Monday, March 19. 2007What Students Can Do To Support OA
Peter Suber's OA News reports that Emory University student Brian Pitts has blogged a student resolution (modelled on the University of Florida student resolution) in support of the Federal research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Green OA mandate. Below is a letter to Brian and other students suggesting that they can help OA even more by also lobbying in support of a Green OA Mandate at their own university, rather than just waiting for the passage of the FRPAA mandate:
Dear Brian: Sunday, March 18. 2007Forging An OA Alliance With R&D Industries and Mobilizing University MandatesMany thanks for M. Miradon's remarkable analysis and valuable advice in his commentary on Richard Poynder's rousing article about the struggle for Open Access to European Research. (M. Miradon, I do not know who you are, but I infer you are a present or formal EC official with a great deal of experience with EU politics and a certain sympathy for OA. The OA movement is indeed indebted to you for your insights and insider information.) The "OA movement" is really just a loose federation of mostly academics. It is not skilled or experienced in the area of political lobbying, alas. Some sectors (SPARC US and Europe, perhaps) might be in a position to become more sophisticated in lobbying, but the individual OA activists, being employed academics -- researchers first and activists only second -- are not. The lobbying wings of industries are paid professionals. We have none of those. There is a hope, though, namely, a strategic alliance (perhaps mediated by EURAB) between the academic-researcher OA activists and the vast R&D industry that applies the fruits of research. The R&D industries are far bigger than the publishing industry. They need to be explicitly mobilized to our side (because they too have a strong interest in open access to research, not for themselves directly [which they can easily afford to pay] but for all researchers worldwide [who cannot]: It is researcher-to-researcher access and collaborative/cumulative research progress that supplies R&D industries with the research findings for their R&D applications. But let me make a parallel point: OA is (fortunately) not doomed to wait for legislation, and for lobbying and convincing legislators, in order to prevail. Let us not forget for a minute that if researchers themselves had any sense, we would already have 100% OA, for we would simply self-archive spontaneously. We are too sluggish, busy and confused. Fine, so we need mandates from our research funders and institutions (who are merely busy and confused). Part of their confusion is that they cannot mandate (Green) OA because of something or other having to do with the publishing industry. (It is as vague as that!) So the problem falls into the laps of legislators, who must mandate the researchers' funders and institutions to mandate the researchers to move their fingers. But legislators have not only laps, but bottoms, which they must protect -- from the many lobbying interests to which they are vulnerable. So lobbying becomes the name of the game, for the legislative route. But there is a parallel route, and it has already been engaged in the UK (first) and to an extent also in Europe and Australia: This is the research funding councils (RCUK, ERC, ARC), who can take a cue from the inclinations and interests of the research community, and proceed with a Green OA mandate even if the legislators are deadlocked. And they have begun. And so have individual universities and research institutions. See ROARMAP. And in that sector OA activists can be effective (and have been) without having to learn to navigate the corridors of legislative power. So, in my view, the Brussels meeting was a way to display the will of the research community: the EC petition did that, and now it has given birth to a US petition too. Petitions, of course, will not generate mandates either. But they will help the OA movement "lobby" funders and universities directly, to mandate. Indeed, funders, universities, research institutions, academies and societies, and R&D industries are signing the petitions, officially, as organisations. There remains but a small step to point out that these organisations need not petition the legislators to mandate them to mandate: They can mandate directly themselves! That is the next step: There was already a logical gap in 2002, between researchers (34,000) signing the PLoS petition to publishers, demanding OA, yet not moving their fingers to deposit their own papers. There is now a second logical gap in research funders and institutions signing the EU and US petitions to legislators to mandate Green OA globally, while they do not go ahead individually and mandate OA locally, for their own funding body or their own university! The gap between fingers signing petitions, fingers adopting mandates and fingers depositing papers will be bridged now. It has become too glaringly obvious to be ignored, with all these somber OA declarations, initiatives and manifestos, signed, but no practical action taken! We will keep pursuing the indirect legislative route for global mandates, yes, but we will also publicise and accelerate the direct research-community route of divide and conquer: Local mandates are fully within our own hands, especially at the university level. See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) (also known as the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum PS The request to present the petition to the commissioner in public at the Brussels meeting was denied, but it was nevertheless presented (in private), the presentation was photographed (by Leslie Chan) and the photos were presented at the last session of the meeting, publicly, in Alma Swan's stirring Powerpoint series. Saturday, March 17. 2007Why Cornell's Institutional Repository Is Near-EmptyCritique of: Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. Davis, P.M. & Connolly, M.J.L. D-Lib Magazine 13(3/4) March/April 2007On the contrary; little has been done to develop IRs apart from creating them; moreover, many surveys and analyses have evaluated faculty non-participation and identified how and why to remedy it: By mandating deposit. (See Sale and Swan references at the end of this posting.) D & C: "Results: Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty."This is most decidedly true! The reason is that Cornell researchers are being given equivocal advice instead of an unequivocal mandate. (See: Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver) (I note that, unlike Harvard, Cornell is not one of the 132 Universities that have signed in support of the US Federal Green OA Mandate, the FRPAA; this may be a sign of equivocation, but in Cornell's defense, none of the 132 have yet practised what they petitioned (by adopting locally the global mandate they are urging federally). European, Australian and Asian Universities have been faster off the mark. D & C: "[The only] steady growth [is in] collections in which [Cornell] university has made an administrative investment, such [as] requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace."This passage states the problem (empty IRs) as well as the solution (mandating deposit) -- but the article itself then proceeds to ignore this obvious and already known outcome, and instead goes on and on about the many groundless (and easily answered) reasons faculty cite for not depositing unless it is mandated. The D & C article also wrongly imagines that the primary purpose of IRs is to preserve digital content, rather than to maximise research usage and access by supplementing paid journal access with free access to the author's final draft: (See: Against Conflating OA Self-Archiving With Preservation-Archiving ) D & C: "Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace."Correct. And in that respect Cornell faculty are exactly like faculty at all other universities worldwide that have IRs but no deposit mandate: 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. D & C: "Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories"If all or most faculty were indeed spontaneously despositing their peer-reviewed articles on their personal Web pages or in central disciplinary repositories (CRs) (like Arxiv), there would be no problem: 100% Open Access (OA) would already be upon us, for IRs could easily fill themselves by simply harvesting their faculty's output from their web-pages and CRs. The trouble is that -- except where mandated -- most faculty are not depositing their articles on their Web pages today, and only a few sub-disciplines are depositing in CRs. Hence OA is only at about 15% today. D & C: "[CRs] are perceived to have higher community salience than one's affiliate institution."Right now, the only two CRs with any appreciable content -- Arxiv and PubMed Central -- certainly do have "higher community salience" than IRs, since most IRs are mostly empty. But institutions need merely mandate depositing and the "salience" of their IRs will sail, along with the size of their contents. (Moreover, the true success rate of a repository -- whether IR or CR -- is the percentage of its total annual target content that it is currently capturing. By that proportionate measure, central disciplinary CRs are in fact doing just as badly as unmandated IRs and the real champions are (unsurprisingly) the harvesters like Citeseer, OAIster and Google Scholar that trawl their contents from the distributed IRs and CRs.) All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Researchers' institutions cover all of research output space. Hence researchers' own IRs are the natural and optimal locus for direct deposit. Institutions also have a proprietary interest in showcasing, monitoring, evaluating and storing their own research output -- as well as in maximizing its research impact. Hence both funders and institutions should mandate direct deposit in the researcher's own IR. (CRs can then harvest therefrom, if they wish.) (See: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?) D & C: "Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information"There is no "redundancy" with OA's target content: peer-reviewed journal articles. Those users who can afford paid access, have paid access. Those who do not, have no access. The purpose of OA self-archiving in IRs is to supplement the existing paid access, providing free access to the author's final draft, self-archived online, for those would-be users who do not have paid access to the journal's proprietary version. (The authors of this article, D & C, as we shall see, draw precisely the conclusions from their article that they have themselves put into it, in the form of assumptions, often incorrect ones. Apart from that, all the do is amplify the volume of the faculty misunderstandings they sample, instead of correcting them.) The purpose of maximizing research access is to maximise research impact (download, usage, applications, citations, productivity, progress). D & C: "the learning curve [for depositing articles online]"A non-problem, cured by a few moments of instruction, plus a mandate: Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving) D & C: "confusion with copyright"A non-problem, already completely mooted by the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate: (See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)) Only the depositing itself is mandated; setting access to the deposit as Open Access versus Closed Access is recommended but optional. D & C: "fear of plagiarism"An old canard, cured by referring to Self-Archiving FAQ. D & C: "having one's work scooped"Another old canard. D & C: "associating one's work with inconsistent quality"Yet another old canard. D & C: "concerns about whether posting a manuscript constitutes 'publishing'."One of the oldest canards of them all. D & C: "Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue."Librarians' journal affordability problems helped draw attention to the research accessibility problem, but the affordability and accessibility problems are not the same, nor are their solutions. Cornell faculty are right to regard the affordability problem as not their problem. The accessibility problem, however, is their problem, both from the point of view of Cornell researchers' own lost access to the work of researchers at other institutions (in journals that even Cornell cannot afford to subscribe to) and -- even more important (as most researchers at other institutions are not sitting as pretty as Cornell for subscriptions) -- from the point of view of Cornell researchers' lost research impact (owing to the access problems of would-be users at other institutions). D & C: "Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity."The target content of OA IRs is peer-reviewed journal articles. If there are any disciplines that do not care about maximising the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed journal article output, then there are indeed reasons to examine discipline differences. If not, then what is needed is not discipline-difference studies but pandisciplinary deposit mandates. D & C: "most faculty host their digital objects on a personal website, where their long-term preservation is not secure. If institutions truly value the content created by their faculty, they must take some responsibility for the long-term curation of this content."OA IRs are for supplementary access-provision and usage-maximisation, not for preservation. (What needs preservation is the journal published version, not the author's OA draft.) (See: Against Conflating OA Self-Archiving With Preservation-Archiving) But of course IRs can and will preserve their contents, to make sure their supplementary access provision perdures. D & C: "There are two opposing philosophical camps among those who work to justify institutional repositories: one that views IRs as competition for traditional publishing, the other that sees IRs as a supplement to traditional publishing."There are indeed two opposing views of what IRs are for, but the opposition is certainly not about whether IRs compete with or supplement traditional publishing. It is about whether IRs are primarily for OA content (i.e., peer-reviewed research) or for other kinds of content (e.g., "grey literature"). (There is also some related confusion about whether IRs are primarily for supplementing access or for digital preservation.) Among OA advocates there is no divergence whatsoever on the fact that OA IRs (Green OA) supplement journal publishing; they are not a substitute for it, nor a competitor to it. (There is competition between subscription-based publishing and Gold OA publishing, but that is an entirely different matter, having nothing to do with IRs or Green OA.) Here is a core example of how the authors of this article first make incorrect assumptions, and then simply proceed to derive their inevitably incorrect consequences: D & C: "In 1994, Stevan Harnad wrote his Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, in which he argued that all academics should make their research articles publicly available through open repositories. This collective effort would help to reduce the power wielded by publishers who have built economic barriers to limit scholars' access to the literature."(1) From the very outset, the Subversive Proposal was to supplement traditional publishing with (what we have since come to call) Green OA self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft. Self-archiving was never proposed as a substitute for peer-reviewed journal publication -- as a google search on "harnad supplement substitute" will repeatedly confirm! Latent in the Subversive Proposal -- a Green OA supplement proposal -- was, of course, the possibility of an eventual transition to Gold OA publishing. But that is and always was treated as a hypothetical possibility, whereas Green OA self-archiving (which eventually led to the first OA IR software, EPrints, and eventually to the OA IR movement) was proposed as a concrete, practical action, within reach of all researchers -- a practical action that has since been widely tried, tested, and confirmed empirically to work, and to deliver the enhanced research usage and impact for which it was intended. (2) Davis & Connolly have also completely conflated the explicitly stated purpose of the Subversive Proposal -- which was to maximize research access and usage -- with the library community's struggle with the journal affordability problem. Green OA self-archiving is not about "reducing publisher power" nor about changing economics. It is just about maximizing research access. D & C: "In opposition, Clifford Lynch views IRs as supplements, not primary venues for scholarly publishing, and warns against assuming the role of certification in the scholarly publishing process."All OA IR advocates view IRs as supplements: a way to provide free access to the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication by the "primary venue" (the journal) -- not as a substitute form of peer review or certification or publication. D & C: "[Lynch] argues that "the institutional repository isn't a journal, or a collection of journals, and should not be managed like one""Preaching to the choir: No one thinks IRs are journals. D & C: "Lynch fears that viewing IRs as instruments for undermining the economics of the current publishing system discounts their importance and reduces their ability to promote a broader spectrum of scholarly communication."IRs are not "instruments for undermining the economics of the current publishing system" they are instruments for maximizing the access and impact of currently published research articles. D & C: "Institutional repositories may better serve to disseminate the so-called "grey literature": documents such as pamphlets, bulletins, visual conference presentations, and other materials that are typically ignored by traditional publishers."The idea that IRs should focus on the grey (unpublished) literature instead of the OA Green literature remains just as off-the-mark and wrong-headed today as on the day it was first mooted: (See: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives) D & C: "DSpace was not conceived as competition to commercial publishers, but as a resource to capture, preserve and communicate the diversity of intellectual output of an institution's faculty and researchers It was designed specifically to deal with a wide range of content types including research articles, grey literature, theses, cultural materials, scientific datasets, institutional records, and educational materials, among others."More's the pity that DSpace does not now, nor did it ever, have its priorities straight. The #1 priority for IRs is and always has been (or ought to have been!) OA. (See: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?) D & C: "On May 1st, 2005, a policy was enacted that recommended, not required, that all researchers receiving grant monies from the National Institutes of Heath deposit final copies of their manuscripts in PubMed Central (PMC), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PMC offers many valuable services to authors, such as indexing in Medline (the primary literature index for the biomedical and life sciences), as well as dynamic links to the published version of their article. After eight months, the participation rate remained a dismal 3.8%. Lack of awareness of the policy was not cited as contributing to the low compliance rate. On December 14th, 2005, Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced the CURES Act (S.2104), which would require (not recommend) mandatory deposit of final manuscripts"The NIH Public Access Policy failed for three reasons (in order of priority): The remedy for this was pointed out in advance to NIH (but went unheeded): "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy")(1) because it was not a mandate, but merely a request, The remedy -- the ID/OA mandate -- has since been taken on board in the European Research Advisory Board's policy recommendation. ID/OA has just been adopted by University of Liege -- the first, let's hope, of many adopters, including the US's omnibus Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). (See: How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate) D & C: "Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Its complex organization is seen at comparable institutions, but may discourage contributions to DSpace by making it appear empty. In addition, faculty have little knowledge of and no motivation to use DSpace."The only thing Cornell's DSpace is missing is the ID/OA mandate. That mandate needs to replace or at least complement Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver. D & C: "Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and inertia. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, IRs will need to address this cultural diversity."No, the remedy is not to delve into disciplinary diversity. It is to promote what all disciplines (indeed all of research) have in common, which is the need to maximize the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed research findings -- by mandating Green OA. Stevan HarnadSwan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report. American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, March 15. 2007Gold Fever and Trojan FollyOn Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice, wrote in liblicense: JV: "The Howard Hughes (HHMI-Elsevier) deal is not a setback for open access, even if it is not the greatest imaginable step forwards perhaps."It is not a setback for the minuscule number of articles for which HHMI will finance paid (Gold) OA. It is a setback for all the other articles that could be made (Green) OA through mandated author self-archiving, for free, while subscriptions are still continuing to pay the publication costs. It is not only a waste of money, but it plays into the hands of those who are trying to delay or derail Green self-archiving mandates at all costs. JV: "To knock the HHMI for getting into this deal is short-sighted."It is HHMI that is being short-sighted (and gullible). HHMI ought instead simply to mandate Green OA self-archiving, and to leave it at that. JV: "And subject lines like 'Trojan Horse' with their insidious negativity raise the suspicion that the agenda of some list participants is not really 'open access', but a desire to get rid of publishers or of the notion that publishing, including open access publishing, actually costs money."Nonsense. Open Choice is a Trojan Horse if it is taken as a pretext for paying for Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA. No one is trying to get rid of publishers. We are trying to get rid of access-barriers. Green OA does just that. And while subscriptions are still being (amply) paid for, no one is unaware of the fact that publishing costs money. What is urgently needed today is not money to pay for Gold OA, but mandates to provide Green OA. JV: "It's a delusion that one can get open access by self-archiving mandates that imply having to rely on librarians to keep paying for subscriptions to keep journals alive."Institutions are paying for subscriptions today. That is no delusion. There is little OA today. That is no delusion. Green self-archiving mandates will generate 100% OA. That is no delusion. What happens to subscriptions after that is speculation, not delusion. JV: "Or is the idea that librarians keep paying for journals of which the articles are available with open access part of the proposed mandates?"Institutions are paying for librarians today. That is not proposed; that is already going on. What is not already going on is OA self-archiving. That is what the Green mandates are for. Whether and when institutions will cancel subscriptions because of mandated Green OA is a purely speculative matter, today. What is not speculative is that if and when institutions ever do cancel subscriptions, that money will then be freed to pay for Gold OA costs; not before. Nor is it speculation that Green OA will already have provided 100% OA by then. JV: "Authors can self-publish easily these days and provide open access to their articles to their hearts' content."Why is Jan telling us this? OA is not -- and never has been -- about self-publishing; nor is it about unpublished articles. It is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed, published articles. JV: "Once they involve a publisher, though, they don't do that out of altruistic motives."No. Nor does the publisher. But publishers are being paid in full, today, by subscriptions, whereas Open Access is not being provided, today. And consequently research impact is needlessly being lost today. It would not just be altruism but profligacy to double-pay for Gold OA today. And it would be (and is) not altruistic but foolhardy in the extreme to continue doing without OA, and with the attendant daily loss in research impact and progress, for failure to mandate Green OA. (Foolhardy for the research community, and the public that funds it, I mean: Not necessarily foolhardy for the publishing community!) JV: "They don't 'give' their articles to publishers. They come to ask for a 'label', a 'mark', an official journal reference that makes their article from a piece of text, perhaps interesting, but not recognised by the academic community, into a formally peer-reviewed and published article. It's not the publishers that compel them to do that."I don't know why we are being regaled with all this rhetorical complexity: Researchers submit their papers to journals for two reasons: (1) to get them peer-reviewed andThat is what subscriptions are already paying for. OA is for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the subscription version. It is not authors who seek or get the revenues from subscriptions, it is publishers. No altruism on either side. And the only thing missing, in the online age, is OA. And Green OA mandates will provide that. JV: "And publishers cannot provide those services, on the scale they are needed, on a philanthropic basis."No one is asking them to: Subscriptions are paying, amply. OA is about those users who cannot afford access to the subscription version. JV: "This may be possible for a number of small journals, and where it is possible it deserves to be done that way and probably is already."Jan (and the publishing community) keep talking about journals and journal cost-recovery models. Fine. The research community is talking about OA, and impact-loss-recovery methods. The only tried, tested, successful method of impact-loss-recovery within immediate reach is mandating OA self-archiving. That has nothing to do with journal cost-recovery models. Jan is talking at cross-purposes with OA, with his fixation on payment models (when there is no non-payment problem today, whereas there is a no-access problem today). In thus talking at cross-purposes, Jan (and those of the same persuasion) are standing in the way of a tried, tested, successful, and immediately reachable means of solving the access problem. They are instead promoting a Trojan Horse. JV: "But the worldwide scientific enterprise needs sustainable large-scale industrial-strength publishing to deal with the publication of more than a million new articles a year (and in terms of submissions a multiple of that, given that most papers are rejected at least once)."Can we transfer the problem of the "sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" to another venue than discussions of OA? OA is an immediate, pressing, and immediately solvable problem for research and researchers. Its solution is for research institutions and funders to mandate Green OA, as a few have already begun doing, others have proposed to do, and researchers and institutions have petitioned them to do. The quest for a solution to the "the problem of the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" can proceed in parallel with the quest for OA, but it should not be conflated with it, or get in the way of it. To oppose Green OA mandates and urge "Open Choice" in their stead is precisely the Trojan Horse against which I am warning. JV: "The HHMI deal is a very positive step towards sustainable open access and should be recognised for that. The 'cure' of OA publishing is to be preferred to the 'palliative' of self-archiving. The derision that funding agencies suffer who put open access first, and not cost reduction, is uncalled-for."Who on earth is talking about cost-reduction? The disease is needless, ongoing, online research access/impact loss. The cure is OA. Green OA is OA. It might be merely a "palliative" for "the problem of the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" but it is a cure for the disease of research access/impact loss. What deserves exposure and derision is the attempt to deter and devalue and deride a sure and reachable immediate cure for the disease of research/impact loss in the name of some other uncured "disease" that has next to nothing to do with the research community's immediate, pressing, and solvable access/impact needs today. JV: "If a full, safe cure for a disease is possible, though not necessarily cheaper than lifelong symptom-management and the real possibility of a much shorter life, is it better to go for cheap palliative care than for this full cure?"As usual, we are talking about two different "diseases." One -- "the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" -- is a long-term, hypothetical money-matter with which the publishing community is concerned; the other -- research access/impact loss -- is an immediate, urgent, ongoing practical research-matter with which the research community is concerned -- and it has an immediate, practical solution: Mandated Green OA. To deter, defer or derail the research community's solution to the research community's problem, by portraying the publishing community's industrial long-term sustainability problem as if it were the same problem as the research community's immediate access/impact problem is simply false and misleading. To oppose the research community's immediately reachable solution to its access/impact problem (mandated Green OA) in favour of paying for Gold OA today is nothing more nor less than what I have called it: The promotion of a Trojan Horse. Caveat Emptor. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Don't Count Your (Golden) Chickens Before Your (Green) Eggs Are Laid
I would dearly love to adhere to my dictum "Hypotheses non Fingo," but with hypotheses being finged willy-nilly by others -- at the cost of neglecting or even discouraging tried-and-tested practical (and a-theoretical) action (i.e., Green OA mandates) -- I am left with little choice but to resort to counter-hypothesizing: On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Michael Kurtz [MK] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: MK: "(A) THE CURRENT SITUATION. The quantity of scientific research has been increasing exponentially for several generations. This increase, roughly an order of magnitude during my lifetime (~4% per year, essentially the same as the growth in the global economy), has been mediated and enabled by the existing system for scientific communication, namely toll access journals and libraries."Correct. And another thing has happened in the past generation or so: The birth of the Net and Web, making it possible to supplement toll-access with author-provided free online access (Green OA). That development has next to nothing to do with the growth in the number of articles, nor with the price of journals. It has to do with the possibility of supplementing toll access with free online access. MK: "(B) THE CURRENT COSTS. Direct costs for journals are remarkably small, about 1% of the total research and development budget (1). This compares with other costs involved such as (2) unpaid refereeing and editing 1% and the non-acquisition costs of a library, 2%. Possible changes to the direct cost of journals, up or down, are likely to be smaller than the error in estimating the yearly inflation adjustments."Correct, but irrelevant to the question of providing free online access for would-be users who cannot afford toll access. Yes, if the money currently being spent on user-institution access-tolls were instead redirected to pay for author-institution publication charges, no more or less money would be spent, and online access would be free (Gold OA). But that is happening far too slowly, and does not depend only on the researcher community. Supplementing toll access with free online access (Green OA) is entirely in the hands of the research community. Providing supplementary online access for free can be accelerated to 100% within a year or two through the adoption of research funder and university Green OA self-archiving mandates. That too is in the hands of the research community. Until it is done, research usage and impact continues to be lost, needlessly, daily. MK: "(C) THE POSSIBLE BENEFIT OF OPEN ACCESS. The purpose of OA is to increase the amount and quality of research. The growth rate of research is currently ~4%; if OA is a massive success, it could perhaps increase this growth rate by 10%, which would be a yearly increment of 0.4% of total research. It may be expected that the greatest effect of OA would be in cross-disciplinary research, such as Nanotechnology."(The quantitative estimates are still rather speculative. [Here are some more.] But let us agree that providing OA will indeed increase research productivity and progress.) MK: "(D) THE RISK OF OPEN ACCESS. By substantially changing the economics of journal publishing OA risks the catastrophic financial collapse of some publishers. This is especially true for the mandated 100% green OA path."If and when mandated 100% Green OA does cause subscriptions to be cancelled to unsustainable levels, the resultant user-institution subscription savings can be redirected to pay instead for author-institution publication charges (Gold OA). Green OA mandates, by research institutions and funders are possible (indeed actual), and can grow institution by institution and funder by funder. If Gold OA (with its attendant redirection of subscription funds) can be mandated at all, it certainly cannot be done institution by institution and funder by funder (with 24,000 journals, 10,000 institutions, and hundreds of public funders worldwide). Redirection, if it is to occur at all, has to be driven by Green OA mandates. Pre-emptive redirection of funds (by an institution or a funder) toward Gold OA, without being preceded by 100% Green OA, is a waste of money, effort and time, today. (After 100% Green OA it is fine, as long as there is no double-paying, through redirection of research money instead of subscription money.) MK: "(E) CURRENT GREEN MODELS. There are basically two types of Green repository: centralized, such as arXiv, and distributed, as the institutional repositories. Only arXiv has much of a track record. After more than 15 years arXiv only has more than half the refereed articles in the two subfields of High Energy Physics and Astrophysics; only HEP has more than 90%. It does not appear that there is any subfield of science where the existing institutional repositories contain more than half of the refereed literature."It is completely irrelevant where the free online articles are located. (The IRs and CRs are all OAI-interoperable.) What matters is that 100% of articles should be free online. Spontaneous central archiving has not reached 100% in 15 years (where it is being done at all). The natural and optimal place for institutions to mandate the deposit of their own article output is in their own IRs. That covers all of research output space. Mandated IRs fill within two years. Research funder mandates should reinforce the institutional mandates. If CRs are desired, they can harvest from the IRs. MK: "(F) CURRENT GOLD MODELS. Page charges have existed for decades as a method of financing journals; while their use has been in decline for some time several venerable titles use them, in whole or in part, and there are several new, page charge funded, OA journals. Direct subsidies, by scholarly organizations and funding agencies, have long been used to support scientific publishing. Nearly all technical reports series are funded in this manner."Publication charges are currently being fully covered by subscriptions, but access is not open to all would-be users, hence research usage and impact (productivity and progress) are being needlessly lost. There is no realistic way (nor is there a will) to redirect the subscription money currently being spent by 10,000 user-institutions worldwide for various subsets of 24,000 journals toward instead paying author-institution Gold OA publication charges. Hence the only money that can be redirected to pay for Gold OA today (by institutions or funders) is money that is currently being spent on research or other expenses, thereby effectively double-paying for publication (and at a time when subscription costs are already inflated). Hence if the goal is 100% OA, the way to reach it is through institutions and funders mandating Green OA. After that, redirect toward Gold OA to your heart's content. But to do so before that, or instead of that, is pure folly. P.S. The journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem are not the same problem. Green OA mandates will solve the research accessibility problem for sure. They may or may not cause unsustainable cancellations, but either way they will ease, though not solve, the journal affordability problem (by making the decision about which journal subscriptions to purchase from a limited serials budget into less of a life-or-death question, given that 100% Green OA is there as a safety net for accessing whatever an institutions cannot afford). Green OA, if it causes cancellations, will also cause cost-cutting and downsizing (the IRs can take over the access-provision and archiving load, leaving the journals with peer-review management as their only service), making (post-Green) Gold OA more affordable than it would be today (pre-Green). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, March 14. 2007US and EU Both Have Petitions for OA Mandates
The US Alliance for Tax-Payer Access and other sponsors have just launched a US counterpart to the highly successful and still-growing EU Petition calling for Open Access to be mandated by research funders and institutions.
The EU Petition already has over 23,000 signatories, including over 1000 organisations (universities, research funders, academies of sciences, scholarly societies, research and development industries, publishers).US Petition If you are officially signing for an organisation, please don't just sign the petition! Do locally what you are petitioning for: Adopt an OA self-archiving mandate at your institution, as the Rector of the University of Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier has just done (see below) and register your mandate in ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies). Liege's is the latest of 9 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, and 11 research funder mandates already adopted worldwide, plus 5 funder mandates and 1 multi-institution mandate proposed. Not only has Universite de Liege adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate, but it has adopted the ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate recommended by EURAB and specifically designed to immunise the policy from all the permissions problems (imagined and real) and embargoes that have been delaying adoption of Green OA mandates or have led to the adoption of sub-optimal mandates (that allowed deposit to be delayed or not done at all, depending on publisher policy). Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)The key to the ID/OA mandate's success and power is that it separates the mandatory component (deposit of the final peer-reviewed draft immediately upon acceptance for publication -- no delays, no exceptions) from the access-setting component. (Immediate setting of access to the deposit as Open Access is strongly recommended, but not mandatory: provisionally setting access as Closed Access is an allowable option where judged necessary.) It is to be hoped now that the ULg policy will first spread to the other francophone universities of Belgium, then to the rest of Belgium, Europe, and worldwide. University OA self-archiving mandates are an essential complement to the researcher funder OA self-archiving mandates. University mandates cover unfunded as well as funded research, and provide the all-important locus for the deposit (whether mandated by the funder or the university): the researcher's own university's Institutional Repository.Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:35:15 -0400 Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 13. 2007Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly
On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Leslie Chan wrote:
"I see the Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI-Elsevier deal [in which HHMI pays for for "gold" OA publishing of its funded research] as a major set back for institutional self-archiving as it muddies the green landscape, which I am sure is one of the underlying intents of Elsevier and other publishers in the STM group. I suspect more publishers may follow suit and reverse their stand on green if they think there is money to be made. Something needs to happen quickly. The Trojan Horse has proved to work, unfortunately. What should we do?"I know exactly what needs to be done, and it has been obvious all along: The mandates have to be taken completely out of the hands of publishers and out of the reach of embargoes, and there is a sure-fire way to do it: The mandates must be Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandates. Let the access to the deposit be provisionally set as Closed Access wherever there is the slightest doubt. That way publishers have no say whatsoever in whether or when the deposit itself is done. Then let the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button -- and human nature, and the optimality of OA -- take care of the rest of its own accord, as it will. If only we have the sense to rally behind ID/OA. Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)It is as simple as that. But we have to unite behind ID/OA, and give a clear consistent message (and for that we have to first clearly understand ID/OA!) If we keep flirting with embargoes and Gold and publishing reform and funding instead of univocally rallying behind the ID/OA mandate that will immunise us from publisher policies and further embargoes, we will get nowhere, and indeed we will lose ground. It is as simple as that. (P.S. HHMI got into this because of another legacy of folly, not originating with HHMI: The irrational insistence on central deposit in PubMed Central instead of local deposit in each researcher's own Institutional Repository. A Central Repository can -- on a far-fetched construal -- be argued to be a rival 3rd party re-publisher. Not so the author's own institution, archiving its own research.) Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, March 8. 2007Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat EmptorACS Press Release: "The American Chemical Society’s Publications Division now offers an important publishing option in support of the Society’s journal authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles. The ACS AuthorChoice option, first launched in October 2006, provides a fee-based mechanism for individual authors or their research funding agencies to sponsor the open availability of their articles on the Web at the time of online publication. Under this policy, the ACS as copyright holder enables unrestricted Web access to a contributing author’s publication from the Society’s website, in exchange for a fixed payment from the sponsoring author. ACS AuthorChoice also enables such authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal websites and institutional repositories for non-commercial scholarly purposes. Dear colleagues, I urge you to beware of the American Chemical Society's cynical, self-serving "AuthorChoice" Option. This is an "offer" to "allow" authors to pay, not just in order to provide Gold OA -- which is what hybrid Gold/Green publishers like Springer ("Open Choice") and Cambridge University Press ("Open Option") offer -- but in order to provide Green OA! (Virtually all other hybrid-Gold publishers are Green on author self-archiving, and do not presume to charge for it.) In other words, ACS is proposing to charge authors for the right to deposit their own papers in their own Institutional Repositories. This ploy was bound to be tried, but I urge you not to fall for it! You already have an unassailable right to deposit your peer-reviewed, accepted final drafts (postprints) of your ACS articles in your Institutional Repository. If you don't feel you can make them Open Access just yet, make them Closed Access for now, but deposit them, immediately upon acceptance for publication (the preprint even earlier). (The "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) " policy.) OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and universities, with time-limits on embargoes, are now being proposed and adopted to ensure that your deposits are not left in Closed Access for long. But on no account should you pay ACS a penny for the right to deposit. If you feel your deposit needs to be placed under a provisional Closed Access Embargo, "almost-OA" is immediately available via the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST Button that is being implemented by more and more Institutional Repositories. Direct individual user-to-author eprint requests and their fulfillment online are Fair Use, as they have always been, even when authors mailed paper reprints to individual requesters. To pay for Gold OA today out of scarce research funds -- while all publication costs are still being fully paid for by subscriptions -- is already irrational. But to pay for Green OA would border on the absurd. Caveat Emptor! On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Adam Chesler (American Chemical Society) wrote (to the American Scientist Open Access Forum): "Recent posts to the listserv have contributed to a misunderstanding about the ACS AuthorChoice program to provide open article access... The ACS Author Choice option is for authors who wish or need to sponsor open access to their published research articles. It allows immediate open web access to the final published article as delivered from the ACS web site, in exchange for a fixed fee paid by the author or author's sponsor... ACS AuthorChoice also licenses authors to post electronic copies of published articles on their own personal websites... for scholarly purposes..."Does ACS endorse the posting of authors' peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional website for scholarly purpose without fee? In other words, is ACS now "Green" on author self-archiving, as the following American Learned Societies are? That is the only point at issue. The understanding is that ACS authors are instead asked to pay ACS to do this: Is this the case?American Anthropological Association (If I have indeed misunderstood, a profound and sincere apology is in order.) "ACS permits within the first 12 months of publication up to 50 complimentary article downloads to interested readers who are not already ACS subscribers; at 12 months and thereafter, reader access via these author-directed links is unlimited."My question is about the 51st to the Nth would-be user request during the first 12 months from the date of acceptance for publication, not just about the first 50. However, the draft in question need not be the official ACS PDF: just the author's final accepted version: Does ACS endorse the posting of authors' peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites for scholarly purposes without fee? Reply from Adam Chesler (American Chemical Society), on American Scientist Open Access Forum:I don't doubt that these free adverstisements serve ACS (and the first 50 would-be users) well during the 12-month embargo. I would urge all ACS authors to also deposit their postprints in their own Institutional Repositories, provisionally setting access as "Closed Access", if they wish. (This makes only the metadata visible and accessible to all.) During the embargo, this makes "almost-OA" immediately available for all would-be users webwide via the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST Button that is being implemented by more and more Institutional Repositories. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Physics World: The CERN Gold OA Initiative
In Open Access News, Peter Suber comments on John Harnad's critique of the CERN plan for gold OA:
Harnad, John (2007) Clarifying Open Access: its implications for the research community (Letter). Physics World 29(3).Here are my comments on Peter Suber's comments. (As will be seen, on some points I agree with John Harnad, and on others I agree with Peter Suber.) JH 1: 'Green' OA can achieve [OA] quite adequately, without transferring the cost burden to researchers.This has neither been tested nor even thought-through. There are about 10,000 research universities in the world, perhaps 3000 "core" universities, and maybe 800-1200 mainstay institutional subscribers for each average journal.PS: True. But under the CERN plan, there would be no burden to researchers either. Journals in particle physics would convert from TA to OA, and the institutions that formerly paid subscriptions would thereafter pay author-side publication fees. Authors themselves would pay nothing. There are very few one-discipline research institutions like CERN. Subscriptions are collective annual packages and commitments. Institutional BioMedCentral-style "memberships" are not: Journals cannot contract to accept N articles annually from a particular university and universities cannot contract to submit N articles annually to a particular journal. Even if annual quotas can be estimated annually from prior-year averages, this does not scale to universities that did not previously subscribe to the journal, yet publish articles in it. Nor does it scale to universities that have many journals in many disciplines, and cannot readily make special arrangements for just a few journals and institutional contributors to those journals. I -- like Peter Suber and unlike my brother -- do believe, however, that this kind of redirection will be possible, but only if/when all journals in all disciplines at all universities are being cancelled because of 100% or near-100% Green OA. Pre-emptively doing that redirection now, however, journal by journal -- especially with no necessary match between subscription input and publication output at the journal or field level at a given university -- may look like it makes sense to one-field institutions like CERN, but it looks very different to the overwhelming majority of the c. 10,000 universities that exist -- or even the 800-1200 subscribing universities that make up the mainstay for each individual journal. CERN may be able to talk this "consortium" of 800-1200 instutions per journal into a BioMedCentral-style "membership" agreement, but the question then is whether it will last, or scale. There is a huge speculative element in the assumption that this can all be done as smoothly as CERN anticipates, in the short- and long term. And either way: what is the point of doing it now, when what is urgently needed is much more OA, not top-down business experiments in fields where OA is already well along its way? (To put this into context: CERN has been absolutely superb -- a historic pioneer and world leader -- in OA provision and OA provision policy. CERN was one of the first institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate and CERN's OA Institutional Repository has accordingly been filled, with stunning success. CERN is almost 100% OA for current research output. This is the winning model that CERN should now be promoting across institutions and disciplines, not a premature, pre-emptive and unnecessary Gold Rush. The time for that is after the rest of the research world has caught up with CERN and nears 100% Green OA. Not before. Or instead.) JH 2: Journals must generate revenue by one or more of the following mechanisms....Peter is right that JH's list of funding sources and business models is not exhaustive. But, as Peter says, we don't know much about the long-term viability of these other business models either -- nor whether they would scale to more journals or all journals.PS:This short list oversimplifies the situation. The majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees and we don't know much about what business models they use instead. But we do know that some receive direct or indirect institutional subsidies, and some generate revenue from a separate line of non-OA publications, auxiliary services, membership dues, endowments, reprints, or a print or premium edition. None of these revenue sources appears on JH 's short list. Again, a needless push is being given toward an untested business model at a time when (1) what is urgently needed is more OA in other fields, not new business models (in a field that is already more advanced in OA than most); and (2) for the reason mentioned earlier, it is not clear whether the pre-emptive "redirection" plans scale even within the field in question, rather than creating hardships for multidiscipline universities that don't fit the CERN model. JH 3: In most areas of physics...the choice boils down either to "subscriber pays" or "author pays".Again, if that 6.5% is itself sustainable (rather than short-lived) that still leaves JH's point applicable to 93.5% of OA journals -- and much higher, once we consider the percentage of all physics journals (of which the OA ones are only about 10%). So it is probably quite realistic to state that it's a choice between subscriber-institution pays or author-institution pays; and that there are no known, viable options other than subsidy or volunteerism (which are highly unlikely to scale).PS: The DOAJ lists 199 peer-reviewed OA journals in physics (excluding astronomy), of which 13 charge no author-side publication fees. That's about 6.5%, even before the CERN plan takes effect. JH 4: Although some public funding agencies have expressed themselves in favour of OA, none have indicated willingness to increase their total funding to cover such extra expenses.This is a straight "redirection" of each journal's core 800-1200 subscribers from subscription charges to consortial "memberships." It might or might not work, short- or long-term. What is sure is that it's not what's needed urgently today (OA is). And it is likely that this pre-emptive redirection will cause problems for at least some institutions and researchers.PS: The European Research Council is willing, although I believe its willingness was only made known this week. In any case, the point is moot for the CERN plan, since the publication fees will be covered by the members of the CERN-assembled consortium. And it will not advance the cause of Green OA or Green OA mandates. (The ERC funding would mean a redirection of scarce research funds along the lines that researchers worry about; but fortunately it is just an optional way a fundee is permitted to spend alotted funds -- and, most important, it is coupled with a Green OA mandate: the difference between night and day.) JH 5: There is also a mistaken notion that 'Gold' OA is more cost effective, because electronic papers are much cheaper to produce and distribute. But this has more to do with advances in technology than the OA model itself.I agree completely with Peter that getting rid of the paper edition and offloading access and storage onto the distributed IR network would cut both costs and services in a way that merely going online would not.PS: Not true. Several kinds of savings can be traced to the OA model itself: OA dispenses with print (or prices the optional print edition at cost), eliminates subscription management, eliminates DRM, eliminates lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, reduces or eliminates marketing, and reduces or eliminates profit margins. Also note that one of CERN's findings in June 2006 was that "sponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the enquiry would require an annual budget of 5-6 Million €, significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions." But to realise those economies, the paper edition first has to be abandoned, and the offloading network needs to be in place, and filled. Cancellation pressure from universal Green OA might just give rise to that outcome. But the pre-emptive redirection that is instead being contemplated here sounds more like just re-baptising the current core subscriptions as "consortial memberships" at the current asking price. So no economies, just redirection. JH 6: [T]he scientific quality of journals switching to the author-pays model may be adversely affected.I agree with Peter that this is not a worry at all.PS: For the case on the other side, see my October 2006 article, Open access and quality. JH 7: The ideal of open access can largely be achieved, however, simply by encouraging deposit of all publications in freely accessible archives.But that is the point! What is the point of going in this needless, untested direction when what is urgently needed is to mandate (not just "encourage") Green self-archiving, in the rest of particle physics as well as the rest of the disciplines and institutions, so we can have 100% OA at long last? Why the Gold Rush instead?PS: Agreed! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, March 5. 2007The Siren Call of Speculations About Publishing Reform
As it's unclear how to log on to post a comment to Jim Till's blog, I do it here:
(1) OA means Open Access, not Open Access Publishing (Gold OA). (2) The "transition phase" we are in is between non-OA and OA, not particularly between non-OA publishing and OA publishing (Gold) (although possibly, after OA, an eventual transition to Gold OA might follow) (3) Hence the pertinent "transitional scenario" today is neither "Scenario A" (research funders allow fundees to use research funds, optionally, to pay Gold OA fees), nor "Scenario B" (research funders allow fundees to use research funds, nonoptionally, designated to pay Gold OA fees). (4) The pertinent transitional scenario today -- the one adopted and proposed by all funder mandates to date (except the Wellcome Trust mandate, which also funds Gold) -- is "Scenario OA": research funders mandate that fundees make their published articles OA by self-archiving them free for all on the web: Green OA. (5) Scenario OA (Green) is the one wisely proposed by CIHR: Not scenarios A or B. (6) I continue to be baffled, utterly baffled, by the preoccupation with speculating about hypothetical transitions to Gold OA instead of the practical, immediate transition to OA, via Green OA mandates. (7) Green OA is within immediate reach. (8) Those who prefer instead to keep speculating about Gold OA should at least declare that their interest is not really in OA itself, but merely in reforming the business model of journal publishers. (9) The research community, in the meantime, keeps losing its daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact, cumulatively, while we keep debating about hypothetical transitions to Gold OA. (10) The full weight of those whose primary interest is in the transition to OA should accordingly be thrown behind the Green OA mandates, forsaking all others (till 100% OA is safely upon us or imminent). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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