Thursday, May 3. 2007Asymptotic Costs of Gold Open Access Journal PublicationMartin J. Osborne (MJO), Department of Economics, University of Toronto, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: SH: "...This journal will charge about $1000 to publish, which is within the current going rate for OA journal publication fees." MJO: The "going rate" surely depends on the field. Theoretical Economics, an Open Access journal (of which I happen to be the Managing Editor) charges a submission fee of $75 and no publication fee for authors who use the software standard in our field (LaTeX).You are quite right. In fact, as Peter Suber frequently points out, the majority of the Gold OA Journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge for publication at all. They either continue to cover publishing costs out of subscriptions, while making their online version freely accessible to all, or they have other sources of funding, such as subsidies or voluntarism. The (unidentified) journal under discussion here, however, as well as all of the high-profile journals usually associated with OA (such as the PLoS and BMC journals) do charge for publication, and in the same range as the (unidentified) journal under discussion (not yet listed in DOAJ). In addition, there is now a very large number of hybrid-Gold OA journals that offer OA as an option to the author, likewise in the price range in question. (Those journals, not being OA journals, but merely offering an extra OA option to the author are, rightly, not covered by DOAJ.) So I think the description "current going rate for OA journal publication fees" was quite representative and accurate. Please note that although I of course endorse publishing in Gold OA journals for authors who can afford to do so today, and I also happen to believe that one day all journals will convert to Gold OA, I am not an advocate of publishing in Gold OA journals as the means of providing OA today. There are nine reasons for this, the decisive three being (3) - (6). Publishing in OA journals in order to provide OA to one's research output, is nonoptimal and premature today because: (1) Most journals (90%) are still subscription-based journals today. (2) Hence institutions' potential publication funds are still tied up in paying for ongoing journal subscriptions today. (3) OA publishing charges are still far too high today; they need to be reduced to just the true costs of implementing peer review alone (and the price you quote, though on the low side, is much closer to those true costs). (4) 100% OA can be achieved, immediately, today, through (Green) OA self-archiving, by authors, in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs), depositing their own articles, published in today's conventional, subscription-based journals (90%). (5) Green OA self-archiving can be, and is being, mandated by researchers' institutions and funders worldwide, in order to maximize research usage and impact, and thereby research productivity and progress. (6) 100% OA is urgently needed today, indeed it is already greatly overdue; research usage and impact, productivity and progress are being lost daily, and cumulatively, as long as we delay mandating Green OA self-archiving (e.g., waiting instead for Gold). (7) 100% Green OA may also force cost-reduction and downsizing to the true essentials on the part of conventional subscription-based journals, eventually. (8) 100% Green OA may also force conventional subscription-based journals to convert to Gold OA, eventually, thereby also freeing the subscription cancellation funds to pay for it. (9) 100% OA, however, is needed today, not eventually, and Green OA mandates can and will provide it, today, without continuing to wait and hope for an eventual, affordable conversion to Gold OA by all journals, perhaps, some day. SH: "...This means that for now OA publishing charges are over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions." MJO: I don't understand the meaning of this claim. Suppose journal X charges a subscription and then journal Y, which is OA, enters the scene. If everyone who used to submit to X switches to Y, the subscription fees will be replaced by submission/publication fees. If X charged $500 per volume to 300 libraries and Y publishes 40 papers per volume, even with a publication fee of $1000, the scientific community will save $110,000 (= 300x$500 - 40x$1000).Your calculation is absolutely correct -- and I have made it many, many times before: apologies for not posting the links to the Forum this time: they were included in the blogged version of the same posting. " The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"However, that calculation misses the critical elements for this transition: (a) Subscriptions are paid by user-institutions; publication fees are paid by author-institutions.Hence one can do the hypothetical a-priori arithmetic all one likes, but that does not convert journals to OA, let alone Gold OA at a price that reflects its true costs; nor does it convert committed institutional subscription budgets to institutional publication-fee budgets for paying those true costs, across all subscribing institutions. The downsizing and transition to Gold OA is likely to happen eventually, but only after it has first been preceded (and driven) by the transition to 100% Green OA. The transition to Green OA, however -- unlike the transition to Gold OA -- is entirely within the hands and reach of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders) today: It merely has to be mandated. The good news is that the transition to Gold OA -- which is not in the research community's hands -- is far less urgent or consequential than the transition to Green OA, which is in their hands. And the transition to Green OA will already provide the 100% OA that the OA movement is all about, and for. OA is not about journal affordability; it is about research accessibility. Although it will not solve the journal affordability problem, 100% Green OA will reduce it to a far more minor problem, lacking the urgency it has today, when it is still wrapped up with the research accessibility problem. Research accessibility is the true motivation for OA, for the research community, who are the only ones who can provide OA, and are also its primary beneficiaries. "The Green and the Gold Roads to Open Access"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum An Exchange Regarding Open Access Journals
This is a reply to an anonymized query:
Identity Deleted:"What do you know about this new journal? [Journal Name deleted](1) OA Journals are a good idea, though a bit premature right now, if the goal is OA: OA can be achieved right now through author self-archiving of articles published in conventional subscription-based journals. (2) Nevertheless, it is a good idea to support and promote OA journals if one can. (3) This particular journal will charge about $1000 to publish, which is within the current going rate for OA journal publication fees. (4) It is specifically because of this publication charge that OA journals are still premature: Right now, most journals are not OA, and most of the potential institutional funds to pay for publication are currently tied up in paying for it via subscriptions. (5) This means that for now OA publishing charges are over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions. (6) $1000 per article is not much for some authors, but a lot for others. (7) What all authors should be doing is self-archiving their articles, to make them OA. (8) That will not only provide OA, but it will force subscription journals to cut costs and it may eventually force them to convert to OA publishing (at a much lower price). (9) The existence of viable OA journals today, however, despite the extra costs (some) entail for authors, helps demonstrate that OA publishing is possible, and refutes the claim by some subscription journals that OA means the destruction of journals. (10) This, in turn, helps encourage authors to self-archive, and encourages institutions and funders to mandate self-archiving, thereby accelerating the provision of OA (and the eventual transition to OA publishing). So my advice would be this: (a) If you would otherwise have agreed to serve on the editorial board of a journal like this, then the fact that it is an OA journal should be another point in its favour.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Russia and Turkey Register Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates in ROARMAP
The Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Middle East Technical University of Turkey have adopted Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates and registered them in ROARMAP
Bravo to these institutions. Worldwide, that now makes: 11 institutional mandates(and some of the proposed mandates are big ones!) If your institution has an Institutional Repository, please register it in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), which will then track its growth and contents. And if your institution has adopted or is proposing to adopt an OA Self-Archiving Mandate, please register it in ROARMAP, for others to see and emulate. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, May 1. 2007OA Citation Impact Study: No Conclusions Possible
Tonta, Yaşar and Ünal, Yurdagül and Al, Umut (2007) The Research Impact of Open Access Journal Articles. In Proceedings ELPUB 2007, the 11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Focusing on challenges for the digital spectrum, pp. 1-11, Vienna (Austria).The above article compared average citation counts in several different fields for a sample of articles in a sample of OA journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The average citation counts for articles in the OA journals were found to vary across fields. It was concluded that OA research impact varies across fields. No comparison was made with non-OA journals in the same fields. Hence it is impossible to say whether any of these differences have anything to do with OA. Fields no doubt differ in their average number of citations. Journals no doubt differ too, in subject matter, quality, and citation impact, hence must be equated: It is not clear whether the OA journals in each field are the top, medium or bottom journals, relative to the non-OA journals. No conclusions at all can be drawn from this study. The authors are encouraged to do the necessary controls. Note also that Hajjem et al. 2005 (and others) report that the ratio of OA/non-OA articles is positively correlated with citation counts. This can mean that higher-quality articles are more likely to be made OA (Quality Bias), or that the OA impact advantage is greater for higher-quality articles (Quality Advantage) -- or, most likely, both (Hajjem & Harnad 2006). Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47. Hajjem, C. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Access Impact Advantage: Quality Advantage or Quality Bias? Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, April 29. 2007Cure Gold Fever With Green DepositsBill Hooker has already corrected the two main misunderstandings in Matt Hodgkinson's posting: (1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks that have been delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates for several years now, by making the issue of publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot if they are holding up the adoption of a full Green OA mandate. Green OA is still Green OA (immediate, direct, full access) but an ID/OA compromise mandate now is infinitely preferable to no self-archiving mandate at all. And together with the "Fair-Use" Button, ID/OA provides almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period. (And, yes, I do add the speculation that ID/OA, once universally adopted, will very soon lead to the welcome death of embargoes, and hence to 100% Green OA; but nothing hangs on this speculation: It is an ID/OA mandate that should be adopted if there is deadlock or delay in agreeing on the adoption of a Green OA mandate.) (2) All articles deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) will be harvested and indexed by OAIster, Google Scholar, and many other harvesters and search engines. There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited. The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited (i.e., 85% of the annual peer-reviewed journal literature) and the solution is to mandate Green OA -- or, failing that, to mandate ID/OA. Hence 100% Green OA will indeed have delivered OA's goal, irrespective of whether and when it goes on to lead to Gold OA. A few other points: (3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep fussing about Gold OA and costs while daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact continues to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can put an end to it. My objection to Gold fever is a matter of immediate priorities. It is not only putting the Golden cart before the Green horse (or counting the Golden chickens before the Green eggs are laid), but it is leaving us year in and year out at a near-standstill, whereas self-archiving mandates have been demonstrated to fast-forward universities toward 100% OA for their output within two years. (See Arthur Sale's splendid studies.) (4) I criticise the CERN Gold OA initiative for much the same reason: CERN could have done so much more. CERN has a successful Green OA mandate (not even the ID/OA compromise) and CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields. (Saving subscription costs is utterly irrelevant once you have 100% Green OA: Journal subscriptions then become optional luxury items instead of basic necessities, as now.) (5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal like Springer's Open Choice is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs, and hence doubly foolish. (Rationalizing that it can be corrected by "adjustments" in the subscription price is not only credulous in the extreme, but it blithely countenances locking in current asking-prices in a way that makes the "Big Deal" look like chump change.) Paying for Gold OA in a pure-Gold journal (like the BMC and PLoS journals) -- when one can simply publish in any journal and self-archive to provide OA -- is merely foolish (except for those with a lot of spare change). (At this time: not if and when 100% Green OA causes unsustainable institutional subscription cancellations, thereby releasing the funds to pay for institutional Gold OA publishing costs. (But -- speculation again -- it is likely that journals will have to cut costs and downsize in converting to Gold OA, so the asking price for Gold OA will not be what it is now.) (6) I do not criticise depositing in Central Repositories (CRs) per se (though I do think it is foolish): I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), and I especially criticise mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs. Institutions are the primary research providers. IRs tile all of OA output space. Institutions and their researchers have a shared interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own research output. Institutions can mandate, monitor (and even monetarize) self-archiving in their own IRs (and funders can reinforce those mandates); CRs cannot. And CRs can harvest from IRs if they wish. Mandating self-archiving in researchers' own IRs is the systematic and scaleable -- hence optimal -- solution for generating 100% OA, not a panoply of arbitrary CRs criss-crossing research space. (7) I have no interest in vying for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art. I don't doubt that the descriptor "open access" can be googled before the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative decided (quite consciously, after surveying several alternatives) to adopt OA for the movement to which it subsequently gave rise. Before the BOAI, there was no OA movement, just a lot of notions in the air, among them: free online access, self-archiving, and journals funded by means other than the subscription model. (8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it, at the current rate. Green OA, in contrast, can be accelerated to reach 100% within two years, if we just go ahead and mandate it, instead of continuing to fuss about Gold OA! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Open Access Is Not Just A Public Health Matter
The interest and commitment of some of the supporters of Open Access (OA) is derived from and motivated by the importance of making health-related research accessible to those who need it: patients, family, researchers.
This is certainly an important component of OA, and perhaps the aspect that most directly touches our lives. But if OA is seen or portrayed as being mainly a health-related matter, it not only leaves out the vast majority of OA's target content-- which is all research in all research areas, from the physical and biological sciences to the social sciences and the humanities -- but it even under-serves OA's potential benefits to health research itself. Even the "tax-payer access" aspect of OA, though important, is not quite representative, because the primary benefit of OA to the tax-payer who pays for the research is not that it makes the research freely accessible to the tax-payer (although it does indeed do that too!), but that it makes the research freely accessible to the researchers for whom it was mostly written, but many of whom cannot afford access to it -- so that they can use, apply and build upon that research, in their own research -- to the benefit of the tax-payers who funded it and for whose sake the research is conducted. Again, a focus on the need for direct public access to health-related research leaves out the vast majority of research that is not health-related and that the public has no particular interest in reading -- but a great interest in making accessible to those who can use and build on it so as to increase research progress, which may in its turn eventually lead to applications that benefit the public. Paradoxically, it is in recognizing and supporting OA's much more general research enhancing mission that we can also best support its health-related potential. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, April 28. 2007Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying OrganisationFour basic kinds of OA-related events keep being arranged periodically by various official organisations (librarians, universities, publishers, funders, government committees): (1) Librarians and universities who think OA is all about journal affordability, preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI);There is no recognized topic of (Green) OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group recognized or invited to any of these OA events. So only two recourses are left to Green OA advocates: One is to do as we are doing, which is to keep on raising our voices on behalf of Green OA in writings and petitions and at the meetings we happen to be invited to. The other possibility is the one Richard Poynder and Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted, which is a Green OA lobby. Creating such an official Green OA lobby would be very timely and important (but it would have to be carefully protected against dilution by well-meaning but blinkered proponents of (1), (2) and (3), which would defeat both its focus and its purpose). One good thing, though: The fact (sub specie aeternitatis) is that (1) - (X), are, respectively, (1) irrelevant, (2) premature, (3) premature, and (X) obsolete, and it is indeed Green OA and Green OA mandates that will win the day and usher in 100% OA, sooner or later. Let us work to make it sooner, rather than later. Open Access (OA) means free online access to the articles in the c. 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals published annually across all disciplines, countries and languages. The purpose of OA is to maximise research usage and impact, and thereby maximise research productivity and progress, by making all research findings accessible to all their potential users webwide, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published. There are two roads to 100% OA: (1) The "Golden" Road to OA is to convert all journals from recovering their publishing costs, as they do now, out of user-institution subscription charges, per journal, to recovering their publishing costs instead out of author-institution publication charges, per article. (Gold OA is also called "BOAI-2" -- the second of the two roads to OA proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which first adopted the term "Open Access" in 2002 for the new movement it launched.)Gold OA and Green OA are clearly complementary, but there is considerable disagreement over which one should be given priority. The current level of OA worldwide is about 25%, of which about 10% is Gold and 15% is Green. This is because about 10% of journals are Gold (though mostly not the top journals), and because only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously. So what is needed is either to increase the proportion of Gold OA journals (and their uptake) to 100%, or to increase the promotion of Green OA self-archiving by authors to 100% (or both). The critical difference in the probability of increasing OA to 100% via Gold versus Green is that Gold OA depends on two further factors: (i) converting journals to Gold and (ii) finding the money to pay authors' Gold OA publication fees (particularly while most journals are subscription-based, and hence most potential publication funds are still tied up in subscriptions). Publishers are reluctant to convert to Gold, and authors are reluctant to pay for Gold OA charges at this time. The situation with Green OA is very different, because it does not depend on converting publishers, and it is virtually cost-free. Most institutions already have Institutional Repositories (IRs). The only problem is that they are largely empty because, as noted, only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously -- even though a series of recent studies have demonstrated OA's dramatic benefits for all fields of scientific and scholarly research (doubled usage and citations). There are, however, the two fundamental advantages of Green OA over Gold OA that were just noted: Gold OA requires (i) converting publishers to Gold OA publishing and it also requires (ii) finding the funds for authors to pay for it. Green OA merely requires authors' own institutions and funders to mandate that they self-archive their own postprints. And Green OA mandates have been repeatedly demonstrated to work. Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.Moreover, if and when mandated 100% OA from Green self-archiving should ever go on to cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, thereby forcing journals to convert to Gold OA publishing, the cancellations themselves will release the institutional subscription funds that can then be used to pay for institutional authors' Gold OA publication charges. So the pragmatics of the status quo and the goal would seem to indicate that mandating Green OA (by research funders and institutions) should be given priority, rather than focussing on trying to (i) convert journals to Gold OA and trying to (ii) find the funds to pay for it. Journal publishing is in the hands of publishers, but Green OA self-archiving is in the hands of authors and their institutions and funders. Green OA self-archiving mandates are beginning to be adopted by funders and institutions, but not nearly quickly enough, even though they could easily be extended to 100% adoption worldwide. There are two reasons for the delay: (1) lobbying against Green OA mandates by the publishing industry and (2) distraction from mandating Green OA arising from the parallel efforts to promote Gold OA. The pragmatics are clear, however: The research community (researchers, their employers and their funders) have no leverage over the publishing industry and its policies, only over their own employees, fundees and policies. OA is overwhelmingly in the best interests of the research community (as well as students, the vast R&D industry, the developing world, and the tax-paying public worldwide), and the research community itself is in a position to mandate 100% OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving. One cannot mandate Gold OA. The only leverage that publishers have against Green OA mandates is (1) copyright, which they can try to invoke in order to embargo the provision of OA by their authors and (2) their claim that 100% Green OA would make subscriptions unsustainable. As we have seen, (2) is not a valid deterrent to the research community, because if subscriptions did become unsustainable, this would merely mean a conversion to Gold OA publishing, which would be welcome. As to (1) -- the use of copyright and embargoes by publishers to try to prevent Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates -- there is a very simple compromise that provides 100% almost-OA immediately (a vast immediate benefit to research usage, impact, productivity and progress) and that will also usher in 100% Green OA very soon thereafter: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate plus the "Fair Use" Button in Institutional Repositories. Instead of trying to mandate both immediate deposit and immediate OA, funders and universities need merely mandate immediate deposit (of the postprint, immediately upon acceptance for publication). Sixty-two percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving, so access to at least 62% of these deposits can immediately be set to OA. For the remaining 38% of journals that have access embargoes, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access": The metadata (author, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are all openly accessible immediately, webwide, but the full-text of the article (postprint) is not. Instead, for the 38% of deposited postprints that are published in an embargoed access journal (embargoes range from 6 months to 3 years or more!), the would-be user, who has reached the link to the deposited article, based on its visible metadata, reaches a "Fair Use" Button, provided by the software of each Institutional Repository: The user need merely cut-paste his email address in a box and click on the button. This automatically emails an immediate EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST to the article's author; the email conveys the request and provides a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automatic emailing of a single copy of the deposited postprint to the eprint-requester. The difference between this compromise "almost-OA" and the current status quo is already the difference between night and day for all those would-be users worldwide who cannot afford access to the subscription version. It systematises and automatises email access to the author and the postprint, and it provides the required document almost immediately. And it will very rapidly lead to 100% Green OA, as the universal benefits of OA became palpable to the entire research community. So the research community's optimal strategy is to give priority to the adoption of Green OA mandates by universities and funders. An immediate-deposit, immediate-OA mandate is obviously optimal. But if that cannot be agreed upon immediately, adopting an ID/OA mandate is infinitely preferable to any further delay in adopting a mandate at all. To keep holding out instead for the successful adoption of a stronger Green OA mandate or to wait for a universal transition to Gold OA is merely to continue prolonging the loss in research access, usage and impact, needlessly and avoidably, to the detriment of research productivity and progress. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, April 18. 2007OA or mOre-pAy?Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their own article. I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs. Sixty-two percent of journals (including all 502 Springer journals) already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting self-archiving embargoes, or both. In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research-community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers should have no say whatsoever. The way to put an end to the publisher filibuster on Green OA self-archiving mandates is the pro-tem compromise of weakening the mandates into immediate-deposit/optional-access mandates (ID/OA), so that they can be adopted without any further delay. This immunizes them from any further attempts by publishers to prevent or delay adoption: Only deposit is mandated (immediately). Access to the immediate deposit can then either be set as Open Access immediately, or (in case of a publisher embargo), as Closed Access, provisionally, with almost-OA provided by the "Fair Use" Button during any embargo. This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after. (Note also that such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.) But Jan Velterop (JV) is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell: JV: "It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: 'almost-OA'."No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of delay by publishers. What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is mandated is immediate deposit. Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate, almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful, propagating benefits of universal OA.) Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000 Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course, but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too: JV: "This 'almost-OA', metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if their main goal is to achieve 'almost-OA' it rather seems a waste of time and money."Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2) the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address: The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester. That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all expenses are already covered). No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100% OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all) for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open Choice Gold OA even less so. OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more intent on more-pay than OA... JV: "OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not 'almost-OA', but true and immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository, which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA publishers I am familiar with)."Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it, yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions are still paying all the publishing costs.) And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates, will very soon bring on 100% OA. JV: "So my advice to authors who want secure, sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the OA choice."And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, April 17. 2007Don't Make Deposit Timing Policy Conditional On Publisher Embargo Policies
On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Alexander Borbély, University of Zurich, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
I was astonished to read that depositing the final version of the manuscript is prohibited [for Blackwell's European Journal of Neuroscience]... Making available only the version originally submitted is not very useful if major modifications based on the referees' recommendation are made:I am very familiar with these instructions. Blackwell's is a 12-month embargo publisher.Are you familiar with these instructions and what is your opinion?Blackwell Publishing PDF version of the Article The solution is extremely simple: always deposit the postprint (i.e., the refereed, revised, accepted final draft) immediately upon acceptance for publication (definitely not 12 months later!) and set the access as "Closed Access" instead of "Open Access," if you wish, which means the metadata (author, title, journal, abstract) are openly accessible to anyone on the web immediately, but the full-text is not. In addition, as I wrote before, make sure to implement the "Fair Use" Button (in your university's repository, ZORA): EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST. All searches will lead to the Closed Access Deposit, and that in turn has the Button, which will provide for all usage needs during the 1-year embargo, semi-automatically, almost immediately, via almost-OA. Embargoes will all die (I promise!) a very quick death once all institutions mandate immediate deposit like this; but embargoes will win the day if institutions foolishly make the mandated deposit date contingent on the publisher embargo's say-so. Several other points: (1) Unlike Blackwell's journals, most journals (62%) already endorse immediate OA deposit. (2) There is no reason whatsoever to hold out for the publisher's PDF: The author's postprint is just fine for all research purposes! The PDF is completely irrelevant, one way or the other. (3) Although it must always be left as an individual judgment for the author to make in the case of each individual paper, it is also good scholarly practice, wherever possible, to also deposit, even earlier, the pre-refereeing preprint (especially if submitting to an embargo publisher): The repository will tag the preprint clearly as an unrefereed draft, with a prominent link to the refereed postprint (and from there to the "Fair Use" button); this will also allow search engines to pick up the full-text for full-text indexing in the case of a Closed Access deposit, leading to many more discoveries of both the preprint and the postprint. I do not for one microsecond believe that any publisher's statement that "a corrected version of the preprint (i.e., the postprint) cannot be made OA immediately" has any legal validity; nor do I think such nonsense could ever be enforced, had it had any legal validity. But instead of wasting still more time to wait for people to at last realize this, and to set access to their immediately deposited postprints as OA immediately, the immediate-deposit/optional-access policy (plus the "Fair Use" button) are the best interim compromise solution. Then nature can take its course. And meanwhile researcher access needs are taken care of, almost-immediately, through almost-OA, during any putative embargo period. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, April 14. 2007Depot: Central Round-Up, Back-Up and Stop-Gap for UK's Open Access Institutional Repositories
EDINA, SHERPA and JISC have just announced DEPOT, which looks as if it will be a superb central service for the UK, and a model for all countries worldwide that wish to provide Open Access to their research output.
DEPOT is many things, but chiefly a mediator for UK Institutional Repositories (IRs): (a) If your institution already has an IR, Depot will redirect your deposit there, while also registering it and tracking it centrally, to make sure the deposit is picked up by the major search engines.I have mostly only congratulations for the designers and implementers of Depot. It is the optimal synthesis: It reinforces the author's own IR as the canonical locus for OA content. It monitors and integrates all of the UK's IRs. And it provides a provisional locus for any researcher whose institution does not yet have an IR (or for researchers who are not affiliated with an institution). I would, however, like to recommend three small but very important changes in the following: These are the corresponding three small but crucial changes I would strongly urge:(1) Currently, Depot states that only postprints can be deposited.(The postprint is either the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication, or the published PDF itself.)(2) Currently, Depot does not state when deposit should be done.(The depositor is referred to the Romeo directory of publisher policies on author self-archiving to ascertain whether and when he can deposit.) (1') Do not restrict deposit to postprints: Include preprints too.(Preprints are pre-peer-review versions of articles that are to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.) (2') Make it clear that the deposit of the postprint should be done as soon as the article is accepted for publication.(The preprint should be deposited even earlier, to be followed by the postprint as soon as it exists.) And most important of all: (3') Make it clear that the deposit itself, and its timing, does not depend in any way on publisher policy: only the OA-access-setting date might.The postprints of any articles for which the publisher has not yet endorsed immediate self-archiving can still be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, but the deposit can be provisionally set as Closed Access, instead of Open Access, if the author wishes, with only the metadata accessible to all. Depot's FAQ is not quite clear on the relation between Depot and the many IRs. Presumably if the author's institution has an IR, Depot will redirect the deposit there. (In that case, excluding preprints is not a good idea, not only because they are crucial precursors of postprints, but because all IRs will welcome both preprints and postprints. It would be a very bad idea to try to draw a formal line between the two. Let peer review itself do that, and then the journal's name, both prominent metadata tags in EPrints as well as other IRs.) Moreover, as it is stated that Depot itself will be based on the EPrints IR software, this means that Depot will have (i) the option for Closed Access deposit as well as (ii) the "Fair Use" Button -- REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT. With those features, almost-OA can be provided almost-immediately and semi-automatically for any Closed Access deposit: Any would-be user webwide, led by the metadata to a deposit that turns out to be in Closed Access, can just copy/paste his email address into a box that is provided by the software, and then press the REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT button. This immediately sends the author an automated email eprint request, containing a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automated emailing of one copy of his eprint to the requester. There is a vast difference between deferring deposit until the publisher endorses OA deposit, and doing an immediate CA deposit, deferring only the OA-setting. Depot should definitely facilitate the latter practice. (Some clarification is also needed of the mechanism of transfer from Depot to the author's IR.) But overall, the Depot service is near-perfect, and once optimised with these two small changes, it is worthy of not only admiration but emulation worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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