Saturday, April 7. 2007Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) adopts Green OA self-archiving mandate
From Driver News:
"After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories. This needs to be done at the latest one year after the publication date, to increase visibility and impact. More information on the conditions can be found in their general agreement for researchers." This is indeed good news, but could easily be made even better by upgrading the mandate to Immediate Deposit (ID/OA): Setting access to the deposited article as Open Access can be delayed for up to a year (if FWO allows it and the author so chooses), but the deposit itself must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, so the article's metadata are immediately visible webwide. (1) "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"(If the author chooses to delay setting Open Access (OA) to a deposit, access can be initially set as Closed Access (CA) until the chosen release date. Meanwhile, each Repository's "Fair-Use Button" can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to all would-be users webwide who see the deposit's metadata: Requesters need merely paste in their own email addresses and click, thereby sending an automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST to the author, who need merely click to authorize having one individual eprint of the deposit emailed to the requester.) (3) "EPrints 'Request eprint' button"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, April 5. 2007Alma Swan on Open Access in American Scientist (the journal)
Alma Swan's article "Open Access and the Progress of Science" has just appeared in American Scientist (the journal) May-June Issue 2007.
You can join the American Scientist Open Access Forum, post discussion to the Forum, and view the complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion (1998-2007) on providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online. Sunday, April 1. 2007Green Grows the RCUK
As announced in Peter Suber's Open Access News, on 1 April 2007 two UK Research Councils, PPARC and CCLRC merged into a single Council: Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). PPARC had already mandated Green OA Self-Archiving; CCLRC had "strongly encouraged" it. STFC mandates it. That means that instead of 5 out of 8 UK Research Councils mandating OA, 5 out of 7 now mandate OA.
Worldwide, we have reached 23 Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates adopted (9 institutional, 3 departmental, 11 funder mandates, including the European Research Council, ERC) plus 6 more proposed (1 multi-institutional, 5 funder mandates), two of them (FRPAA in the US and EC A1 in Europe) big ones. See Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) Learned Societies: By Their Works Shall Ye Know ThemOn Sat, 31 Mar 2007, in response to "Mobilising Scholarly Society Membership Support for FRPAA and EC A1," Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director, American Geophysical Union, wrote, in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: "Were open access in the best interests of advancing science societies would be supporting it now."The purpose of Open Access (OA) is to maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted. "It is as hard for a society executive to know what to oppose as it is to know what we should be supporting on the OA side."The American Geophysical Union is completely Green on author self-archiving. That means it is on the side of the angels -- except if it is also lobbying against Green OA Mandates such as FRPAA or EC A1. "Please don't characterize us with the commercial publishers."The Society publishers that are Green on author self-archiving and are not lobbying against the FRPAA Green OA mandate are certainly not like the publishers -- commercial or society -- that are. "There is no other way those most interested in assuring that the record of a discipline is not lost can assure that will not happen except to do it themselves and that is why there are societies."I hope there are more reasons for learned societies to exist than just preservation, because preservation can and will be taken care of in the digital era quite expeditiously. I would say that there are still other reasons for learned societies' existence, such as to implement peer review and certify its outcome (with their journal name), to host meetings, perhaps to fund scholarships, to lobby (but not to lobby against OA!) -- and possibly also to sell a paper edition of the journals as long as there is still a demand for it. "government can not be trusted to do so."Digital preservation need not be entrusted to government. Research institutions will preserve their own (published) article output, self-archived in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs). And for good measure (and backup) the distributed and mirrored IR contents can be harvested into various Central Repositories (CRs), including learned society repositories, if they wish. But lest there be any misunderstanding, the purpose of the FRPAA Green OA mandate is not research preservation but research access and impact. And the Green OA mandates that require direct central self-archiving in a CR (such as PubMed Central (PMC) or a funding agency CR) are not sensible or optimal. All self-archiving should systematically be done in the researcher's own institution's IR, the primary research provider. (The only exceptions should be unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have an IR; for them there are CRs to deposit in directly for the time being.) CRs like PMC can then harvest from the IRs. See: "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" "Funding agencies of all kinds operate in their own interest... None have a primary mission in the protection of the knowledge base;"The locus of deposit is a relatively minor issue; and, to repeat, OA self-archiving is not being mandated for the sake of preservation but for the sake of access and impact. Public, tax-payer-funded funding agencies presumably act in the tax-paying public's interest. "Academic institutions standing alone do not have the capacity to guarantee all knowledge."No one institution (or society) can, but a distributed network of them, with back-up and redundancy certainly can. "Societies are one vital resource, academic institutions are another... One without the other is the woof without the warp, a flop."Agreed, but neither here nor there, insofar as the substantive issue under discussion is concerned, which is the passage of Green OA self-archiving mandates such as the FRPAA -- and overcoming publisher lobbying against them, whether from commercial or society publishers. "Instead of shouting about the moral rectitude of OA and other irrelevant issues how about looking at the whole problem. The development and protection of the knowledge base needs to be optimized. Optimizing one aspect is likely to be deleterious in other parts of the system."No one at all is shouting about moral rectitude. The purpose of OA is to maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted. "Time, Price, Quality - Pick any two."Yes indeed: And at the same time: Mandate self-archiving, and self-archive. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, March 30. 2007Mobilising Scholarly Society Membership Support for FRPAA and EC A1On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Andrew A. Adams wrote: You are right that scholarly society members need to be specially mobilised by OA advocates now, to get them aware and on-side. I think David Prosser and Fred Friend in the UK and Heather Joseph and Peter Suber in the US are in the best position to guide a systematic campaign to mobilise support for EC A1 and FRPAA from the society memberships. Many of the societies have signed the EU or US petitions (although obviously the most important membership targets are those whose officers have not signed)."On the subject of Scholarly Society Publishers, you agree that it is likely that the heads of scholarly societies will be lining up alongside the commercial publishers in lobbying against OA mandates in the US. Since most scholarly societies are semi-democratic bodies, we need to try to mobilise OA advocates to use those democratic avenues to transform the Scholarly Societies into lobbyists for instead of lobbyists against, OA. Of course, as always, this requires the time of OA advocates. The specific goal would be to inform members about the great likelihood that their own officers will be actively lobbying against Green OA mandates (FRPAA and EC A1), and hence the need to make the will of the grassroots membership known, heard and felt. The core issue is that Scholarly Society officers are taking exactly the same stance as commercial publishers (either opposing OA altogether, or opposing the OA Green Mandates that are designed to reach OA), but they are doing so in the name of protecting the society's publishing revenue streams for the sake of the society's "good works" (which consist of funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) -- and they are doing so in the name of their memberships, without consultation, disclosure, or answerability. The memberships have to be very clearly informed of this, and of the fact that renouncing OA in favour of protecting their society's publishing revenue streams in order to ensure that they can continue to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying would amount to the individual members themselves agreeing to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying with their own lost daily research impact and income, lost because would-be users of their work are being denied access to their work because their institutions cannot afford subscription access to it (the supplementary access that the Green OA Mandates are specifically meant to provide).Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor The findings on the way self-archiving doubles research usage and impact in all fields should be made very clearly known to the membership, so they fully understand and appreciate the central causal contingency that is actually at issue in all of this: The solution is very simple: Scholarly society meetings, scholarships and lobbying should sustain themselves in other ways in the OA era, rather than by reducing members' research impact. Reducing research access is the exact opposite of the purpose of a scholarly society. Raising the registration fee for meetings, and adjusting membership fees to the level agreed upon for the funding of scholarships and lobbying makes the system far more open and answerable to the real needs of the membership.Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact Advantage (I am certain that members will be appalled once the publishing books are opened and they see how small a proportion of their society's publishing profits is actually being used for these good works: The books will show that those scholarly societies that have any sizeable publishing profits to speak of tend to use them, like all other publishers, to increase their publishing division's size, staff and perquisites, not to fund "good works." The American Chemical Society is the prime example of this. Publishing has become a state-within-a-state in the profitable societies, and that is why they sound so much like commercial publishers, differing only in the fact that they can add a specious note of self-righteousness to their resistance to OA, citing their "good works." The remedy, of course, is to remind the membership of the actual mandate of scholarly societies, which is to promote the scholarship, not to profit from limiting it.) Moreover, a long period of peaceful coexistence between subscription revenues and Green OA self-archiving mandates is still ahead of us, because it takes time for the mandates to take effect, with OA growing anarchically across all journals, not individually, journal by journal. Even in fields that have had 100% Green OA for years now -- notably the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, which have both attested to this publicly -- Green OA self-archiving has not yet produced any detectable decline in subscription revenues. Stevan HarnadBerners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, March 29. 2007Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise
Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. To appear in: Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, 25-27 June 2007, Madrid, Spain.
To read full-text, click here. Comments welcome. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 27. 2007Australian Productivity Commission Report: Trojan Horse-Play
Once again, the reader would probably do better to read Peter Suber's incisive but gentle critique of the stunningly "confused and confusing" report of the Australian government's Productivity Commission on Public Support for Science and Innovation. My own uncharitable rant, from when I first laid eyes on it yesterday, follows below:
What a word salad is the Australian government Productivity Commission report on Public Support for Science and Innovation. All that jabber, a lot of it incoherent, but what it amounts to is a total confusion about Green and Gold, OA self-archiving and OA publishing, institutional repositories and central repositories, embargoes, and what needs to be mandated and how (and why). A perfect entry-way for the Trojan Horse of paying the asking price for pre-emptive Gold OA instead of just mandating Green OA. (Doesn't even seem to realize that combining payment with embargoes is adding insult to injury!) A mess. They should take it back and try (seriously this time) to think it through, clearly, and reduce it to the few sentences it merits. And those sentences are already known: Mandate Green OA self-archiving of all published articles in Institutional Repositories (deposit required immediately upon publication, even if provisionally in Closed Access). Fund Gold OA only if you really have the spare change; otherwise, wait until it's needed: If/when institutional subscriptions are unsustainably cancelled, use (part of) the institutional savings to pay for the Gold OA publication charges for institutional research output. Not before!That's all that's needed. The rest is all confusion and folly. Peter Suber's Fair and Gentle But Firm Rejoinders to OA Opponents
Readers of this blog who do not regularly read Peter Suber's splendid Open Access News (OAN) should! OAN provides a wealth of immediate information about OA developments. It has been my first (and most frequent) daily port of call for years now.
Yesterday Peter did two characteristically fair and gentle -- but resolutely firm -- rejoinders to the increasingly shrill (but remarkably shallow) attempts by representatives and partisans of some -- certainly not all, possibly not even most -- sectors of the journal publishing industry to oppose the growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates being adopted and proposed by research funders and universities worldwide. The two articles Peter rebuts are by Brian Crawford, Chairman of the PSP Executive Council of AAP and an editorial by the CEO of ALPSP about a similar -- but somewhat more reasoned -- article by Nevada librarian Rick Anderson. As usual, the claim is that the Green OA self-archiving mandates that have been adopted and proposed will destroy journals and peer review by destroying subscription income. As usual, the reply is that (1) there is to date no evidence at all that Green OA self-archiving will not co-exist peacefully with subscription-based cost-recovery, but (2) if and when it no longer does, then there will be a conversion to Gold OA publishing-fee-based cost-recovery, paid for out of the very same money that institutions now spend on subscriptions, money they would have saved in having cancelled subscriptions (not money redirected from research). But the fact that 100% OA is both attainable via the Green OA mandates and highly beneficial -- to research, researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public that funds the research -- is beyond dispute. Research is not funded and conducted in order to guarantee the journal publishing industry's current revenue streams and current ways of doing business. For Peter's much gentler rebuttals, please see: Crawford PSP/AAP Rebuttal and Anderson ALPSP Rebuttal Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, March 25. 2007The European Commission has already mandated Green OA!
I append below another brilliant suggestion from the redoubtable N. Miradon (who may be retired but hardly retiring -- and tireless!) in the form of a proposed letter to European MPs and MEPs about the forthcoming EC deliberations on Open Access policy.
If I have not misunderstand, N. Miradon has drawn to our attention here an existing EU/EC policy under which it would be possible to implement an ID/OA mandate for EU research funding with no further legislative or consultative changes required at all! (See comments further below: It looks to me as if pointing this out to the EC would be the shortest and easiest route to the adoption of the EC A1 recommendation -- since strongly supported by the Brussels Open Access Petition -- to implement Green OA self-archiving, for, in effect, it is already mandated! The only thing that still needs to be specified is trivial and noncontroversial: the locus and mode of submission and storage of the already mandated publication. Currently it needs to be sent in by email; the only change needed is to require it to be deposited in a Closed Access URL in an Institutional Repository! More about this below.) A few suggestions are added below concerning the all-important locus of deposit of the published research documents. It is very important (in order to generate a coherent, systematic, universally scaleable solution) that the default locus of deposit should be specified as the researcher's own (OAI-compliant) Institutional Repository (IR). Other loci are possible if the researcher's institution does not yet have an IR: there are numerous possible Central Repositories (CRs), national and international, and the EU could perhaps also provide one of its own; but the preferred locus should be the researcher's own IR. The EU policy will also help encourage research institutions to create their own IRs if they have not done so already, and to fill them also with their non-EU-funded research output. That will complement the funded research and make all European peer-reviewed research output OA, maximising its usage and impact: Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) "Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999) "Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003) "France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories" (started Oct 2006) Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? A few comments and suggestions on N. Miradon's text: On Sat, 24 Mar 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:I would add here that depositing them in an interoperable OAI-compliant repository would be optimal, preferably the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR).
The web page or portal can be harvested from the EU researchers' IRs, or it can consist of a list of the projects, or the papers resulting from the projects, together with a link to their URL in the IR in which they are deposited.
The OAI protocol is the standard for making the IRs interoperable. There may need to be some further tag for specifically selecting EU funded publications.
This existing EU/EC policy is already a godsend, as it already provides the basis for the EU to adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate (ID/OA) (also called the "dual deposit/release strategy") without any further need of legislation or consultation: As the EU already requires (i.e., mandates) both (1) the electronic copy of the publication, and (2) the right to make it OA (if and when the copyright agreement with the publisher allows it), the only thing left to stipulate is how "send[ing] to the commission an electronic copy" should be done, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the form of depositing it in the researcher's own IR (preferably, or in a OAI-compliant CR otherwise), in immediate Open Access if possible, otherwise in Closed Access -- and merely sending the commission the URL for the (Closed Access) deposit! The EU can harvest the document if it wishes, or link it in a portal. The only change involved here is a specification of the mode of submission for what has already been mandated by the EC. "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" "Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)" Dual Deposit/Release Strategy A National Open Access Policy (The NIH had a similar opportunity to do this in 2004, but failed to take notice.) "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy(Oct 2004)" And through links to the researcher's own IR. Compare the above to the ID/OA Mandate (or "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy"): "Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication... but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author..." Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, March 24. 2007Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2)
Below is a posting, with permission, of an offline exchange with Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice. I have labelled the dramatis personae and indented for chronology. (The title "Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice" is mine, not Jan's.)
Jan argues that paying for Open Choice Gold OA at this time, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing, would not be double-paying for OA. I argue that it would be. Jan argues that mandating Green OA -- as ERC, ARC, NHMRC, 5 RCUK research councils, and a growing number of universities have done, and as FRPAA, NIH, EC, CIHR and EURAB propose to do -- will destroy journals and peer review. I argue that it will provide OA -- and that if it ever does cause subscription cancellation, then that will be the time to convert to Gold OA, paying the institutional Gold OA publishing costs out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings themselves, rather than pre-emptively double-paying, as we would be doing if we did it now, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing. (I will let Jan have the last word in this posting and will reply separately to a few of his points in my next posting. My surmise is that the careful reader of this exchange will not need my subsequent reply -- though this surmise could be wrong.) Stevan Harnad
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