Saturday, March 3. 2007CETERUM CENSEO...
I like my friend Jan Velterop's good-natured replies (even though, I cannot, of course, agree with most of what he says). I am also more than happy for Jan to invoke my "ceterum censeo" to anticipate my likely response, that being precisely what I myself have been calling it for years!
But let us cut to the quick, because this is all in reality exceedingly simple, once shorn of the ideology, wishful thinking and non-sequiturs: (1) Jan is for OA; so am I.Jan "challenges" me, in return, to say whether as an OA advocate I would support a Gold OA mandate that would forbid fundee institutions to use research funds for subscriptions, allowing them to be used only to pay OA publishing costs. I can answer quite explicitly: If such a Gold OA mandate were also coupled with a Green OA mandate, and were ensured of wide, quick adoption, whereas a simple Green mandate alone was not, then I would definitely support the Green/Gold mandate. But that is not the reality at all. The reality is that not even stand-alone Green OA mandates are being adopted sufficiently widely and quickly yet (although there are grounds for optimism), and that the two reasons they are not being adopted widely and quickly enough are (a) publisher opposition and (b) worries about whether, at the current (arbitrary) asking price, Gold OA would be viable and affordable. I think simple Green OA mandates alone will be able to overcome the opposition and delays, whereas burdening the efforts to get an OA mandate adopted at all with still further handicaps (such as complicated and unnecessary constraints on funding budget overheads, uncertain interactions with library budgets, and uncertainty about the current viability -- or even the necessity -- of Gold OA publishing) would simply increase resistance and delay or derail adoption of any OA mandate at all. So I support and promote simple Green OA mandates, not Green OA mandates with budgetary constraints pre-emptively redirecting research funds that are currently used for subscriptions toward paying instead for Gold OA publishing charges. I don't think that is necessary or even makes sense now, though it might eventually make sense if and when it is needed, i.e., if and when Green OA is ever exerting significant cancellation pressure on subscriptions. What we need right now is OA -- and mandating Green OA is the fastest, surest way to generate 100% OA. Ceterum censeo... Cato the Elder On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving MandatesThe online age has given birth to a very profound conflict of interest between what is best for (1) the research journal publishing industry, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what is best for (2) research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. It is no one's fault that this conflict of interest has emerged. It was a consequence of the revolutionary new power and potential for research that was opened up by the Web era. What is at stake can also be put in very concrete terms: (1) hypothetical risk of future losses in publisher revenueThe way in which this conflict of interest will need to be resolved is also quite evident: The research publishing industry is a service industry. It will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa. And what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the tax-paying public in the online age is: Open Access (free online access). That is what maximizes research usage and impact, productivity and progress. The research publishing industry lobby of course does not quite see it this way. It is understandable that their first commitment is to their own business interests, hence to what is best for their bottom lines, rather than to something else, such as Open Access, and what is best for research and researchers. But what is especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when so-called "Open Access" publishers take exactly the same stance against Open Access (OA) itself (sic) that conventional publishers do. Conventional publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded) but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been self-deluded if not hypocritical. Let me be very specific: There are two ways to provide OA: Either individual authors make their own (conventionally) published journal article's final draft ("postprint") freely accessible on the Web, or their journals make their published drafts freely accessible on the Web. The first is called "Green OA" (OA self-archiving) and the second is called "Gold OA" (OA publishing). In other words, one of the forms of OA (OA publishing, Gold OA) is a new form of publishing, whereas the other (OA author self-archiving, Green OA) is not: Green OA is just conventional subscription-based publishing plus author self-help; the author supplements the usual access to the publisher's subscription-based version for those users who can afford it with a free onine version for those who cannot. Both forms of OA are equivalent; both maximize research usage and impact. But Green OA depends on the author whereas Gold OA depends on the publisher. Now both forms of OA do represent some possible risk to publishers' current revenue streams: With Green OA, there is the risk that the authors' free online versions will make subscription revenue decline, possibly unsustainably.So let us not deny the possibility that OA in either form may represent some risk to publishers' revenues and hence to their current way of doing business. The real question is whether or not that risk, and the possibility of having to adapt to it by changing the way publishers do business, outweighs the vast and certain benefits of OA to research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the tax-paying public. This question has been addressed by the various interested parties for several years now. But lately -- after much (too much) delay and debate with publishers -- research funders as well as research institutions have begun to take OA matters into their own hands by mandating Green OA. Funder Mandates: As a condition for receiving research grants, fundees must self-archive in their Institutional OA Repositories (or Central OA Repositories) the final drafts of any resulting articles that are accepted for publication: The European Research Council (ERC), 5 of 8 (and soon 6 out of 7) UK Research Councils, the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Wellcome Trust have already mandated Green OA self-archiving. In the US both the Federal Public Research Access Act (FRPAA) and a mandated upgrade of the NIH Public Access Policy are likewise proposing a self-archiving mandate. Similar proposals are under consideration in Canada, individual European countries, and Asia.These Green OA mandates by research funders and institutions have been vigorously opposed by some (not all) portions of the publishing industry: the opposing lobby has already succeeded in delaying the adoption of Green OA mandates on a number of occasions. Nevertheless, the benefits of OA to research are so great that such attempts to delay or derail the Green OA mandates are proving unsuccessful. The specific issue I wish to address here, however, is the stance of (some) Gold OA publishers on the Green OA mandates: Most Gold OA publishers support Green OA mandates. After all, a Gold OA journal is also, a fortiori, a Green journal (as are about 65% of conventional journals), in that it explicitly endorses OA self-archiving by its authors. But endorsing individual author self-archiving is not the same as endorsing self-archiving mandates by funders and universities. So it is not surprising that although most conventional journal publishers endorse individual author self-archiving, many of them oppose self-archiving mandates. So what about those Gold OA journal publishers that oppose Green OA mandates? This is an extremely telling question, as it goes straight to the heart of OA, and the rationale and justification for insisting on OA. Gold OA journals rightly represent themselves as differing from conventional journals in that they provide OA. To put it crudely, what they propose to authors is: "Publish in my journal instead of a conventional journal if you want your article to be Openly Accessible to all users." (And, for those Gold OA journals that charge publication fees: "Publish in my journal instead of a conventional journal and pay my publication fee if you want your article to be Openly Accessible to all users.") Apart from that, there is the usual competition among journals: OA journals compete with non-OA journals, and journals of all kinds within the same field compete among themselves. For conventional journals and for OA Gold journals supported by subscriptions, there is competition for subscription fees. For all journals there is competition for authors. And for Gold OA journals that charge publication fees, the competition for authors is compounded by the competition for publication fees. What about OA itself? In order to be successful over its competition, a product-provider or service-provider has to provide and promote the advantages of his product/service over the competition. In the competition between OA and non-OA journals, the cardinal advantage of the OA journal is OA itself: OA journals provide OA, maximizing research usage and impact; conventional journals do not. For subscription-based Gold OA journals, OA is a drawing point. For publication-fee-based Gold OA journals, OA is a selling point. So what about Green OA mandates? For the 35% of conventional journals that have not endorsed OA self-archiving by their authors, their opposition to Green OA mandates is just an extension of their opposition to OA: We know where they stand. "What matters is what is best for our bottom line, not what is best for research." For the 65% of conventional journals that are "Green" in that they have endorsed OA self-archiving by their authors, those of them (their percentage is not yet clear) that oppose Green OA mandates are in a sense in conflict with themselves: "It's ok if individual authors self-archive to enjoy the advantages of OA, but it's not ok if their institutions or funders mandate that they do so." (This is an awkward stance, rather hard to justify, and will probably succumb to the underlying premise that OA is indeed an undeniable benefit to research.) But then what about opposition to Green OA mandates from Gold (or hybrid-Gold) OA publishers -- publishers that are presumably 100% committed to the benefits of OA for research? This is the stance that is the hardest of all to justify. For the fact is that Green OA is in a sense a "competitor" to Gold OA: It offers OA without constraints on the author's choice of journal, and without having to pay publication fees. The only resolution open to a Gold OA publisher who wishes to justify opposing Green OA mandates is to adopt precisely the same argument as the one being used by the non-OA publishers that oppose Green OA mandates: that mandated OA self-archiving poses a potential risk to their subscription revenues -- in other words, again putting what is best for publishers' bottom lines above what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the tax-paying public. Perhaps this was bound to come to pass in any joint venture between a producer who is not seeking any revenue for his product (i.e., the researcher-authors, their institutions and their funders) and a vendor who is seeking revenue for the value he adds to the (joint) product. I happen to think that this conflict-of-interest will only sort itself out if and when what used to be a product -- a peer-reviewed, published journal article, online or on paper -- ceases to be a product at all (or at least a publisher's product), sold to the user-institution, and becomes instead a service (the 3rd-party management of peer review, and the certification of its outcome), provided by the publisher to the author's institution and funder. I also happen to think that only Green OA mandates can drive this transition from the current subscription-based cost-recovery model to the publication service-fee-based model, with the distributed network of institutional OA repositories making it possible for journals to offload all their current access-provision and archiving burden and its costs onto the repositories, distributed worldwide, thereby allowing journals to cut publication costs and downsize to become providers of the peer-review service alone, with its reduced cost recovered via institutional publication fees paid out of the institutional subscription-cancellation savings. Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.But this is all hypothetical: We are not there now. Right now, the cost of publication is being amply paid by subscriptions. Publishers are hypothesizing that OA self-archiving mandates will make that revenue source unsustainable -- but no actual evidence at all is being provided to show either that that hypothesis is correct, or when and how quickly subscriptions will become unsustainable, if the hypothesis is indeed correct. Most important, publishers are giving no indications whatsoever as to why the peaceful transition scenario described above will not be the (equally hypothetical, but quite natural) sequel to unsustainable subscriptions. Instead, the only thing publishers are offering is hypothetical doomsday scenarios: the destruction of peer review, of journals, and of a viable industry. Then, on the pretext of the need to protect their current revenue streams and their current ways of doing business from this hypothetical doomsday scenario, publishers try to block OA self-archiving mandates, despite OA's substantial demonstrated benefits to all the other parties involved, viz, researchers, research institutions and funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. This is indeed a conflict of interest, although the future revenue losses to the publishing industry are completely hypothetical, whereas the current ongoing access/impact losses to research are very real, and already demonstrated (to the satisfaction of all the players except the publishing industry). I close with a reply to Jan Velterop, of Springer's "Open Choice": Springer is a subscription-based, hybrid Green/Gold publisher: Springer sells journals by subscription; Springer is fully Green, endorsing author self-archiving; Springer offers authors fee-based Gold OA as an option; and Jan opposes Green OA mandates. The following exchange begins with an attempt to justify (some) publishers' insistence on the transfer of exclusive rights (rather than just publishing rights) to the publisher; Jan suggests that transferring exclusive rights is a form of "payment" by the author to the publisher, but he never explains why the rights need to be exclusive. Then Jan goes on to oppose Green OA self-archiving mandates, because they would provide OA without paying for it. (No mention is made of the fact that all publishing costs are currently being paid for already -- via subscriptions...) On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Jan Velterop, Springer UK wrote: JV: "transfer of exclusive rights to a publisher is a form of 'payment'. Payment for the services of a publisher."Is it? And then what are subscription revenues? A fringe benefit? (I would have thought that assigning a publisher the right to publish and the exclusive right to collect revenues for selling an author's work, without even paying any royalties to the author, was "payment" enough for the value added by the publisher...) JV: "The publisher subsequently uses these exclusive rights to sell subscriptions and licences in order to recoup his costs"Why exclusive rights? JV: "The advantage is seemingly for the author, who (mistakenly) has the feeling that he doesn't have to pay for the services of formal publication of his article, but who seldom realizes why he is asked to transfer exclusive rights."Authors are naive, but not quite as foolish as that. They know the publisher needs to sell subscriptions to make ends meet. But what you haven't explained is why the publisher needs exclusive rights in order to do that. JV: "The disadvantage is that payment in the form of exclusive rights limits access, because it needs a subscription/licence model to convert this form of 'payment' into money."Disadvantage or no disadvantage, subscriptions are currently making ends meet quite successfully. And you still haven't explained why the rights transferred need to be exclusive. JV: "And subscriptions/licences are by definition restrictive in terms of dissemination."No problem, once the author supplements the access provided by subscriptions with free online access to his own self-archived draft (Green OA), providing eprints to would-be users who cannot afford the published version, exactly as authors had provided reprints in paper days. JV: "Article-fee supported open access publishing, where the transfer of exclusive rights is replaced by the transfer of money, consequently doesn't have the need for subscriptions and can therefore abolish all restrictions on dissemination.Yes. But where is the need for "article-fee supported open access publishing" (Gold OA) at a time when (a) most journals are still subscription-based, (b) subscriptions are still paying the costs of publishing, and (c) the only thing the author needs to do to provide (Green) OA is to self-archive (and the only thing the author's funder or institution need do is mandate it)? JV: "Stevan Harnad c.s. will argue that none of this matters, because there is 'green', meaning that whatever 'exclusive' rights have been transferred, authors can still disseminate their articles via self-archiving in open repositories. In that model, having transferred 'exclusive' rights is meaningless, and that implies that the 'payment' that exclusive rights transfer actually is, has become worthless."(1) You have not yet replied about why the transferred rights need to be exclusive. (2) Nor about what the problem is, as long as subscriptions are paying for publication costs, as they are. (3) If you choose to invoke the hypothetical "doomsday" scenario -- that mandated self-archiving will cause cancellations and drive subscriptions down to unsustainable levels -- by way of response, kindly first cite (3a) the evidence that self-archiving causes subscription cancellations and (3b) the arguments and evidence as to why publishing will not quite naturally make the adaptive transition to the Gold OA cost-recovery model that you favor, if and when self-archiving mandates ever do cause subscriptions to become unsustainable. JV: "In mandates with embargos, the 'payment' may not be completely worthless (depending on the length of the embargo) but is at least severely devalued."You seem to be singularly fixated (for an OA advocate) on payment rather than access (at a time when all payments are being made, but much access and impact is being lost). You also seem to be more concerned about payments than access delays, and you seem to be expressing some sympathy for embargoed access over Open Access in your (unsupported) defense of exclusive rights as a form of "payment." JV: "I am a great fan of open access, but not a great fan of 'green'."Translation: I am a great fan of OA as long as it is paid Gold OA. (The accent seems to be on the "paid" rather than on the "OA".) But what is missing today is not publisher payment, but OA... JV: "'Green' is a kind of appeasement by publishers (some of who, it must be said, themselves didn't [and sometimes still don't] realise the 'payment' nature of exclusive rights transfer)."Perhaps my interpretation is more charitable: 92% of journals did not endorse Green OA (65% for immediate postprint OA) merely to "appease" or "placate," but because they recognized that OA is indeed a great benefit to research and researchers, and that trying to oppose OA would be neither creditable nor successful. Jan seems to prefer the less charitable idea that endorsing Green self-archiving was merely a cynical sop, granted on the assumption that it would not be used, and perhaps even to be taken back, "Indian-Giver" Style, if too many researchers actually went ahead and self-archived. JV: "Appeasement is often regretted with hindsight. Instead of allowing the nature of exclusive rights transfer to be compromised, publishers should much earlier have offered authors the choice of payment either transfer of exclusive rights, or cash. The appeasement, the 'green', now acts as a hurdle to structural open access, perhaps even an impediment."In other words, publishers should have refused to endorse Green OA self-archiving unless they were paid extra for it. Never mind that all publication costs were and still are being fully paid via subscriptions. No OA without extra pay (Gold). Because of this impetuous Green appeasement, Springer (a Green publisher) is now stuck with only being able to ask payment for Gold, not for Green too... JV: "Harnadian orthodoxy will dismiss this. It holds that subscription journals will survive, that they will be paid for by librarians even if the content is freely disseminated in parallel via open repositories, and that it doesn't matter anyway"Shorn of the above rhetoric, my position is much simpler: Nothing of the sort. There is no guru, but all I say is what I have been saying all along: if and when OA self-archiving makes subscriptions unsustainable, journals can and will adapt by converting to Gold OA, and institutions will pay the Gold OA fees out of (a portion of) their windfall subscription cancellation savings. (Only a part, because journals will have down-sized to peer-review service-provision alone.)Mandate self-archiving now, for immediate Green OA.JV: "(the guru is tentatively beginning to admit that large scale uptake of self-archiving, for instance as the result of mandates, may indeed destroy journals)" JV: "because a new order will only come about after the complete destruction of the old order."No destruction: merely a natural adaptation to the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, made possible by the online medium. JV: "After all, morphing the old order into the new, without complete destruction, entails a cost in terms of money, which "isn't there", and anyway, the cost that comes with complete destruction of the old order is preferred to spending money on any transition, in that school of thought."Translation, shorn of Jan's rhetoric: And the objection isn't primarily to the redirection of scarce research funds to pay for needless Gold OA costs. If the research community is foolish enough to want to do that, it is welcome to do so. The objection is to any further delay in mandating Green OA, wasting still more time instead on continued bickering about paying pre-emptive Gold publishing fees. Let research funders and institutions mandate OA Green self-archiving, now, thereby guaranteeing 100% OA, now, and then let them spend their spare time and money in any way they see fit.'Harnad (and many others) are objecting to needlessly (and wastefully) redirecting scarce research funds toward paying for Gold OA now, when (1) 100% Green OA is reachable without it, when (2) subscriptions are still covering publishing costs, and when (3) it is still a speculative matter whether and when Green OA will ever cause subscriptions to become unsustainable. The time to redirect funds toward paying for Gold OA is when the hypothesized subscription cancellations have actually materialized, so the new savings can be redirected to pay for the new Gold OA publishing costs.' JV: "I doubt that a complete wipe-out will come. But there are quite a large number of vulnerable journals and a partial wipe-out as a result of mandated self-archiving is entirely plausible."If what Jan is saying here is that journals will continue to be born and die, as they do now, I agree. Green self-archiving mandates don't affect journals individually, they affect them all, jointly, and the effects are gradual. No one funder or institution generates the contents of an individual journal. So as the percentage of self-archiving rises, there will be a (possibly long) uncertain period when it is unclear how much of the contents of any given journal are accessible online for free. If and when a point is reached where journal subscriptions do become unsustainable, there will be a natural mass transition to Gold OA. Before that time, it is a matter of the sheerest of sheer speculation whether Green OA will or will not alter either the rate or the direction of spontaneous journal births and deaths. JV: "Although there seems to be a myth that journals are very, even extremely, profitable, the fact is that a great many journals are not profitable or 'surplus-able' (in not-for-profit parlance). In my estimate it is the majority. Within the portfolio of larger publishers these journals are often absorbed and cross-subsidised by the journals that are profitable. Smaller (e.g. society-) publishers cannot do that. Marginal journals do not have to suffer a lot of subscription loss before they go under. Some of these, especially society ones, will be 'salvaged' by being given the opportunity to shelter under the umbrella of the portfolio of one of the larger independent publishers. Others will just perish if they lose subscriptions. They could of course convert to open access journals with article processing fees, but setting those up is no sinecure, and requires a substantial financial commitment, as the experience of PLoS and BMC has shown. Journals that are run for the love of it, by the commendable voluntary efforts of academics, are mostly very small, and are the first to be affected, unless, of course, they do not need any income because they are crypto-subsidised by the institutions with which their editors are affiliated. Such journals have always been there and there are probably more now than ever (and some are very good indeed, or so I'm told), but to imagine scaling them up to deal with the million plus articles per year published as a result of global research efforts seems far-fetched, indeed."Part of this speculative account had some plausibility: Yes, journals are born and die. Yes some struggle to make ends meet (irrespective of OA). Yes some are subsidised. None of this has anything at all to do with OA. The causal influence of OA on this already ongoing birth/death/survival process, however, is pure speculation: Some titles will die; some will migrate (possibly to OA Gold publishers like Jan's former employer, BioMed Central -- which, I note in passing, has signed the EC petition in support of the EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate, whereas Jan's current employer, Springer, did not); some will survive, with or without subsidy, just as before. Nothing to do with Green OA, either in terms of rate or direction. But where on earth did Jan get to the non-sequitur of "scaling... up the [border-line and subsidised journals] to deal with the million plus articles per year"? Journals will continue to make ends meet as they did before, on subscriptions or subsidies; some will die, as they always did; others will migrate. Then, if and when subscriptions become unsustainable, there will be a transition (and downsizing) to OA Gold, paid for out of (a portion of) the very same subscription cancellation savings that drove the transition, redirected toward paying for Gold OA fees. Jan's own speculation only sounds like an Escher impossible-figure because he chooses to paint it that way. Without the imposition of that arbitrary distortion, the transitional landscape looks perfectly natural. JV: "Open access is the inevitable future, and it is worth working on a truly robust and sustainable way to achieve it."OA means free online access, and that is indeed worth reaching for right now, via Green OA self-archiving mandates, which are reachable right now. Jan instead recommends continuing to sit and wait for a hypothetical outcome, while meanwhile refraining from reaching for a sure outcome: 100% OA via Green mandates. Jan urges the research community instead to "work on" finding a way to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA now, when Gold OA is neither needed, nor are the funds available for paying for it (without poaching them from research) because the funds to pay for publishing are still paying for subscriptions. Caveat pre-emptor. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, March 1. 2007Feedback on the Brussels EC Meeting on Open AccessThe five suggestions I shall make below about the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access are controversial, but I am quite confident that the points are valid. My confidence comes from having been involved in this for a very, very long time, having heard everything already many, many times over and having given it all a very great amount of thought (more thought than it deserved, because most of the misunderstandings are so transparent and elementary!). (1) It would be a great strategic error on the part of the EC to allow itself to be drawn back into further talks and studies, instead of implementing the OA self-archiving mandate (EC A1) that was proposed in January 2006, and that has since been implemented by the ERC and reinforced by EURAB. The talks and studies have already taken place, for years now, many times over. The EC is basically stepping back to the point where the UK Parliamentary Select Committee was in 2003: It too conducted an extensive inquiry, with all interested parties, and made the same recommendation as EC A1: Mandate OA self-archiving. And the response was the same: publishing industry lobbying, the usual ominous warnings that mandating OA self-archiving will destroy journals and will destroy a multi-billion dollar industry, the usual conflation of Green OA and Gold OA (author OA self-archiving, Green, and journal OA publishing, Gold) and the usual attempt to delay, derail, filibuster in any way possible. And the publishing lobby was successful in the UK -- for a while. It successfully got the ear of Lord Sainsbury, the UK Industry minister (just as it did the EC Commissioner!), But in the end, reason prevailed, and now we have 5 out of the 8 UK Research Councils plus the Wellcome Trust mandating Green OA self-archiving after all, and more mandates planned. The publishing lobby will always say we need more studies and consultations. They have to, because they have absolutely no empirical evidence to support their Doomsday Scenario: There is not even evidence that self-archiving -- even where it has reached 100% for years now -- causes cancellations at all, let alone destroys journals. In the complete absence of negative evidence, and with all actual evidence positive -- for the benefits of OA to research, researchers, and the R&D industry -- the only thing the publishing lobby can do is to raise the volume on its dire but evidence-free predictions: and keep asking for more studies, for more evidence! But what the EC should be asking itself is: What studies? and evidence of what? Surely the only way to test whether there is any truth at all to the hypothesis that mandating OA self-archiving will generate cancellations is to mandate OA self-archiving and see whether it generates cancellations! The EC does not fund all, most, or much of the contents of any individual journal. Hence it is enormously improbable that an EC self-archiving mandate will have any significant effect on any journal's subscriptions. But the only way to see whether it does, is to go ahead and adopt the mandate. Its effects can be reviewed and reconsidered after 1, 2, 3 years. Instead doing nothing under the guise of "debate among stakeholders and policy makers [and] encouraging experiments with new models" is of no use at all. (2) The other aim of both the publishing lobby and the Gold OA publishing lobby is to focus the EC on the issue of "funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system" instead of on the issue of providing access. The EC meeting was dominated, appallingly, by discussion of journal revenues and economics (to no effect whatsoever, as all that was said has already been said, countless times before, for nearly a decade now). There was next to no discussion of the daily, weekly, monthly cumulative loss of research access and impact that is continuing as we continue to talk about the same things over and over. Recall that publishers' warnings about future loss of revenue are hypothetical, whereas researchers' loss of current access and impact is actual, and cumulative, and also means loss of revenue, from lost R&D industrial applications: losses on the public investment in research. The cure for that loss of access and impact, and of R&D industrial revenue, is to mandate OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with the the economics of funding Gold OA journals. The focus on funding journals is a red herring. What the EC needs to do is to mandate OA self-archiving. That is Green OA. It does not require funding anything: just mandating self-archiving. Publishers are publishers, whether they are non-OA publishers lobbying against OA and self-archiving, or Gold OA publishers lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates. How and why did the EC manage to get diverted from the problem of research access (for which the solution is to mandate Green OA) to the problem of journal economics? (3) The research publishing industry is not the industrial dimension of research: The R&D industry is. And the R&D industry and its revenues are orders of magnitude bigger than those of the publishing industry. And the R&D industry shares in the current, actual loss of research access and impact that OA is meant to cure -- and that the publishing industry lobby is (successfully) endeavouring to prevent. Why is the EC inviting and listening so intently to the views of the publishing industry regarding access to research, instead of listening to the views of the R&D industry (along with the views of the research community itself)? As I have said many times before, this is worse than the tail wagging the dog: It is the flea on the tail of the dog, wagging the dog. (4) The substance of the recommendation of the EC petition and its 24,000+ signatories (so far), including 1000+ official organisation signatories -- universities, research institutes, scientific academies, R&D industries, etc. -- is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) should be mandated. The voices raised for OA were not about funding Gold OA, and certainly not about diverting scarce research funds from research to paying publishers for Gold OA. Gold OA cannot be mandated. There seems to be some profound confusion about that, even among the proponents of the EC Recommendation: The only ones who can be mandated to do anything by a funder are the fundees: the researchers funded to do the research. There seems to be an incoherent idea afoot that, somehow, it is publishers who are to be mandated to do something. Publishers know very well that they cannot be mandated to do anything, but they are quite happy to draw out the consultations and "studies" on topics like embargoes and PDFs in order to give the impression that that is what this is all about. What this is about is mandating OA by mandating that authors self-archive their own final drafts of journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The embargo question is only about the date at which those deposits should be made Open Access. (Till then, the deposits can be made Closed Access, but their metadata are still visible webwide, and individual eprints can be requested by users via email.) But the all-important thing now is not the allowable length of this embargo, but mandating the deposit. The EC has allowed itself to be distracted from what this is all about, in order to focus instead on embargoes and on funding Gold OA! That can go on forever; meanwhile, daily, weekly cumulative loss of EU research access and impact continues, and with it loss in EU research productivity, progress, R&D applications, and R&D revenue. Mandate Green OA self-archiving and then return to the endless consultations on embargo lengths and Gold OA funding! But don't allow Green mandates and OA to be filibustered still longer with these studies and consultation that lead nowhere but to more studies and consultations, as EU research access and impact keep hemorrhaging needlessly. Last point: (5) One genuine (and valid) point of resistance on the part of the research community (rather than the publishing community) against OA Mandates concerns their being coupled in any way with the redirection of scarce research funds, away from research and toward the payment of Gold OA publishing fees. There is no need at all to couple the EC OA mandate with the diversion of any funds from research to pay Gold OA fees. There is no reason for the mandate to make any reference to Gold OA fees at all. The mandate should be a Green OA self-archiving mandate. That is all. (In this respect, the Wellcome Trust mandate is a bad model to follow. The Wellcome Trust is a private charity and can do whatever it chooses with its funds. But diverting public research funds to pay needlessly for Gold OA publishing charges when it is not at all necessary -- because subscriptions are still paying for publication and Green self-archiving can be mandated to provide OA -- is an arbitrary and ill-thought-out step that can only generate research community resistance.) The need for and benefits of OA are a certainty, as is the ability of Green OA self-archiving mandates to make all funded research OA. In contrast, all hypotheses about the way this will or should affect the future of research publication are mere speculation. The publishing industry has been freely speculating -- with zero evidence -- that mandating Green OA will destroy journals and peer review. The way to counter such speculations is not to be frightened by them into inaction, simply because they are fierce speculations. The way to counter them is with plausible counterspeculations. So here is one: If and when mandated Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable -- because all articles are OA and subscriptions are cancelled -- all the subscribing institutions will have vast windfall savings from their cancelled subscriptions: Those same institutional windfall savings will then be available for redirection to pay for institutional Gold OA fees for publishing their outgoing articles, without diverting a penny from research. That will be the time to make the transition to Gold OA publishing, not now, when most journals are not OA, when subscriptions are paying for all publishing costs, when scarce research funds would need to be diverted to pay for any Gold OA publishing costs, and when what is urgently needed is not funds to pay for Gold OA: what is urgently needed is OA. And it is already attainable, via Green. All that needs to be done is to mandate it. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, February 22. 2007A Tale of Fleas, Tails, Dogs, and Pit-Bulls...
Open Access (OA) to research maximizes research usage, impact, applications, productivity and progress in the online era. Hence OA is optimal for researchers, for their institutions and funders, for the vast research industry, and for the tax-paying public that funds the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted. OA is accordingly inevitable.
The way to hasten and ensure this optimal and inevitable (and already overdue) outcome is for researchers' funders and institutions to mandate that researchers self-archive their published research articles in their OA institutional repositories, free for all users. (Without a mandate, about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously; with a mandate, over 90% comply.) Self-archiving mandates are accordingly being adopted by a growing number of funders and institutions worldwide, and are being proposed by still more of them -- notably the European Commission for European research and the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) for most of US research. The publishing industry lobby has been attempting to derail or delay the optimal and inevitable, prophesying, with no evidence whatsoever, that self-archiving mandates will destroy journals and a viable industry. But in reality this doomsday prophecy is completely false, and in any case the publishing industry is merely the flea on the tail of the dog: The tax-paying public, the research community -- and the vast research and development industry that applies the fruits of research for the general public and for the national and international economy -- are the dog. The flea has so far successfully wagged the dog, and is lately resorting to "pit-bull" tactics to try to continue doing so. But fortunately, the flea is fated to fail to forestall the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the research applications industry, and the tax-paying public. OA self-archiving mandates are now imminent, as the sleepy dog is at last waking and coming to its senses about what is in its own best (and hence the public) interest in the online age. The flea can and will, of course, successfully adapt to the new online reality; what it cannot hope to do is to continue to defer the optimal and inevitable indefinitely. Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum The DC Coalition: A Matter of PrincipleOn Tue, 20 Feb 2007, Martin Frank, Executive Director, American Physiological Society, wrote: DC Principles: The following press release was posted to the DC Principles website.And the evidence that mandating self-archiving -- as 5 of 8 UK research councils, the Wellcome Trust, Australian Research Council, NHMRC, CERN and a growing number of universities worldwide have already done, and EC, ERC, EURAB, CIHR and FRPAA are proposing to do -- "would abruptly end the publishing system"? Or is this just the same doomsday prophecy we have heard (and heard refuted) over and over, simply being repeated louder and louder? Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. DC Principles: One such measure, the Federal Research Public Access Act introduced in the 109th Congress would have required all federally funded research to be deposited in an accessible database within six months of acceptance in a scientific journal. Some open access advocates are pressing for the introduction of a similar measure in the 110th Congress.A measure that, as noted above, is already being adopted worldwide, because of its vast benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the vast research and development industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research (see recent petition). Are evidence-free doomsday prophecies from one service industry supposed to be grounds for denying these benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the vast research and development industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research? Or is this just the flea on the tail of the dog, endeavouring to wag the dog? DC Principles: In essence, such legislation would impose government-mandated access policies and government-controlled repositories for federally funded research published in scientific journals, according to members of the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition.The self-archiving mandates require publicly funded research to be made publicly accessible to all users. The rhetoric of "government control" is shrill nonsense, in line with the data-free doomsday prophecies. Is this the program of disinformation that the "DC Principles" Coalition have been counselled to disseminate by the esteemed public relations consultants of their STM confreres? DC Principles: "We as independent publishers must determine when it is appropriate to make content freely available, and we believe strongly it should not be determined by government mandate" [said Martin Frank of the American Physiological Society and coordinator of the coalition]The public funds it, researchers and their institutions conduct, write and peer-review it, all for free, but "publishers must determine when it is appropriate to make it freely available"? In exchange for having been given it free to sell, for having peer-reviewed it for free, and for having paid dearly for subscriptions in order to access it? That's an awfully big price the public and the research community and research progress, and research applications are all expected to pay in exchange for the 3rd-party management of their free peer review service. How much longer does the DC Principles Coalition imagine that the research community, the tax-paying public, and the vast research applications industry will keep giving this arbitrary assertion of right-of-determination, amplified by empty prophecies of doom, the undue credence it has enjoyed to date? DC Principles: The Coalition also reaffirmed its ongoing practice of making millions of scientific journal articles available free of charge, without an additional financial burden on the scientific community or on funding agencies. More than 1.6 million free articles are already available to the public free of charge on HighWire Press.Commendable. Now what about all the rest of the articles that their authors, funders and institutions likewise want to make freely available, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates? DC Principles: "The scholarly publishing system is a delicate balance between the need to sustain journals financially and the goal of disseminating scientific knowledge as widely as possible. Publishers have voluntarily made more journal articles available free worldwide than at any time in history -- without government intervention," noted Kathleen Case of the American Association for Cancer Research.Commendable. Now what about all the rest of the articles that their authors, funders and institutions likewise want to make freely available, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates? DC Principles: The Coalition expressed concern that a mandate timetable for free access to all federally funded research would harm journals, scientists, and ultimately the public.The doomsday prophecy again, repeated ever more shrilly to compensate for the complete absence of evidence in its support. DC Principles: Subscriptions to journals with a high percentage of federally funded research would decline rapidly.If and when the demand for a product declines, it is time to cut costs. If and when publishing downsizes to just the management of the peer review service, the institutional savings from the (hypothesized) subscription-declines will be more than enough to pay for peer review, per article published, on the open-access publishing model. DC Principles: Subscription revenues support the quality control system known as peer review and also support the educational work of scientific societies that publish journals.Subscription revenues will continue to flow as long as there is enough demand for the product. Once the only product needed is the peer review management service, the institutional savings will be enough to pay for its costs several times over. At no time has the research community, its institutions or its funders, or the tax-paying public that funds its funders, been asked, nor has it ever agreed, to subsidise "the educational work of scientific societies" with its own lost research access and impact. DC Principles: Undermining subscriptions would shift the cost of publication from the publisher who receives subscription revenue to the researcher who receives grants. Such a shift will: Divert scarce dollars from research. Publishers now pay the cost of publication out of subscription revenue; if the authors have to pay, the funds will come from their research grants.No. Publication costs are currently being paid out of subscription revenues. On the hypothesis that institutions cancel those subscriptions, it is those same subscription revenue savings that can continue to pay for (what is left of) publication costs, per paper published. Not a penny of research grants need ever be redirected. The subscription savings will be redirected. DC Principles: Nonprofit journals without subscription revenue have to rely on grants, which further diverts funding from research.Journals that are subsidised today can continue to be subsidised tomorrow. Journals that are subscription-based today, if/when their subscriptions are cancelled, can be paid for (what is left of) their costs, per article, from the author's institutional subscription savings. More than enough money is in the system. No doomsday scenario. Just downsizing and redirection of windfall savings. DC Principles: Result in only well-funded scientists being able to publish their work.Utter nonsense. See arithmetic above. DC Principles: Reduce the ability of journals to fund peer review. Most journals spend 40% or more of their revenue on quality control through the peer review system; without subscription income and with limitations on author fees, peer review would suffer.When there is no more demand for anything but peer review, institutions will have saved 100%, of which they need merely redirect 40% to pay for the peer review of their own publications. (Please do the arithmetic.) DC Principles: Harm those scientific societies that rely on income from journals to fund the professional development of scientists. Revenues from scholarly publications fund research, fellowships to junior scientists, continuing education, and mentoring programs to increase the number of women and under-represented groups in science, among many other activities.At no time has the research community, its institutions or its funders, or the tax-paying public that funds its funders, been asked, nor has it ever agreed, to subsidise "the professional development of scientists, research, fellowships to junior scientists, continuing education, and mentoring programs" with its own lost research access and impact. DC Principles: Members of the DC Principles Coalition have long supported responsible free access to science and have made:Commendable. Now what about all the rest of the articles that their authors, funders and institutions likewise want to make freely available, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates? DC Principles: "By establishing government repositories for federally funded research, taxpayers would be paying for systems that duplicate the online archives already maintained by independent publishers," Case noted.With the slight difference that the contents of the OA archives will be freely accessible to all, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates. DC Principles: "The implications of the U.S. government becoming the world's largest publisher of scientific articles have not been addressed," she added.Self-archiving mandates are for providing access to published articles, not for publishing them. In an online world, publishing means certifying papers as having met a journal's peer-review quality standards. That means the peer review service. That's all. The implied "government monopoly" subtext is again just empty rhetoric, designed to inflame, not to inform honestly. DC Principles: According to Frank, "As not-for-profit publishers, we believe that a free society allows for the co-existence of many publishing models, and we will continue to work closely with our publishing colleagues to set high standards for the scholarly publishing enterprise."Amen. 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. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/ American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, February 17. 2007Impressions from Brussels EC Meeting
My impressions of the Brussels EC Meeting:
(1) The petition demonstrating the very broad-based support for the proposed EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate was presented to the EU Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potocnik.Researcher and industrial support for OA and OA Self-Archiving Mandates will now be very vigorously consolidated. Stevan Harnad PS I think a bit of a storm is now brewing in the physics community over the CERN initiative to promote an immediate transition to Gold OA publishing in particle physics. The concern is that this will divert scarce funds from research. I think the concern is warranted: that it is indeed premature to push toward gold OA when most fields [including many parts of physics] don't yet have green OA. CERN should work to generalise its own admirable and successful green OA self-archiving mandate to the rest of the world, and meantime make use of the complementarity between conventional publication and green OA, co-existing in parallel, rather than needlessly pressing for an immediate transition to gold OA publishing at a time when gold OA is neither needed -- publication still being funded by (and potential publication funds still tied up in) subscription expenditures -- nor are funds available to pay for gold OA without taking them from elsewhere, most probably research. Gold fever also distracts from the pressing, immediate basic need for OA itself, as well as from green OA's immediate availability, at no cost. We need to stop fussing about publishing and publishing costs, and focus on access, and providing it in the fastest and surest way available: by mandating green OA self-archiving. Wednesday, February 14. 2007(1) Petition and (2) Poll on European Commission Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal
Below, Les Carr, head of University of Southampton's Eprints team announces the results of a poll of EC F6 projects on the EC Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate proposal (A1). The results are as overwhelmingly positive as those of the parallel petition.
These results are to be announced in Brussels tomorrow (February 15). On the same time day in the United States, there will be a "National Day of Action" by students in support of the FRPAA Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal. On the eve of the Brussels EC meeting, the Budapest Open Access Initiative celebrates its fifth anniversary in Brussels: The European research and academic community has demonstrated overwhelming support for the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate (A1). A petition, launched jointly on January 14th 2007 by research organisations in a number of European countries, has drawn over 24,000 signatures from Europe and worldwide in support of the EC's proposal. The response includes over 1,000 institutional signatories from National Academies of Sciences, Universities, Rectors' conferences, Learned Societies, national and private research funding councils, and industries that apply research.) Sunday, February 11. 2007Pitting Petitions Against Pit-Bulls: Sense Versus Sensationalismlike moths and drunks, seem attracted, irresistibly, where the light shines, not where the key lies" Ben Goldacre has his heart in the right place, but: (1) The Open Access (OA) movement is not the "Open Access Journal movement." Trying to convert non-OA journals to OA journals (and to convert authors to publishing in them) is only one of the two ways to make articles OA ("Gold OA"), and the far more resistant and less certain way. The surer, faster way is just to convert authors to self-archiving their own articles (published in whatever journal they wish) on the web to make them OA ("Green OA").(2) It is not "two [Gold] OA publishing organisations" that have led the fight for OA, but one (Green and Gold) organisation -- the same one that first coined the term OA in 2002: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). (3) The need for access to "medical literature", and in "developing countries" is just one small portion of the need for OA, which concerns all forms of research, and researchers all over the world. (4) The primary need for OA is to make research (most of it specialised and technical) freely available not only to "part-time tinkering thinkers, journalists and the public" but to the researchers worldwide for whom it was written and who can use and apply it to the benefit of the public that paid for it. (5) To demonize non-OA publisher Reed-Elsevier as the "sponsor of the DSEI international arms fair [that] needs police, security, wire fences, and the pitbull of PR [Dezenhall] to defend it" is to sink into the very same pit-bull tactics. Reed-Elsevier journals are Green on OA: It is research funders and universities that now need to mandate Green OA.Journalists and tinkerers should think more carefully before opining about OA: Good science needs more sense, not more sensationalism. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, February 8. 2007Please Display Remarkable Results of EC OA Petition
Here is another brilliant incentive that all OA supporters are urged to put on their websites for yet another push to display the strength of the support for the petition in favour of the EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal, now fast approaching 1000 institutional and 20,000 individual signatories: (substituting : "<" for "{" and ">" for "}" )
This banner (designed by Les Carr and Chris Gutteridge of University of Southampton's EPrints team) will scroll to show the highlights of the institutional signatories, a remarkable list.{table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"} The petition will continue to receive signatures indefinitely, but to sign in time to help the Brussels EU conference to display the will of the European and Worldwide Research community to the EC Science Commissioner, please sign within the next two days (research-related organisations especially -- universities, research institutes, academies of science and arts, learned societies, research funding agencies -- are encouraged to make a show of strength. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, February 1. 2007Budapest to Brussels: Hungarian Academy of Sciences Signs EC OA PetitionPlease pardon me a moment of Pannonian pride: It is mete and fitting that the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Professor E. Sylvester Vizi, has today signed the Petition in support of the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate, on behalf of the Academy. The Open Access Movement began in Budapest in December 2001 as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), launched by the Hungarian philanthropist, George Soros and the Open Society Institute (OSI). OA has since become a global movement and is now accelerating rapidly toward the critical step that will usher in Open Access to all research output worldwide, starting in Europe with the EC Self-Archiving Mandate, but inevitably to be followed in the US with the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate, and elsewhere in the world by kindred policies. I cannot resist adding (though it includes an element of conjecture) that Pannonia even had a hand in formulating the optimal version of the European OA Self-Archiving mandate, in the form of the European Research Advisory Board's (EURAB) policy proposal. On the EURAB committee that formulated that excellent policy was the Vice President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Professor Norbert Kroo. The President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has now closed the circle, in signing the EC OA petition on behalf of the Academy. Many thanks also to Professor Csaba Pleh, Deputy General Secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who also played a critical mediating role, as did Barbara Kirsop, of EPT. Más volt eddig, másképp lesz most! Hernád István (Stevan Harnad) External Member, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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