Depot has been to provide the UK academic community with an online deposit facility for eprints during the interim period while Institutional Repositories (IRs) were being set up. Among other policy issues this was to put in place material support for the prospect of mandates for Open Access self-archiving. The initial purpose for the Depot has been judged to have been completed, and the project funding from JISC for the Depot as part of JISC RepositoryNet is coming to an end. The Depot was never planned to be a central repository that would rival institutional repositories; rather it has complemented them by assisting both researchers-as-authors by providing two support functions. The first is that of re-direction, linking the potential depositor of an eprint with the appropriate UK institutional repository. This uses identity recognition and the OpenDOAR registry of IRs. The second is that of ingest, enabling deposit of that eprint, and thus exposure under terms of Open Access for those UK academic authors not having an appropriate IR. Both functions are computer-aided and without mediation by library or other support staff. We have also carried out some project work (EM-Loader project) to investigate how extraction of metadata from extant sources could improve the deposit process, both assisting the depositor but also helping to ensure good quality metadata. Within EDINA and SHERPA, which developed and supports the Depot, we have been carrying out an appraisal of options for an exit strategy beyond its project funding. Could the Depot add value by continuing as support activity for the open access agenda, or else when and how to close the Depot? Please give us your views. Preliminary discussion with advocates of OA self-archiving have indicated that there is value in continuing the Depot in order to assist OA sharing of research output internationally, especially where IR capacity is not yet comprehensive. There has also been discussion about how to develop the re-direction capabilities more generally, including support of OA deposit mandates by funding bodies - for example, by helping their funded researchers locate the appropriate IR. The existing Depot service will be fully supported until at least 30 September 2009. Next month (March) or shortly thereafter we will decide what to do based upon feedback from yourselves, and any other developments, using the following six months to enact an agreed plan. This might include re-branding or change of mission and message, as well as arranging the transfer of the limited content that we have in the Depot to some other repository or even handing over the running of the Depot to another body. Your comments are welcome, and should be sent to edina@ed.ac.uk, marked 'Role of the Depot'. EDINA Services
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The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society. The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)
You can sign on to the Forum here.
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