Saturday, October 20. 2007EurOpenScholar Launched by European University Rectors
A Conference of Rectors of European Universities convened in Liège on 18 October 2007 by the Rector of the University of Liège, Bernard Rentier, has launched EurOpenScholar:
"a showcase and a tool for the promotion of Open Access (OA) in Europe. It will be a consortium of European universities resolved to move forward on OA and to try to convince the largest possible number of researchers, their institutions and their European Funding Agencies to engage now in what will undoubtedly be the mode of communication of tomorrow. The transitional period will be the most challenging. Our goal is to facilitate and thereby accelerate as much as possible the transition to the OA era.Translated from text of Bernard Rentier, Rector, Université deLiège. Video to Promote Open Access Mandates and Metrics
I unfortunately could not attend the European University Rectors' Conference on Open Access, convened by the Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège on 18 October 2007, but I did send this 23-minute video on OA Mandates and Metrics, part of which, so I understand from Alma Swan, was shown at the Conference:
Please feel free to use the video to promote OA mandates and metrics at your institution: download video Friday, October 19. 2007Peter Suber Interviewed by Richard Poynder
Richard Poynder, the de facto chronicler of the Open Access Movement (and beyond), has at long last done one of his characteristically probing and always insightful interviews with "the de facto leader of the open access (OA) movement," Peter Suber. Read, learn, and admire.
Has anybody noticed Thursday, October 18. 2007Time to Update the BBB Definition of Open AccessOn Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Frederick Friend wrote: "I also agree with [Peter Suber, Peter Murray-Rust and Robert Kiley] that the UKPMC re-use agreement is vital for future academic developments. With hindsight we were too slow to pick up on the significance of the changes to copyright transfer agreements in the 1990s by which authors now assign all electronic rights to publishers. Blanket assigning of electronic rights has created and is still creating barriers in the electronic re-use of subscription content. We cannot afford to make the same mistake of neglect on the arrangements for academic re-use of OA content, whether green or gold."I am afraid that this is more a matter of misunderstanding than of disagreement: (1) The disagreement (with PS, PM-R and RK) was not about whether or not it is a good idea for the author to retain certain electronic rights. (It is a good idea for the author to do so, wherever possible. However, rights-retention is not a necessary prerequisite for Green OA self-archiving, nor for Green OA self-archiving mandates. Hence it would be a big mistake to imply otherwise: i.e., to imply that authors cannot self-archive, and/or their institutions/funders cannot mandate that they self-archive, until/unless the author successfully negotiates rights-retention. That would not only be incorrect, but it would be a gratuitous deterrent to self-archiving and to self-archiving mandates, hence to OA.)I am sorry to sound like a pedant, but these details are devilishly important, and need to be understood quite explicitly: Concerning (1) (i.e., rights retention as a prerequisite to Green OA self-archiving), what I said was that for the 62% of articles published in Green journals -- i.e., those that have explicitly endorsed the immediate OA self-archiving of the postprint (whether final draft or PDF) -- no further rights are needed to self-archive them, hence no further rights need to be negotiated as a precondition for self-archiving. The self-archived work is "protected" by standard copyright, and it is also OA, with all the attendant usage capabilities (of which I listed nine, covering all uses that research and researchers require, which are also all the self-same uses for which OA itself was proposed). I also said that for the 38% of articles published in non-Green journals -- i.e., those journals that have not yet explicitly endorsed the immediate OA self-archiving, by the author, of the postprint (whether final draft or PDF) -- the strategy that I recommend is (a) mandated Immediate Deposit, Optional Closed Access and reliance on the semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button to cover usage needs during the embargo. I agreed, however, that it is possible to disagree on this strategic point, and to prefer instead (b) to try to negotiate rights retention with the non-Green publisher or else to (c) publish instead with a Gold OA publisher that provides the requisite rights. There is of course nothing at all wrong with strategy (b) and/or (c) as a matter of individual choice in each case. But strategy (a) is intended as the default strategy for facilitating exception-free self-archiving, and especially for facilitating the adoption of legal-objection-immune, exception-free self-archiving mandates. So far, the only "right" at issue is the right to self-archive -- the right to provide immediate Green OA. It is that Green OA that I was arguing was sufficient to provide full OA (and the 62% of journals that are Green have already endorsed it.) But now we come to (2): certain "re-use" rights and capabilities that purportedly go beyond those that already come with the territory, with Green OA self-archiving. Now we are no longer speaking of the right to self-archive, obviously, but of the right to create certain kinds of "derivative works" that one may re-publish (and perhaps even re-sell). What I said there was that the right to re-publish, re-sell, and create derivative works for re-publication or re-sale is not part of OA. They are something extra (approaching certain kinds of Creative Commons Licenses). Most important, those extra rights are not necessary for research and researchers, they go far beyond OA, and they would handicap OA's already too-slow progress towards universality if added as a gratuitous extra precondition on counting as "full-blooded OA." The very idea that these extra rights are needed comes not from the intuitions of the library community about how to include subscription content in course-packs -- those needs are trivially fulfilled by inserting the URLs of Green OA postprints in the course-packs, instead of inserting the documents themselves! -- but from intuitions about data-mining from (some sectors) of the biological and chemical community (inspired largely by the data-sharing of the human genome project as well as similar chemical-structure data-sharing in chemistry). There are very valid concerns about research data sharing: note that such data are typically not contained in published articles, but are supplements to them that until the online era had no way of being published at all, because the data-sets were too big. So the concern is about licensing these data to make them openly accessible and to prevent their ever becoming subject to the same access-barriers as subscription content. This is a very important and valid goal but, strictly speaking, it is not an OA matter, because these research data are not part of the published content of journal articles! So, yes, providing online access to these data does definitely require explicit rights licensing, but no one is stopping their authors (the holders of the data) from adopting those licenses! (The appropriate CC licenses exist.) And there's certainly no reason to pay a Gold OA publisher for those extra rights or rights agreements for data, which are hitherto unpublished content that can now be licensed and self-archived directly. This brings us to the second case, the case that I suspect those who see an extra rights problem here have most in mind: It concerns the content of published journal articles, both inasmuch as the articles may indeed contain some primary data, as opposed to merely summaries, descriptions and analyses, and inasmuch as the article texts themselves can be seen as constituting potential data. This is where data-mining rights and derivative-works rights come in: "Naked" Green OA -- simply making these published full-texts accessible online, free for all -- is not enough (think these theorists) to guarantee that robots can data-mine their contents and that the results can be made accessible (published, or re-published) as "derivative works," unless those extra "rights" (to data-mine and create derivative works) are explicitly licensed. My reply is very simple: robotic harvesting and data-mining come with the free online territory as surely as individual use does. Remember that we are talking about authors' self-archived postprints here, not the publishers' proprietary PDFs, whether Gray or Gold. If the journal is Green, it endorses the author's right to deposit the postprint in his OA IR. The rest (individual accessibility, Google, Scirus, OAIster, robotic harvestability, and data-mining) all come with that Green OA territory. So the contention is not about the Green OA self-archiving of the postprints published in the 62% of journals that are Green. Is the contention then about the 38% of articles published in non-Green journals? I agree at once that if the author feels he cannot make those articles Green OA immediately, and instead deposits them as Closed Access, then, with the help of the IR's "Email Eprint Request" Button, only re-use capabilities (1)-(7) [(1) accessing, (2) reading, (3) downloading, (4) storing (5) printing, (6) individual data-mining, and (7) re-using content (but not text) in further publications] are possible. This is definitely not OA; it is merely almost-OA. Missing is full-text (8*) robotic harvesting and (9*) robotic data-mining. If, to try to avoid this outcome, an author who fully intends to deposit his postprint immediately upon acceptance regardless of the outcome, first elects to try to negotiate the retention of more rights with his publisher -- or even elects to publish with a paid Gold publisher rather than deposit as Closed Access, with almost-OA -- that's just fine!That author is intent on self-archiving either way. The problem with holding out for and insisting upon more rights is (1) the author who would not deposit except if the publisher was Green (or Gold), and -- even more important -- (2) the institutions that would not mandate depositing except if all publishers were already Green (or Gold). It is those authors and those institutions that are the main retardants on universal OA today. If most universities already mandated immediate-deposit either way (OA or CA), I would do nothing but applaud the efforts to negotiate the retention of more rights -- even unnecessary ones! -- But it would still remain true that no rights retention at all was necessary in order to deposit all postprints (and attain almost-OA), and that only a publisher endorsement of Green OA self-archiving was needed to attain full OA (1-9*). And it would remain true that re-publication, re-sale and "derivative-works" rights had nothing to do with either OA or the real needs of research and researchers. [I am not, by the way, dear readers, "adulterating" OA; I am accelerating it, whereas those who are needlessly raising the barriers are (unintentionally) retarding it. Nor do, did or will I ever -- even should the string of B's get still longer! -- accept those parts of the increasingly gilded BBB "definition" of OA that are and ever have been unnecessary or incoherent, hence counterproductive for OA itself -- although I shame-facedly confess to having failed to pick up on that incoherence immediately in B1. That's what comes of being slow-witted. Blackballed from B2, I (with many others) was merely window-dressing at B3, which was really just, by now, ritually reiterating B2. If there is any "permission" barrier at all, it is a psychological one, and it pertains only to the "permission" to provide Green OA, no more -- something I always carefully call "endorse" (or sometimes "bless") rather than "permit" or "allow," because I think that's all just a matter of Wizard of Ozery too, and will be seen to have been such in hindsight, once this maddenly molluscan trek to the optimal and inevitable is at long last behind us...] One last point -- made in full respect and admiration for Peter Suber. Peter understands every word I am saying and always has. His position, of all the people on this planet, is closest to my own. But Peter in fact has grander goals than I do. His "FOS" (Free Online Scholarship) movement predated OA, and had a much bigger target: It included no less than all of scholarship, online: not just journal articles, but books, multimedia, teaching materials, everything. And the freedom was a greater freedom than freedom to access and use the scholarship. I greatly value, and fully support Peter's wider goals. But I don't think they are just OA. They are FOS. (I shall be remembered only as an impatient, testy, parochial OA archivangelist, whereas Peter will be rightly recognised as the patient, temperate, ecumenical archangel of FOS.) But OA does have the virtue of being the easier, nearer, surer subgoal. I think that every time a little divergence arises between Peter and me, it is always a variant of this: He still has his heart and mind set on FOS, and it is good that he does. Someone eventually has to fight that fight too. But OA is narrower than that, and it is also nearer; indeed it is within reach. Hence it is ever so important that we should not over-reach, trying to attain something that is further, and more complicated than OA, when we don't yet even have OA! For we thereby risk needlessly complicating and further delaying the already absurdly overdue attainment of OA. I think that is what is behind our strategic difference on (1) whether OA requires the elimination of all "permission" barriers or (2) whether, after all, the elimination of all "price" barriers -- via Green OA self-archiving (which is and always has been my model, and my ever-faithful "intuition pump") -- does give us all the capabilities worth having, and worth holding out for. Re-publication rights and the right to create derivative works may be essential for FOS, and for the Creative Commons in general. But they are not essential for OA in particular; and it would be an unnecessary, self-imposed handicap to insist that they should be. That would merely raise barriers for OA where there are and need be none. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, October 16. 2007How Green Open Access Supports Text- and Data-MiningIn "Why Green Open Access does not support text- and data-mining", Peter Murray-Rust wrote: PM-R: "...the first thing to do is to gather a corpus of documents... any other scientist should be able to have access to it. It therefore has to be freely distributable..."Agreed. So far this is just bog-standard OA. If the original documents are self-archived as Green OA postprints in their authors' Institutional Repositories (IRs), your SciBorg robot can harvest them and data-mine them, and make the results freely accessible (but linking back to the postprint in the author's IR whenever the full-text needs to be downloaded). PM-R: "[At SciBorg] we are interested in machines understanding science..."Fine. Let your SciBorg machines harvest the Green OA full-texts and "repurpose" them as they see fit. PM-R: "almost all articles are copyrighted and non-distributable. Publisher Copyright is a major barrier... you can’t just go out and compile a wordlist or whatever as you may infringe copyright or invisible publisher contracts (we found that out the hard way)..."You can't do that if you are harvesting the publisher's proprietary text, but you can certainly do that if you are harvesting the author's Green OA postprints. PM-R: "PDFs are so awful... we have to repurpose them by converting to HTML, XML and so on..."Fine. PM-R: "Now the corpus is annotated. Expert humans go through line by line...It is this annotated corpus which is of most use to the scientific community..."Fine. PM-R: "So suppose I find 50 articles in 50 different repositories, all of which claim to be Green Open Access. I now download them, aggregate them and [SciBorg] repurpose[s] them. What is the likelihood that some publisher will complain? I would guess very high..."Complain about what, and to whom? A Green publisher has endorsed the author's posting of his own Green OA postprint in his own IR, free for all. The postprint is the author's own refereed, revised final draft. Now follow me: Having endorsed the posting of that draft, does anyone imagine that the publisher would have any grounds for objection if the author revised the draft further, making additional corrections and enhancements? Of course not. It's exactly the same thing: the author's Green OA postprint. So what if the author decides to mark it up as XML and add comments? Any grounds for objections? Again, no. Corrections, updates and enhancements of the author's postprint are in complete conformity with posting his postprint. Suppose the author did not do those corrections with his own hands, but had a colleague, graduate student, a secretary, or a hired hand do them for him, and then posted the corrected postprint? Still perfectly fine. Now suppose the author had your SciBorg "repurpose" his postprint: Any difference? None -- except a trivial condition, easily fulfilled, which is that the locus of the enhanced postprint, the URL from which users can download it, should again be the author's IR, not a 3rd-party website (which the publisher could then legitimately regard as a rival publisher -- especially if it was selling access to the "repurposed" text). So the solution is quite obvious and quite trivial: It is fine for the SciBorg harvester to be the locus of the data-mining and enhancement of each Green OA postprint. It can also be the means by which users search and navigate the corpus. But SciBorg must not be the locus from which the user accesses the full-text: The "repurposed" full-text must be parked in the author's own IR, and retrieved from there whenever a user wants to read and download it (rather than just to search and surf the entire corpus via SciBorg). Not only does this all sound silly: it really is silly. In the online age, it makes no functional difference at all where a document is actually physically located, especially if the document is OA! But we are still at the confused interface between the paper age and the OA era. So we have to be prepared to go through a few silly rituals, to forestall any needless fits of apoplexy, which would otherwise mean further dysfunctional delay (for OA). So the ritual is this: It would be highly inimical to the progress of Green OA mandates to insist that the publisher's endorsement to self-archive the postprint in the author's IR is "not enough" -- that the author must also successfully negotiate with the publisher the retention of the right to assign to 3rd-party harvesters like SciBorg the right to publish a "derivative work" derived from the author's postprint. That would definitely be the tail wagging the dog, insofar as OA is concerned, and it would put authors off providing Green OA (and hence put their institutions off mandating it) for a long time to come. Instead, when SciBorg harvests a document from a Green OA IR, SciBorg must make an arrangement with the author that the resultant "repurposed" draft will be deposited by the author in the author's own IR as an update of the postprint. Then, whenever a user of SciBorg wishes to retrieve the "repurposed" draft, the downloading site must always be the author's IR: no direct retrieval from the SciBorg site. This ritual is ridiculous, and of course it is functionally unnecessary, but it is pseudo-juridically necessary, during this imbecilic interregnum, to keep all parties (publishers, lawyers, IP specialists, institutions, authors) calm and happy -- or at least mutely resigned -- about the transition to the optimal and inevitable that is currently taking place. Once it's over, and we have 100% Green OA, all this papyrophrenic horseplay can be well-deservedly dropped for the nonsense it is. Please, Peter, be prepared to adapt SciBorg to the exigencies of this all-important (and all too slow-footed) transitional phase, rather than trying to force-fit the status quo to SciBorg, at the cost of still more delays to OA. PM-R: "Only a rights statement actually on each document would allow us to create a corpus for NLP without fear of being asked to take it down..."No. Green OA authors with standard copyright agreements are not in a position to license republication rights to SciBorg or any other 3rd party. Let us be happy that they have provided Green OA at all, and let SciBorg be the one to adapt to it for now, rather than vice versa. Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Green OA Moots Permission Barriers By Bypassing Price BarriersIn Open Access News, Peter Suber wrote (by way of reply to my posting): PS: "Comments. I hope no one minds if I reprint my comments from June 12 2007 in which I responded in detail to a very similar post by Stevan:So far this is exactly correct -- except I would definitely say that Green OA self-archiving removes not just "most" but all the "permission barriers" pertinent to research use, which is what OA is all about. Remember that there is also a "permission barrier" to re-publishing in print, but OA is not and never was intended to address that! PS: "The chief problem with this view is the law. If a work is online without a special license or permission statement, then either it stands or appears to stand under an all-rights-reserved copyright. The only assured rights for users are those collected under fair use or fair dealing. These rights are far fewer and less adequate than OA contemplates, and in any case the boundaries of fair use and fair dealing are vague and contestable."If "naked" (unlicensed) content on the web is really a barrier to use, how come we are not hearing about the need to license all web content (e.g. advertisements, blogs) because people are otherwise afraid to download, print, store and otherwise "re-use" them? (Answer: Because people are doing all those things, without hesitation.) I think the truth is the exact opposite! That the default option, if something is freely accessible on the web, is that it's fine to do all those other things that come with it, and then some. (You can't even view web content without downloading and "storing" at least for long enough to read, yet that downloading and storing are not explicitly licensed!) Far from perceiving themselves as being stuck behind "permission barriers" when they surf the web except when explicitly license to do otherwise, web users usually (wrongly) assume that they have even more rights than what comes with the territory: They will, for example, not only read, download, store, and print copyrighted web images, but also re-post them online, identically or in "derivative" form, and sometimes even re-publish them in print publications, identically or in "derivative" form. You actually have to have shrill "you may not" notices to try to discourage them from going overboard like that! Now I have no particular interest in these excesses one way or the other (either to cultivate them or to curb them). But I think that they clearly illustrate that the "problem", if any, is precisely the reverse of what is being imagined by those who think that self-archived OA content needs a formal permissive license over and above just being there, free for all on the web, otherwise it risks not being used beyond on-screen reading! All seven individual uses I described in my earlier posting (as well as the two robotic ones) can be and are being fully exercised for all Green OA content today -- and there just aren't any further uses to which OA can justifiably lay claim (as OA). PS: "This legal problem leads to a practical problem: conscientious users will feel obliged to err on the side of asking permission and sometimes even paying permission fees (hurdles that OA is designed to remove) or to err on the side of non-use (further damaging research and scholarship). Either that, or conscientious users will feel pressure to become less conscientious. This may be happening, but it cannot be a strategy for a movement which claims that its central practices are lawful."Paying permission fees for Green OA content? Paying whom? I honestly cannot imagine who or what you have in mind here, Peter! I am conscientious about not re-using web-accessible images in re-postings or publications unless I know they are public domain or I have permission. But I (and every other researcher on the planet) don't give a second thought as to whether I may read, download, store, print-off, and re-use the contents -- but not re-post or re-publish the verbatim text (which is like the image) -- of journal articles we can access freely on the web. I am not feigning puzzlement: I am truly baffled about why, when the reality is the exact opposite, OA advocates, of all people, would worry that web users might be too coy (or "conscientious") to do with OA texts exactly the same things that we all do with all other free web content -- and too coy or "conscientious" to do so specifically in the case OA texts, of all things, because they lack a formal license to do it (exactly as virtually all other web content lacks such a license!). [Could it be, Peter, that when you think of "unlicensed OA content" you are thinking of hybrid Gray/Gold publishers, who take an author's money, but don't adopt the full Creative Commons License that that money has surely paid for? I would probably agree with you on such cases, but my paradigmatic case is not paid Gray/Gold OA but Green OA, where it does not matter what copyright transfer agreement an author has signed as long the journal endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving, as 62% already do. All the rest comes with the Green OA territory.] I think part of the problem is that (some) OA advocates may indeed be over-reaching in what they are taking to be licensed by "OA". I make absolutely no bones about the fact that the right to re-publish the verbatim text, online or on-paper, is not part of OA and never was, just as plagiarism or re-publishing a corrupted "derivative" version of the text is not and never was a part of OA, online or on-paper. OA is a new capability opened up by a new medium. I quote your own stirring words: The unprecedented public good is free online access to what used to require paid on-paper access. This does not license re-publication or "derivative works" (cut-pasted from the verbatim text), online or on paper, but the remarkable property of the new technology is that it does not need to! For one of the other things that "comes with the [Green OA] territory" is that anyone, anywhere, can access (and print off) the online text, any time. Re-publication is not licensed, it is mooted. There is simply no need for it. (The worriers about licensing content for "course-packs" are still thinking the old way: OA content does not need a license to be put in a course-pack: The text does not need to be put in a course-pack! Only its URL does.)"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds." So, having disposed of the red herring of a special license that is supposedly needed to allow downloading, storing, and printing-off of freely available web content, we now see that there is no need to license re-publishing either, either online or on paper. What is left? Harvesting, data-mining and derivative works. Harvesting, as noted, likewise comes with the territory. If google did not have to be licensed to harvest the rest of the web, why on earth would we imagine that it needed to be licensed to harvest OA content, of all things? Ditto for the data-mining by harvesting robots. (Individual data-mining on your downloaded copy is not even at issue.) Now what about "derivative works"? Let's be specific: re-publication of verbatim OA texts, online or on paper? That is not allowed without permission -- but nor is it needed, because a collection of URLs does the trick just as well. Altered or corrupted versions of the OA texts? Apart from attributed fair-use excerpts, that is not allowed without permission either. But what would ever have made anyone think that the invention of a new technology that would allow unlimited access to authors' give-away texts would mean that authors would all want to license that those texts, besides being accessible, should be alterable or corruptible, ad lib? Surely we are happier with requiring specific case-by-case permission for such further uses, rather than a blanket license under the guise of "OA"? What uses are left that research or researchers could possibly want, as a general rule: Harvestability into a commercial, pay-to-use database? It seems to me that that is no longer an OA matter. Indeed, authors might prefer to license their content to free database providers in preference to commercial ones. But either way, that is not part of OA, which was about "completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds." Nothing there about commercial interests. PS: "This doesn't mean that articles in OA repositories without special licenses or permission statements may not be read or used. It means that users have access free of charge (a significant breakthrough) but are limited to fair use.""Fair use" was a paper-based notion. In the case of the online medium, "fair use" quite naturally, indeed unavoidably, expands to include everything else that comes with the online territory. In the case of freely accessible web documents, that "fair use" simply includes downloadability, storeability, printability, and data-minability, for individuals; and, for harvesters: robotic harvestability, data-minability, and certain derivative services (though I would not venture to specify which, though they certainly include free boolean searchability). With the Green OA territory comes also the accessibility online to everyone everywhere, mooting forever all need for collections, course-packs, re-publications, or other such "derivative works," online or on paper. For individual "derivative works," some form of "fair use" criterion still has to apply to determine how much verbatim content is permissible without the original author's permission. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, October 14. 2007Re-Use Rights Already Come With the (Green) OA Territory: Judicet LectorAs not one, not two, but no fewer than three of my valued OA comrades-at-arms have so far publicly registered their disagreement with my position on one (possibly two) points of detail concerning "re-use" rights, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a closer look at these points to see exactly what is and is not at issue: Individual re-use capabilities. The concern is about "re-use rights," but I prefer to speak of "re-use capabilities." My OA comrades suggest that these consist of more than just the ability to read, and they are certainly right about that: If a document is OA -- i.e., if its full-text is freely accessible online, immediately and permanently, webwide -- then that means that any individual, webwide, can (1) access the document online, (2) read it, (3) download it, (4) store it (for personal use), (5) print it off (for personal use), (6) "data-mine" it and (7) re-use the results of the data-crunching in further research and research publications (however, they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it). Robotic harvestability. In addition to the individual re-use capabilities (1-7), there are the following: (8*) Robotic harvesters like Google can harvest the freely available Web-based text (exactly as they harvest all other texts that are freely available on the Web) and inverse-index it, thereby making it searchable by boolean full-text search in their search engines. (9*) Robotic data-miners can also harvest the text, machine-analyse it, and re-use the results of their data-crunching for research purposes in further research and research publications (however, they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it). The Green OA territory. All the above -- (1)-(7) plus (8*)-(9*) -- already come automatically with the (Green) OA territory when a full-text is made freely accessible online, immediately and permanently, webwide. It is for this reason that I continue to insist -- and this is the fundamental point of disagreement with my three OA comrades -- that there is no need whatsoever for any further re-use rights beyond what already comes automatically with the Green OA territory. In particular, there is no need to pay extra for Gold OA, in order to "purchase" these "extra" re-use rights. Nor is there any need to add any further re-use rights to Gold OA copyright agreements (although formalizing the rights is always fine, and a good idea). Gold OA includes Green OA. If you have paid a publisher for Gold OA, you have, among other things, certainly paid for the right to deposit your refereed final draft ["postprint"] in your own OA Institutional Repository (along with any XML tagging you may wish to add to facilitate usage, search, harvesting and data-mining): hence you already have (1)-(9*). Hence what you are paying for, if you elect to pay for Gold OA, is not extra re-use rights, but simply Gold OA, which already includes Green OA, which in turn already provides all the requisite re-use capabilities. Gold OA without Green OA? If any author (or funder) were ever to pay for "Gold OA" without thereby also getting the publisher's blessing to deposit the refereed final draft (postprint) in the author's own Institutional OA Repository (Green OA), then that author (or funder) would be doing something exceedingly foolish. (I know of no "Gold OA" today that does not automatically include Green OA.) But, apart from that, paying for Gold OA is still an unnecessary expenditure today for all except those to whom money is no object and who consider paid Gold OA to be worth the cost because it helps promote Gold OA, reinforcing the fact that it is a potentially viable cost-recovery model. Gold OA itself is certainly not necessary for any re-use needs that are purportedly not fulfillable through Green OA alone. Pay for Green OA rights? The second possible point of disagreement with my three OA comrades, a more minor one, would be about whether it is worth paying for Gold OA to a hybrid Gray/Gold publisher who does not endorse Green OA self-archiving except if paid for Gold OA: I'm inclined to say that Closed Access self-archiving in your Institutional Repository (IR), along with the IR's "Email Eprint Request" Button, is a much better strategy than paying such a hybrid Gray/Gold publisher for Gold OA in such cases, because it facilitates exception-free IDOA Deposit Mandates. But this is a less important point of disagreement than the logical, practical point about whether paid Gold OA is indeed needed for certain re-use rights. "Harvesting rights"? I will close on the sole potentially substantive matter on which my three OA comrades do have at least a theoretical point -- but, I will argue, a point that has no practical import: The reason I put an asterisk after 8* and 9* is that it can be argued that whereas the individual uses (1) - (7) do indeed come with the territory if one makes a document freely accessible on the web, this does not necessarily cover robotic uses such as harvesting. "Could?" is trumped by "Does." I will give a very simple and pragmatic answer: "Can," "could," "cannot" and "could not" are all trumped here by "does." My OA comrades are needlessly reasoning hypothetically in this case, when the objective evidence is already in: "If authors were to self-archive their articles on the web, freely accessibly (Green OA), as described above, could robots like Google harvest and data-mine them?" The answer is a resounding "yes": they could, and can, as demonstrated by that fact that they already do, without exception or challenge, and have been doing so for years now! Articles vs. books. We are not talking here about the full-texts of books, ambivalently provided to Google by their publishers (and authors), or scanned directly by Google, with certain conditions imposed by their publishers and authors on their re-use. We are talking about authors' final drafts (postprints) of their peer-reviewed journal articles, self-archived free for all by their authors in order to maximize their accessibility, usage and impact. In the case of books, there can be and have been contentious harvesting issues. But in the case of self-archiving, not a single article's harvestability has been contested, and we already have a decade and a half of precedent and practice behind us in this. So those who are worrying about the need to formally guarantee Google's (and other harvesters') "right" to do what they are already doing, without exception or challenge, since the advent of the Web, are worrying about a notional obstacle, not a real one. OA is not about or for re-publication or re-sale, online or in print; OA is about access and use. Before replying to insist that I am wrong about about "re-use" being a nonproblem for self-archived postprints, may I ask my readers please to recall (i) the parentheticals I carefully inserted earlier, concerning both individual users and harvesters: "(though they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it)". None of that is part of OA, nor has it ever been ("BBB" Declarations to the contrary notwithstanding). OA is a brand new possibility, opened up by a brand new medium: the Web. "Online re-publishing or re-sale rights" were never part of OA, any more than on-paper re-publishing or re-sale rights were -- nor do they need to be, because of everything that comes with the OA territory (i.e., with being freely accessible to one and all online). What about Gray publishers? Recall also that (ii) Gold OA already includes Green OA (as part of what you are paying for) and that (iii) with Gray publishers (i.e., those that are neither Green nor Gold) the interim solution for now is Immediate Deposit mandates plus the semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" (or "Fair Use") Button for any Closed Access deposits. That does provide for individual researchers' uses and re-uses even for this "Gray" literature (meaning non-Green, non-Gold journal articles) -- although it does not provide for robotic harvesting and data-mining of the (Closed Access) full-texts, just their metadata. IDOA and the Button -- or Paid Gold OA? Here, as I said, my colleagues and I may agree to disagree on the second, minor point, as to whether (a) it is a better strategy to rely, for now, on mandated IDOA and the Button for articles published in non-Green journals (38%), trusting that that will eventually force those journals to go Green (62%)? or, rather, (b) it is a better strategy to pay for Gold OA right now? But note that what is not at issue either way is whether Gold OA itself requires or provides "re-use" rights over and above those capabilities already provided by Green OA -- hence whether in paying for Gold OA one is indeed paying for something further that is needed for research, but not already vouchsafed by Green OA. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, October 12. 2007UK RAE Reform Should Be Evidence-Based
The UK Research Assessment Exercise has taken a few steps forward and a few steps back:
(1) In evaluating and rewarding the research performance of universities department by department, future RAEs (after 2008) will no longer, as before, assess only 4 selected papers per researcher, among those researchers selected for inclusion: All papers, by all departmental researchers, will be assessed. (Step forward)As I have pointed out many times before, (i) prior research income, if given too much weight, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and reduces the RAE to a multiplication factor on competitive research funding. The result would be that instead of the current two autonomous components in the UK's Dual Support System (RAE and RCUK), there would only be one: RCUK (and other) competitive proposal funding, multiplied by the RAE metric rank, dominated by prior funding. To counterbalance against this, a rich spectrum of potential metrics needs to be tested in the 2008 RAE, and validated against the panel review rankings, which will still be collected in the 2008 parallel RAE. Besides (i) research income, (ii) postgraduate student counts, and (iii) journal impact factors, there is a vast spectrum of other candidate metrics, including (iv) citation metrics for each article itself (rather than just its journal's average), (iv) download metrics, (v) citation and download growth curve metrics, (vi) co-citation metrics, (vii) hub/authority metrics, (viii) endogamy/interdisciplinarity metrics (ix) book citation metrics, (x) web link metrics, (xi) comment tag metrics, (xii) course-pack metrics, and many more. All these candidate metrics should be tested and validated against the panel rankings in RAE 2008, in a multiple regression equation. The selection and weighting of each metric should be adjusted, discipline by discipline, rationally and empirically, rather than a priori, as is being proposed now. Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.(I might add that RCUK's plans to include "potential economic benefits to the UK" among the criteria for competitive research funding could do with a little more rational and empirical support too, rather than being adopted a priori.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, October 9. 2007On Paid Gold OA, Central Repositories, and "Re-Use" Rights
On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 Andrew Albanese, Associate Editor, Library Journal, wrote:
"[J]ust writing to see if you have any thoughts on the UKPMC [UK PubMed Central] statement on re-use...seems a little unnecessary to me. Stating the obvious? Rather than say "copyright still applies," would it not have been more useful to issue guidelines on, say, how to craft a copyright clause that facilitates open access? Do these broad statements help anyone?"I agree that the UKPMC re-use statement is unnecessary and stating the obvious. (Even advice on amending copyright clauses to facilitate Green OA self-archiving is not necessary as a precondition for self-archiving, or for mandating self-archiving, although it is a good idea to try to amend copyright agreements where feasible and desired -- hence good advice is always welcome.) (1) To begin with, the UKPMC statement is about paid Gold OA, and (for reasons I have adduced many times before) I believe that -- except for those researchers and funders who are so well off that money is no object -- paying for Gold OA at this time is unnecessary and a waste of money (until and unless most or all of the institutional money that is currently being spent on subscriptions is released to pay for Gold OA). (2) Successfully establishing a credible, high-quality fleet of paid Gold OA journals was definitely useful in order to demonstrate the principle of paid Gold OA as a feasible one (especially under the current financially straitened circumstance in which most of the potential Gold OA funds are still tied up in institutional journal subscriptions); but that does not change the fact that Gold OA is far from being either the fastest or surest way to scale up to 100% OA today. (3) The fastest and surest way to provide 100% OA today is for authors to self-archive their (published) articles in their own Institutional Repositories [IRs] (not in Central Repositories [CRs] like PubMed Central or UKPMC: CRs should harvest from IRs) -- and for authors' institutions and funders to mandate that they self-archive. (4) This Green OA self-archiving does not require the description or assertion of any new "re-use rights": All the requisite uses already come with the Green OA territory itself (i.e., with the full text being made freely accessible to all on the web). So this is a lot of fuss and fanfare about nothing: details peculiar to paid Gold OA and to direct deposit in 3rd-party CRs like UKPMC. Not what the research community urgently needs today (100% OA), nor what will get us there. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, October 7. 2007Gold Conversion: A Prisoners' Dilemma?Although I no longer write much about it -- because there are strong reasons for according priority to Green OA Self-Archiving first, and I am ever fretful about doing anything that might instead help get us bogged down, yet again, in passive, pre-emptive speculation rather than practical action -- I too expect and welcome an eventual transition to Gold OA journal publishing, and have done so from the very beginning. The question, of course, is how we get there from here. My own expectation (based on much-rehearsed reasons and supporting evidence) is that it will be the eventual cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA that both forces and funds the transition to Gold OA, with the institutional cancellation savings paying the institutional Gold OA publication fees. But this scenario is predicated on two necessary prior conditions: (a) universal Green OA and (b) universal journal cancellations. This scenario for converting to Gold OA does not work if it is not universal; in particular, it cannot unfold "gradually" and piecemeal, either journal by journal or institution by institution. The three reasons for this are that (1) the true, fair costs of Gold OA publishing are not known at this time, (2) nor is the money available to pay for them, (3) nor (and this is perhaps the most important) would publishers be willing to downsize to those asymptotic reduced costs at this time of their own accord. Only (a) the cancellation pressure from universal Green OA, together with (b) the distributed infrastructure provided by universal Green OA -- allowing the functions (and costs) of access-provision and archiving to be offloaded from journal publishers and libraries onto the distributed network of Green OA Institutional Repositories -- will suffice to force both the downsizing and the transition, while at the same time freeing the funds to pay for it. (My profound ambivalence about again raising this speculative hypothesis concerning the future of journal publishing at this time is that it risks delaying universal Green OA, by increasing publisher resistance to the Green OA mandates that are needed to bring OA about. Yet I keep having to resurrect the hypothesis now and again, as a counter-hypothesis, to answer equally speculative hypotheses about a direct transition from non-OA to Gold OA, neglecting the nonhypothetical, tried, tested, demonstrated and hence feasible, intermediate step of universal mandated Green OA, which is, apart from all else, an end in itself, being eo ipso 100% OA.) The trouble with the "flip-over" hypothesis (the aggregator's-eye view proposed by then-CEO of Ingenta, Mark Rowse in 2003 -- see Peter Suber's recent summary) is the same as the trouble with the "institutional membership" strategy of BioMed Central as well as the "hybrid Gold" option offered by a number of publishers today (the author/institution can choose either conventional, no-fee non-OA publishing or fee-based OA publishing, paid for per individual article published): The reality is that today most of the potential institutional funds for paying for Gold OA (whatever the price) are still committed to paying for institutional journal subscriptions. Although the idea of locking this all in at current subscription rates, using the very same money, and just "flipping" -- from institutions as users, buying-in journals (i.e., annual collections of articles published by other institutions), to institutions as providers, paying-out for publishing their own individual articles -- sounds appealing (especially to an aggregator, and as long as we forget for the moment that the current subscription prices and publishing costs are arbitrary and inflated, not reflecting the substantial economies to be made from distributing the access-provision and archiving load across the network of Green OA institutional repositories), there is a logical problem inherent in the minutiae of this flip that make it into something of an Escher drawing: An institution can commit in advance to paying for the buy-in of a certain yearly collection of journals for its users. But can it commit in advance to publishing, in any particular journal, a certain yearly number of articles by its authors? Are even the prior years' publication figures for that journal from that institution a valid predictor of what will be submitted by that institution to that journal the following year? And can a peer-reviewed journal commit in advance to accepting a certain yearly quota of papers from a given institution? (Is it not the referees who must decide, article by article, journal by journal?) Is it not more likely that the yearly institutional quota of articles published in any particular journal will vary substantially from year to year, and from institution to institution? And is it not the author who must decide, in each case, where he wishes to submit his article (and for the referees to decide whether they will accept it)? The equation does balance out, even at current prices, if the "flip" is universal. But as long as it is instead piecemeal and local to a journal or institution, it contains certain internal contradictions. While there is no universal OA, individual institutions will still need subscription access to the individual journals their users require. (This is equally true if the subscription access is transfered from the journal level to the individual article level, through "pay-per-view.") As long as an institution is paying for those annual institutional incoming content access-fees, that money is not available to pay for outgoing article publication-fees. If an individual journal agrees to make all of an institution's outgoing articles OA in exchange for the current subscription fee, that's fine -- so far that's still just a bonus for renaming the "institutional subscription fee" an "institutional publication fee." The institution continues to get access to all the incoming articles in that journal, and, in addition, its own outgoing articles in that journal become OA: What subscribing institution would not happily agree to receiving that bonus as well, in exchange for merely rebaptizing its current "subscription charges" as "publication charges"? But then (assuming this no-risk bonus is offered to all subscribing institutions rather than just one, and they all accept this renaming), the result would of course be that, next year, virtually all articles in that particular journal become Gold OA, for all institutions, whether or not they publish in or subscribe to that journal. So, the following year (or whenever the "membership" deal elapses), why bother to subscribe to that journal at all, especially for institutions that only publish the occasional article in it every few years? In evolutionary biology, this is what is called an "evolutionarily unstable strategy". At the single-journal level, it is a recipe for inviting cancellations, soon. It does not scale, either across time, or across individual journals. The same offer may sound less risky at the publisher "big-deal" level, in which it is a joint subscription to a whole fleet of journals that is at issue, rather than a single journal. But, first, if that is viable at all, it is only viable for publishers with fleets of journals. And even there, it is still the authors (not their institutions) who decide, individually, each year, in what journal they should publish. Libraries can consult annual user statistics to decide what journals to subscribe to next year, but it is not clear that this also translates coherently into author publication statistics. Again, libraries may be happy to take the Gold OA bonus in exchange for just renaming their fleet-subscription fees "publication fees" today, but what happens in subsequent years, when it is author statistics that are consulted on which fleets of publishing fee "memberships" to "renew"? The system may stay stable for a while, if there is wholesale transition by most journals at a fleet level. In fact, initially, the ones most at risk for cancellation might then be the journals that do not offer the OA bonus in exchange for renaming their subscription fees publication fees; so this would in fact act to further universalize the transition to Gold (a good thing). But we should be clear on the fact that this exercise would have been a name-game, alongside a wholesale voluntary transition to Gold OA publishing on the part of publishers, with libraries ready to commit to pay for it at current rates, for now, as "membership fees." (For the subscribing institution, the fee-based "product" was incoming journals or fleets of journals; but for the publishing institution, the fee-based "service" is based on individual outgoing articles, each in its own author's chosen journal. A "flip" here would be rather like all countries agreeing to pay McDonalds, Burger King, etc. a flat annual rate out of taxes for all the burgers their tax-payers eat annually, based on their running national averages for the latest N years: Fine for the fixed big-mac-eating tax-payer, perhaps, but not for the ones who never touch the stuff, or prefer more wholesome fare for their money. And that's without taking into account that this would also lock in current prices in a way that is impervious to supply and demand; or the possibility that it could prove a lot cheaper to produce burgers some other way, some day. McDonalds' promise to "pass on" any future economies to the consumer would sound pretty hollow in this captive-market "membership" arrangement.) Nevertheless, I'd certainly be happy if this could all be agreed quickly and amicably, between publishers and institutional libraries: But can it? Or would publishers, in a kind of prisoner's dilemma, worry that institutions might then defect on some of their journals -- the ones they currently subscribe to and use, but in which their authors do not publish much? The prospect of such selective "cancellations" might well be enough to keep publishers from making the first move, preferring instead to stick with subscriptions and just offer hybrid OA (as many already do) as an option, at an extra institutional fee per article, with no risk to the publisher, rather than as an unconditional freebie in exchange for the current subscription fee (simply renamed), relying on faith that "memberships" will stay loyal in the long term even after everything becomes OA. I can't second-guess the outcome of this prisoner's dilemma concerning voluntary publisher conversion to Gold OA, but I can already say confidently that the current option of hybrid Gold OA won't scale, because there isn't the extra money to pay the extra OA fees while the potential money for paying them is still paying for subscriptions. So hybrid Gold OA fees will remain just an occasional extra bonus to publishers (and an extra expense to institutions). The one thing that just might encourage publishers to make the full transition to Gold OA voluntarily, however, is the worry that if they wait to make the transition under the anarchic pressure of Green OA self-archiving and self-archiving mandates at the article level, then the transition may indeed come with a forced downsizing and loss of income, as I have hypothesized, whereas if they convert voluntarily now, at the journal level, then they might hope to "lock in" current prices for a while longer yet. This is in fact a second prisoner's dilemma, and I certainly can't second-guess its outcome either, except to say that if it does drive the transition, then it will have been the prospect of Green OA mandates that induced the transition, rather than the actual practice of Green OA mandates -- but the cause will still have been the Green OA mandates! What the research community must not do in the meanwhile, however, is to just sit passively, waiting to see whether or not the publisher and library community resolve their Prisoners' Dilemma(s) in favour of Gold OA. Rather than "waiting for Gold," I hope we will continue pushing full-speed for 100% Green OA by mandating it. That way we win, regardless of how the Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved. The Gold OA dilemma, after all, is between the publishing community and the library community, whereas Green OA is entirely between the research community and itself. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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