Saturday, March 3. 2012Plan C for Open Access: Flea Powder![]() ![]() 1. Research libraries cannot, need not and will not cancel (important) journals until all or almost all their contents are freely accessible to their users by some other means.(It is this optimal and inevitable outcome for research and researchers that the publishers' lobby is doing its best to forestall as long as it possibly can. But it's entirely up to the research community how long they allow them to do it. As long as they do, it amounts to allowing the flea on its tail to wag the research/dog…) Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. Tuesday, February 28. 2012Splitting the Difference on Open Access: Pseudo-Solomonian "Balance"![]() ![]() Between the (Publicly-Funded Research) Dog and the (Publishing) Flea on its Tail...' New York Times, February 27, 2012: "Gulf on Open Access to Federally Financed Research" by Guy Gugliotta "The debate between these two extremes has been remarkably vitriolic, in part, perhaps, because neither side has been completely honest. Mr. Adler would not discuss publishers’ profit margins, and open-access advocates frequently say that the journals are low-overhead cash cows that are gouging the public. Open-access scientists, on the other hand, are less than candid about how important it is to their careers to be published in prominent traditional journals. If scientists truly wished to kill the system, all they would have to do is withhold submissions."This balanced midpoint between "extremes" is utter nonsense, of course. (1) The need (and reasons) of researchers for publishing in journals with high peer review standards are no secret (and nothing to hide or apologize for!) (2) The objective of OA is not to "kill the system" but to provide OA. (3) As usual, the false assumption is that OA = Gold OA publishing. (4) OA has nothing to do with "withholding submissions" or boycotting. (5) Both bills (FRPAA and RWA) are about mandating Green OA self-archiving of published journal articles. What's worth writing an article (or book) about is how this relentless misunderstanding of something so stunningly simple just keeps propagating itself, year after year after year. And it looks like Congress will yet again wimp out this year on FRPAA, splitting the difference with RWA in much the same clueless spirit as the above sterling example of "balanced" journalism... So it's back to yet another year of trying to talk sense into universities about mandating Green OA... One thing the journalist got right: There is indeed something that researchers are less than candid about: not withholding submissions but withholding keystrokes... Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos. Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Saturday, February 25. 2012Alma Swan interviews Stevan Harnad after BOAI 10 in BudapestStevan Harnad from Leslie Chan on Vimeo. Thursday, February 2. 2012Pogo: Why Are Researchers Yet Again Boycotting Instead of Keystroking?![]() "Why did 34,000 researchers sign a threat in 2000 to boycott their journals unless those journals agreed to provide open access to their articles - when the researchers themselves could provide open access (OA) to their own articles by self-archiving them on their own institutional websites?"Not only has 100% OA been reachable through author self-archiving as of at least 1994, but over 90% of all refereed journals (published by 65% of all refereed journal publishers) have already given their explicit green light to some form of author self-archiving -- with over 60% of all journals, including Elsevier's -- giving their authors the green light to self-archive their refereed final drafts ("postprint") immediately upon acceptance for publication... So why are researchers yet again boycotting instead of keystroking, with yet another dozen years of needlessly lost research access and impact already behind us? We have met the enemy, Pogo, and it's not Elsevier. (And this is why keystroke mandates are necessary; just keying out boycott threats to publishers is not enough.) Sunday, January 22. 2012Research Works Act: Who Needs Open Access To What? And Why?![]() ST: "Can you give me any numbers for scientists within the U.S. who do not have access to the professional literature they need through either their institutional affiliations or services like DeepDyve?"I can give you the following pieces of indirect evidence: (1) The (now-out-of-date) ARL stats on institutional serials holdings. The estimate is that the articles in the serials that the institution cannot afford to subscribe to or license are inaccessible to the users at that institution. (2) The data on the OA advantage in downloads and citations (indicators of what is being lost if access is restricted to subscribers only). More direct evidence can only come from polling researchers or monitoring their web activity automatically, to see how many times they click on articles and are stopped by a pay-wall (including a DeepDyve pay-wall). ST: "(I do not believe it is the responsibility of the U.S. government to provide research to everyone in the world.)"Perhaps not (though US researchers do not conduct research only intended to be used, applied and built upon by US researchers; and lost research uptake and progress is a loss for all researchers and research) -- but the ARL stats show that no US institution can afford access to all or most journals, and many can only afford only a small fragment. That's all lost research impact and progress. ST: "How much of the literature they need is not already being provided through Green OA repositories?"At least 80% is not provided -- except if deposit is mandated, in which case less than 20% is not provided. But mandates is what this is all about... ST: "Do you have an answer to the posting made by Danny Jones yesterday?"I wasn't going to reply to that posting, which essentially says "mandated OA deposit of articles is too much of a burden: just make progress reports and final reports OA instead" -- but since you ask: ![]() Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:46:43 -0600 DJ: "I am very interested in seeing (specifically in my case) NIH-funded final reports made publicly available."Fine, and welcome. But, as I said, no substitute for access to refereed journal articles, for researchers. DJ: "I recommend going a step further to require the annual progress reports to be also made publicly available along with data collected with federally funded grants."Both welcome (though making the data public raises some sticky issues about the researcher's right to mine his own data first). But, as I said, no substitute for access to refereed journal articles, for researchers. DJ: "Before I retired on January 6, 2012 as director of the library at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, I was responsible for monitoring compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy by our mostly NIH-funded investigators. TxBiomed scientists are generally supportive of the policy, but it isn't always easy to be in compliance [with the NIH Public Access Policy] for a variety of reasons."Indeed, because the policy is non-optimal, for a number of reasons. See: "Public Access to Federally Funded Research (Harnad Response to US OSTP RFI)" The main bugs are (1) central deposit instead of institutional deposit (and central harvesting) and (2) the publisher deposit option. DJ: "And complying represents an added regulatory burden for investigators who often have moved on to other investigations when an article finally gets published."The keystrokes to publish-or-perish are the burden. The few extra keystrokes to deposit the final draft are a piece of cake -- it just has to be made part of the author's routine work-flow. Incomparably tinier than doing the progress reports or final report. DJ: "NIH grants may require several years of work before a final report is submitted, and during this time investigators may publish articles reporting results of their funded investigations, which results will also be included in their annual progress reports."More important, the articles will be accessible to subscribers as soon as they are published. OA is about making sure they are accessible to nonsubscribers too. DJ: "Waiting for final reports to be submitted to NIH may actually delay access to NIH-funded research results,"Not for those who have access to the published articles. And, as I said, neither progress reports nor final reports can substitute for access to refereed journal articles, for researchers. DJ: "As these reports are required by NIH already, it does not represent an added burden to investigators (they are already doing it), and the burden rests directly where it should be, with the funded investigator."If depositing a report is no added burden, depositing an article isn't either. (It just needs to be mandated, like publish-or-perish, progress reports, and final reports.) DJ: "with the NIH Public Access Policy, final approval of manuscripts deposited into the NIH Manuscript Submission System is the responsibility of the corresponding author, who is not necessarily the NIH-funded author."All co-authors see final drafts of their articles: The fundees should deposit that. DJ: "The NIH Public Access Policy should be repealed in my opinion. It is an unnecessary added burden for NIH-funded authors and compliance is not as simple as some suggest it is."As great a burden as publish-or-perish, progress reports, or final reports? (Should those be repealed too?) DJ: "And the punitive nature in which investigators are required to comply by threat of consideration against future funding from NIH does not result in great enthusiasm for government regulations."Why is this "punitive" with article deposit and not punitive with publish-or-perish, progress reports, or final reports? DJ: "The progress reports and the final reports are already part of the established responsibility of NIH-funded investigators, and making them publicly available will provide the public with full information about the research that the government is paying for."If the "extra burden" argument had been valid, neither publish-or-perish, progress reports, nor final reports would have been part of researchers' established work-flow. And, no, progress reports and final reports are not what the government is paying for: the refereed research articles are. And there is no longer any reason whatsoever in the online era for restricting access to refereed research only to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they are published. That's not what research is funded for. DJ: "While this approach does not address the contents of published journal articles, having access to the investigators' reports of federally funded research may in fact eliminate the need for access to journal articles that acknowledge federally funded research grants."Substitute grant final reports for refereed research articles? DJ: "Finally, not only should the reports be publicly available, but all data generated as a result of federal funding should also be publicly available."Easier said than done (because of the first-exploitation rights problem). But wouldn't it be too much of a burden for the poor researcher...? ;>) Stevan Harnad Saturday, January 7. 2012Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again![]() ![]() ![]() Translation and Comments: H.R. 3699 misunderstands the secondary, service role that peer-reviewed research journal publishing plays in US research and development and its (public) funding. It is a huge miscalculation to weigh the potential gains or losses from providing or not providing open access to publicly funded research in terms of gains or losses to the publishing industry: Lost or delayed research progress mean losses to the growth and productivity of both basic research and the vast R&D industry in all fields, and hence losses to the US economy as a whole. What needs to be done about public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research? The minimum policy is for all US federal funders to mandate (require), as a condition for receiving public funding for research, that: (i) the fundee’s revised, accepted refereed final draft of (ii) all refereed journal articles resulting from the funded research must be (iii) deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (iv) in the fundee's institutional repository, with (v) access to the deposit made free for all (OA) immediately (no OA embargo) wherever possible (over 60% of journals already endorse immediate gratis OA self-archiving), and at the latest after a 6-month embargo on OA.It is the above policy that H.R.3699 is attempting to make illegal. The purpose of mandating open access to federally funded research findings is to ensure that the findings are accessible to all their potential users, not just (as in the print era) to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happened to be published. Unlike trade magazine and newspaper articles, whose authors write them for fees or royalties, research journal articles are author give-aways, written solely for research uptake and impact. Hence unlike trade publishing, peer-reviewed research journal publishing is a service industry. It exists in the service of research, researchers and research progress. These are vastly larger and more crucial economically than research journal publishing itself, as a business. Hence it is the research publishing industry that must adapt to the powerful new potential that the online era has opened up for research, researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, teachers, students, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. Not vice versa. A vast new potential for research has been opened up by the Web. It would be a great mistake, economically speaking, if research, researchers, the R&D industry and the US tax-paying public all had to renounce this newfound potential so as to protect and preserve the current revenue streams and M.O. of the publishing industry. That M.O. evolved for the technology and economics of the bygone Gutenberg era of print on paper. H.R.3699 would prevent evolution from continuing, to allow research to reap the full benefit of the PostGutenberg era. Requiring research to adapt to publishing would amount to the publishing tail wagging the research dog: The peer-reviewed research publishing industry exists as a service industry for research, not vice versa: Publicly funded research is entitled to the full scientific and public benefits opened up for it by the online era. Foremost among these benefits is the fact that (online) access to publicly funded research need no longer be restricted to those users who subscribe to the journal in which it was published. The research publishing industry can and will continue to evolve until it adapts naturally to the age of free online access to research. Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research. It is hence ironic that some publishers are calling Open Access self-archiving by authors ("Green OA") “parasitic” on their "added value," when not only are researchers giving publishers their articles for free, as well as peer-reviewing them for free, but research institutions are paying for subscriptions in full, covering all publishing costs and profits. The only natural and obvious source of funds to pay OA publishing fees ("Gold OA") -- if and when subscriptions eventually become unsustainable -- is hence the money that institutions are currently spending on subscriptions. In other words, while peer review is still being paid for in full by subscriptions, there is no excuse for holding the author's final draft -- and research uptake, impact and progress -- hostage to publishers' current M.O. What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA. Stevan Harnad Harnad, S. (2011) What Is To Be Done About Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research? (Response to US OSTP RFI). Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access Is a Research Community Matter, Not a Publishing Community Matter. Lifelong Learning in Europe, XVI (2). pp. 117-118. Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1): 55-59. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: (A. Gacs. Ed.) The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan. Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus 26(1): 41-54: Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Houghton, J.W. and Sheehan, P. (2009) Estimating the potential impacts of open access to research findings, Economic Analysis and Policy, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 127-142. ![]() Monday, January 2. 2012Public Access to Federally Funded Research (Harnad Response to US OSTP RFI) (Part 2 of 2)
[Part 2: see also Part 1)]
![]() (Question 8a) “What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the public is granted free access to the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research?” There is no real reason any would-be user should ever be denied access to publicly funded research journal articles. Over 60% of journals (and virtually all the top journals) already endorse immediate green OA to the author’s final draft. But if federal funding agencies wish to accommodate the <40% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate green OA, an embargo period (preferably no longer than 6 months) could be allowed. The crucial thing, however, is that the embargo should not apply to the date at which deposit of the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft in the author’s institutional repository is required. That deposit should be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, for all articles, without exception. The allowable OA embargo should apply only to whether access to the immediate-deposit is made OA immediately, or access is instead set as “Closed Access” during the allowable embargo period. Harnad, S. (2006) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model Open Access ArchivangelismSUMMARY: Universities and research funders are both invited to use this document. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): The deposit -- of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) -- is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions. But whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months). (Question 8b) “Please describe the empirical basis for the recommended embargo period.” The many empirical studies that have – in every research field tested – repeatedly demonstrated the research impact advantage (in terms of both downloads and citations) of journal articles that have been made (green) OA, compared to articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA, have also found that the OA impact advantage is greater (and, of course, comes earlier) the earlier the article is made OA. The advantage of early OA extends also to preprints made OA even before peer review. Delayed access means not only delayed impact but also lost impact, in areas of research where it is important to strike while the iron is hot. See especially the findings of the Harvard astrophysicist, Michael Kurtz in: Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact AdvantageThe optimal OA embargo period is zero: peer-reviewed research findings should be accessible to all potential users immediately upon acceptance for publication. Studies have repeatedly shown that both denying and delaying access diminish research uptake and impact. Nor does delayed access just mean delayed impact: Especially in rapid-turnaround research areas (e.g. in areas of physics and biology) delaying access can mean permanent impact loss (see Figure 6): Gentil-Beccot A, Mele S, Brooks T.C. (2010) Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics. Scientometrics 84(2):345–55 EXTRA QUESTIONS (X1, X2, X3): Question X1. “Analyses that weigh public and private benefits and account for external market factors, such as competition, price changes, library budgets, and other factors, will be particularly useful.” Please see the careful comparative economic analyses of John Joughton and co-workers (Figure 1): Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus 26(1): 41-54 Question X2. “Are there evidence-based arguments that can be made that the delay period should be different for specific disciplines or types of publications?” The optimal OA delay period is zero: the research reported in peer-reviewed journal/conference articles should be accessible to all potential users immediately upon acceptance for publication, in all disciplines. There is no real reason any would-be user should ever be denied access to publicly funded research journal articles. Over 60% of journals (and virtually all the top journals) already endorse immediate green OA to the author’s final draft. But if federal funding agencies wish to accommodate the <40% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate green OA, an embargo period (preferably no longer than 6 months) could be allowed. The crucial thing, however, is that the embargo should not apply to the date at which deposit of the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft in the author’s institutional repository is required. That deposit should be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, for all articles, without exception. The allowable OA embargo should apply only to whether access to the immediate-deposit is made OA immediately, or access is instead set as “Closed Access” during the allowable embargo period. Question X3. “Please identify any other items the Task Force might consider for Federal policies related to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally supported research.” If Federal funding agencies mandate green OA self-archiving of the fundee’s final draft of all peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from federally funded research, deposited in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (ID/OA mandate), this will not only generate 100% OA for all US federally funded research, but it will inspire funders as well as universities and research institutions worldwide to follow the US’s model, reciprocating with OA mandates of their own, thereby ushering in the era of open access to all research, worldwide, in all fields, funded and unfunded (see mandate growth curve from ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies), Figure 2). Sunday, January 1. 2012Public Access to Federally Funded Research (Harnad Response to US OSTP RFI) (Part 1 of 2)About Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research? (Response to US OSTP RFI) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum (Moderator: 1998-2011) Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, UQAM, Canada Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK [Please note that as parts of several questions sometimes ask the same thing, some of the replies are repeated too, in order to make each reply self-contained rather than requiring cross-referencing.] ![]() (Question 1a) “Are there steps that agencies could take to grow existing and new markets related to the access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications that result from federally funded scientific research?” Yes there are very specific practical steps. (“Markets,” however, is perhaps not the most direct and instructive way to understand the dynamics involved: basic research growth (1) and the resulting growth in R&D applications/products (e.g., technology, medicines) (2) need to be considered separately, with (1) feeding into (2)): US Federally funded research is funded by the US tax-payer, and conducted, analyzed and published by researchers (and for researchers), so that the research findings can be accessed, taken up, used, applied, and built upon, by all potential users, for the benefit of the US tax-paying public that funded it, through both further research (1) and R&D applications (2). Barriers to the uptake and usage of publicly funded research are barriers to both research progress itself (1) and to the practical, social and economic benefits of R&D (2). Anything that reduces access to the research findings reduces their impact, which in turn reduces the return in the public benefits from the tax dollars invested in funding, conducting, analyzing and reporting the research. Here are some papers on the economic benefits of providing open access to research (and hence also the economic losses from not providing it): Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus 26(1): 41-54:Below (Figure 1) is Houghton et al’s summary of the estimated benefit/cost ratio for the UK for the two ways of providing Open Access: Green OA = authors publishing in their journal of choice, but also making their peer-reviewed final drafts OA by self-archiving them in their institutional OA repository or (ii) Gold OA = authors publishing in OA journals that make all their articles free online and charge the author a publication fee. Houghton et al calculate, separately, the benefit/cost ratio for the UK universities (“HE”) and for UK as a whole, for converting to Gold OA or for converting to Green OA, and as a function of whether it is the UK alone that converts, or the conversion is done worldwide."Indicative modelling of post‐transition ‘steady‐state’ alternative systems returned benefits of around seven or eight times costs for open access publishing and self‐archiving with overlay services, and 40 times the costs for the Green OA self‐archiving. (p. 49)"Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) ![]() Figure 1. Houghton et al’s Benefit/Cost Analyses for Green and Gold OA in the UKSee also: The effect of open access on downloads ('hits') and citation impact: a bibliography of studiesThe two important things to note for the US RFI are (1) that, for all conversion scenarios, the cost of converting to Green OA is much lower (and distributed across institutions) and the benefit/cost ratio is much higher) than for converting to Gold OA and even more important, (2) federal funders (as well as institutions) can mandate a conversion to Green OA by mandating self-archiving by their fundees (or employees) but they cannot mandate a conversion to Gold OA (because that is in the hands of publishers). Mandating Green OA is hence the optimal policy for the US as well. The main barrier limiting access to research findings in the Internet era is the fact that although the research is publicly funded, it is only accessible to those researchers whose institutions can afford subscription/license access to the journal in which it was published. There are over 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scientific and scholarly fields worldwide. No university or research institution can afford subscription access to all or most of those journals. Most universities can only afford access to a small and shrinking fraction of them: ARL Statistics on universities’ journal holdingsIn the Gutenberg print-on-paper era, before the Internet era, there was no remedy for this, because the true costs of providing access via print-on-paper were so high that in order to cover those essential, ineliminable costs, institutions had to pay for subscription. The costs of providing print access are still high today. But the cost of providing online access alone is not – in fact it is near zero: Once their papers have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, researchers can provide online access by simply depositing their final drafts online in their institutional repositories, free for all, whether or not the user’s institution can afford to subscribe to the publisher’s print or online edition: Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)The costs of providing peer review are not zero. The peers review for free, but the journal editor must choose the peer-reviewers and adjudicate reviews and revisions. But the journal’s costs for all that (peer review + print production and distribution plus online production and distribution) are fully covered today by the subscriptions/licenses paid by the institutions that can afford to subscribe to each journal. The Internet now makes it possible to supplement this subscription access to the publisher’s version-of-record with free online access to the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft for all those potential users whose institutions cannot afford the subscription access to the publisher’s version-of-record. Hence the one, simple, cost-free step that federal agencies can and should take to maximize the uptake, usage, applications and impact of peer-reviewed research is to mandate (i.e., require) that the final, peer-reviewed draft of all federally funded research must be deposited (“self-archived”) in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Over 50 research funders [including NIH] and almost 200 universities and research institutions worldwide [including Harvard and MIT] have already mandated Green OA. (See mandate growth curve from ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies) Figure 2, below). This is what has come to be called “Green Open Access” self-archiving: ![]() Figure 2. ROARMAP Growth Chart for Green OA Mandates by Funders and InstitutionsMandating Green OA is the simple, almost cost-free measure that will grow existing and new markets for the fruits of federally funded research. To see the power of mandating Green OA in accelerating the growth of OA, contrast the growth rate of Gold OA journal publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community nor in the hands of research funders, and hence its growth cannot be accelerated by funder mandates) with the growth rate of Green OA when it is mandated. (See the Figure 3 and Figure 4 below. See also Figure 7.) According to the estimates of the biggest commercial OA publisher today (Springer, publisher of the BioMed Central Journals and Open Choice), Gold OA will not reach 70% for the top journals (the ones indexed by Thompson-Reuters Web of Science) until 2026; even the more optimistic estimates of Laakso et al (based on all journals) don’t reach 70% till 2020. In contrast, Green OA self-archiving, which is less than 20% if it is not mandated, reaches 70% within 1-2 years of adopting a Green OA mandate (and continues to grow toward 100% OA thereafter). ![]() Figure 3. Estimated Growth Curve for Gold OA publishing. Note that 70% gold OA will not be reached till 2020 on Bjork/Laakso simulations and till 2026 on the Springer estimates. Cf. Figure 4 for mandated green OA. ![]() Figure 4. Percentage Green OA when unmandated and when mandated. Unmandated Green OA is about 20%, whereas mandated Green OA soon rises to 70%. (See also Figure 7.) Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011 (Question 1b) “How can policies for archiving publications and making them publically accessible be used to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise?” The result of mandating that the final, peer-reviewed draft of all federally funded research must be deposited (“self-archived”) in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication will be that the research will be taken up, built upon and applied by any researcher, rather than, as now, only those researchers whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published. This maximizes research access, usage and impact, which in turn maximizes research progress, productivity and the benefits of both research and R&D for the tax-payers that funded the research. The current system of access-denial to the findings of federally funded research for all but the researchers at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published is a legacy of the economics of print on paper, and it is no longer necessary. In the online era there is no longer any reason left why peer-reviewed research should not be accessible online to all potential users, rather than only to those at institutions that can afford to subscribe. In careful comparisons of the research impact (downloads and citations) of research published in the same journal and year that was and was not made freely accessible online (open access) it has been repeatedly reported, in every field tested, that the research that is made open access is downloaded and cited significantly more than the research (in the same journal and year) that is not made open access (see Figure 5). Access barriers mean barriers to research applications and benefits, hence losses on the tax-payer’s investment in research. ![]() Figure 5. The OA Impact Advantage. Across all disciplines tested, citations (and downloads) are significantly greater for articles that are made (Green) OA by their authors (self-archiving) compared to articles in the same journal and year that are not made OA. (The important point is that the OA impact is always greater, in all disicplines, not the rank order of the size of the advantage by disicpline, which varies from year to year and sample to sample.) Citations indicate that the research is being used and built upon in further research and applications.See references cited in: The effect of open access on downloads ('hits') and citation impact: a bibliography of studiesLost or delayed research progress also mean losses to the growth and productivity of the R&D industry in all fields, and hence to the US economy. It is a very widespread and deep error to reckon the potential gains or losses from providing or not providing open access in terms of gains or losses to the publishing industry. Peer-reviewed research journal publishing is a service industry. It exists in the service of research, researchers and research progress, which are vastly larger and more important economically than research journal publishing itself, as a business. It is hence the research publishing industry that must adapt to the powerful new potential that the online era has opened up for research, researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, teachers, students, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. Not vice versa. Economically speaking, it would be a great mistake to conceptualize this new situation as research, researchers and the R&D industry having to compromise their newfound potential to maximize the research progress – along the lines that have now been made possible by the online era -- in order to protect and preserve the current revenue streams and M.O. of the publishing industry, which evolved for the technology and economics of the bygone Gutenberg era of print on paper. Research having to adapt to publishing would amount to the publishing tail wagging the research dog. It must always be kept clearly in mind that the peer-reviewed research publishing industry exists as a service industry for research, not vice versa: Publicly funded research is entitled to the full scientific and public benefit opened up for it by the online media. The research publishing industry can and will continue to evolve until it adapts naturally to the new demands and needs of the online age of open access to research. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA. (Question 1c) “What are the relative costs and benefits of such policies?” The costs and benefits of providing Open Access have been extensively analyzed, country by country, in the Houghton reports (see Figure 1): Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus 26(1): 41-54 (Question 1d) “What type of access to these publications is required to maximize U.S. economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise?” What is required is access to the peer-reviewed final draft, free for all users online. The way to provide that is to mandate (i.e., require) that the final, peer-reviewed draft of all federally funded research must be deposited (“self-archived”) in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. It is important also to specify that the locus of direct deposit should be the fundee’s institutional repository, not institution-external central or subject-based repositories. After deposit, institutional repositories can automatically export their contents to central and subject-based repositories – and/or central and subject-based repositories can automatically harvest them – for search and navigation. Mutually Reinforcing Mandates. If complementary, convergent institutional deposit is mandated by both federal funders and institutions (universities and research institutes), instead of needlessly competing, divergent deposit in multiple institution-external repositories, then institutions – the universal providers of all research, federally funded and unfunded -- will be in a position to reinforce, monitor and ensure compliance with the federal funder mandates. This will also encourage institutions to adopt deposit mandates of their own, for all their peer-reviewed research output, funded and undfunded. This will in turn increase the scope and benefit of federal funder mandates, far beyond just the research they fund (see Figure 1 for the importance of getting the rest of the research world to reciprocate OA so everyone can derive OA’s full benefits). Most universities already have repositories, created out of free software such as DSpace and EPrints. But for fundees at institutions that do not yet have a repository of their own, there are back-up repositories, like OpenDepot, created specifically to perform the same function until the institution has a repository of its own, at which time the institution can automatically import all of its researchers’ deposits. Optimally, access to the deposits should be opened (OA) immediately upon deposit, so that uptake and impact can be maximized immediately. The research on the open access impact advantage has shown not only that impact is lost if research is not made open access, but that delayed access does not necessarily recover that lost impact: It is often important with research to strike while the iron is hot, otherwise results may not achieve their full potential impact. Gentil-Beccot A, Mele S, Brooks T.C. (2010) Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics. Scientometrics. 2010;84(2):345–55 ![]() Figure 6. Open Access Impact Advantage Includes Early Access Advantage (Physics). (Note that impact lost because of delayed access is not just delayed; some of it is lost permanently. This is why any access embargo is deleterious to research.)But if federal funding agencies nevertheless agree to allow a temporary embargo on open access, the allowable embargo length should be minimal – not more than 6 months. Meanwhile, the mandatory deposit should nevertheless be done immediately upon acceptance for publication. During the embargo period the repository software makes it possible for individual researchers to request – and authors to provide – a single copy of the research to the individual user for research purposes with just one click from the requester and one click from the author. (This is not open access, but it can help tide over research needs during the embargo.) Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)ABSTRACT: We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access. ![]() (Question 2a) “What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research?” Scientists: With federally mandated green open access self-archiving of federally funded research, the intellectual property interests of scientists continue to be protected exactly as they are now: Scientists retain the authorship of their work. Usage and citations must be attributed. That’s all scientists require, since they do not -- and never did -- seek royalty revenue from the sale of their peer-reviewed journal articles. They only sought that their findings should be accessed, read, used, applied and built upon, in further research and applications. That is called research impact, and it is the way research progresses. It is also for this reason that in the research performance evaluation system, it is for research impact that researchers are rewarded with employment, salary increases, promotion, tenure, research funding, prizes and honors. It is also with research impact – through research progress and applications – that the tax-paying public is repaid for its investment in research funding. Mandating open access maximizes research impact. Federal agencies: With federally mandated green open access self-archiving of federally funded research, the intellectual property interests and investments of federal agencies are maximized, by ensuring that peer-reviewed research findings resulting from federally funded scientific research are accessible to all potential users, not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access. The result is that the uptake, usage, applications and impact of federally funded peer-reviewed research are maximized, Other stakeholders: With federally mandated green open access self-archiving of federally funded research, the other stakeholders and beneficiaries are: (1) research itself – its progress, applications and impact, (2) researchers, (3) research institutions, (4) research funders, (5) the vast R&D industry, (6) students, (7) teachers, (8) the developing world, (9) science journalists, and the (10) public whose taxes fund the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted. Note that the real interest here is not “intellectual property”, but research accessibility, uptake, usage, applications and progress. Publishers: With federally mandated green open access self-archiving of federally funded research, the intellectual property interests of publishers are protected by assigning them the exclusive right to sell access to the print edition and the publisher’s online version-of-record. If and when the free online accessibility to the author’s final draft eventually causes subscription cancelations, making the subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of covering publishing costs, publishers can go on to cut obsolete costs by eliminating the online and print editions (for which there is no longer a sustainable demand if and when subscriptions are no longer sustainable) entirely, offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of open access institutional repositories. The sole remaining essential cost of peer-reviewed publication will then be peer review itself, which institutions will easily be able to pay for – on the “gold open access” pay-to-publish model -- out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from their subscription cancelations. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.(Question 2b) “Conversely, are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders?” (i) There is no need to require the publisher’s version-of-record to be made open access. The majority of publishers have already endorsed immediate OA self-archiving of the authors peer-reviewed final-drafts by their authors. The author’s final draft is sufficient to ensure that no would-be user is denied online access to the peer-reviewed research findings. (ii) Mandating free online access to the author’s final draft (“gratis OA”) would be enough as a first step. Gratis OA is absolutely essential for maximizing research access and impact. In some fields, “libre OA” (free online access plus additional republication and “remix” rights), would be welcome too, but the need for libre OA is not as universal or urgent as the need for gratis OA. All authors want their research findings to be accessible to all potential users, not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they were published. But not all authors want their work to be “remixed”. And once freely accessible online, there is hardly a need for it to be re-published! (Note that along with free online access, the following also automatically comes with the territory: (2) clicking,as well as global harvesting and search by engines like google.) (iii) Researchers should continue to be able to publish their findings in the journal that is most appropriate for their work – usually the peer-reviewed journal with the highest peer-review standards that their paper can meet. It is alright to encourage researchers to publish in open access journals (gold OA) whenever a suitable gold OA journal exists, and it is alright to provide funds to pay the gold OA publication fee when funds are available, but publishing in gold OA journals should not – and need not – be mandatory. Publishing in the journal that is optimal for the paper and then making the final draft green OA is sufficient. Federal research agencies should on no account wait passively for publishers to decide if and when they wish to convert to Gold OA, offering only to divert scarce research funds to pay the fees. Mandate Green OA now and publishing will successfully adapt to the new OA reality quite naturally of its own accord – and the overall cost will be substantially lower for both institutions and funders. ![]() (Question 3a) “What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized approaches to managing public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded research in terms of interoperability, search, development of analytic tools, and other scientific and commercial opportunities?” To reply to this question, it is essential to distinguish the locus of deposit from the locus of search and navigation. The optimal way to mandate (green) OA for all federally funded research is to mandate deposit directly in the fundee’s (OAI-interoperable) institutional repository. The deposits (either just the metadata plus the link to the full text, or the metadata plus the full-text) can then be harvested automatically by subject-based repositories (such as PubMed Central or CiteSeerx) as well as global harvesters (such as Scirus or Google Scholar). The fundamental principle of the Internet and the Web is (1) local, distibuted deposit and then (2) central harvesting, navigation, search and analysis. (Note that content is not deposited directly in google!) The search and analytic tools are all developed at the central harvester level, not at the distibuted content-provider level. Most universities and research institutions already have OAI-interoperable institutional repositories [http://roar.eprints.org]. For those institutions that do not yet have one, there are back-up repositories created specifically for that purpose, such as OpenDepot. Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally. Deposit should always be in the author’s own institutional repository, with the institution helping to monitor and ensure compliance with funders’ deposit mandates. Once embargoes have elapsed, deposits can be automatically harvested by central, discipline-based repositories such as PubMed Central. (The purpose of this is (a) in order to ensure that authors only ever have to deposit once, (b) in order to recruit institutions to monitor and ensure compliance with the funder mandates and (c) in order to facilitate the adoption and implementation of complementary mandates by institutions, the universal research providers, so that they mandate the deposit of both their funded and unfunded research articles.) Harnad, S. (2008) How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates. Open Access Archivangelism 369 (2 March 2008)Search tools and richer metadata are not what is missing: OA content is. What will create the motivation to develop powerful new tools for searching and analyzing OA content will be the provision of the OA content. Unmandated, only a sparse fragment of peer-reviewed research is freely accessible online today. If federal funders mandate green OA, this will not only make federally funded research OA, but it will help and encourage universities and research institutions worldwide to mandate green OA for all their research output, funded and unfunded, across all fields.ABSTRACT: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's and RCUK's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's and U. Liege's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate funder mandates and university mandates to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing: Universities and research institutions will then also be in a position to help monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates.The provision of the OA content will also motivate the development of more powerful standards of interoperability, making the OA content increasingly useful and functional. New OA metrics that track and measure research uptake, usage, applications, citations, directions, progress and impact will also be developed, once the OA database has been provided because it is universally mandated by funders and institutions. Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 “The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance” (Question 3b) “Are there reasons why a Federal agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all published content, and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term stewardship if content is distributed across multiple private sources?” It is imperative to distinguish (i) the peer-reviewed research access/impact problem from (ii) the digital storage and preservation problem. They are not the same problem, and conflating them makes both harder to understand and to solve. There is indeed a digital storage and preservation problem, and many measures are underway to meet it, but it has nothing to do with the research access problem or with open access. Digital content needs to be preserved regardless of whether it is open access or subscription access. And preserving it does not make it open access. Mandating (green) open access self-archiving of the peer-reviewed final drafts of all federally funded research solves the research access/impact problem (for federally funded research). There is no further “custody” issue, once OA has been mandated: The fundee’s peer-reviewed, accepted final drafts are freely accessible online to all users, webwide, whether or not those users have subscription access to the publisher’s version-of-record through an institutional subscription. The green OA drafts are harvested by multiple central harvesters and it is in everyone’s interest to keep them freely accessible indefinitely, migrating and mirroring them with upgrades and technology developments. But those green OA drafts are not the publisher’s version of record. The preservation of the digital version of the publisher’s version-of-record is a matter for national archival deposit libraries, mirroring, LOCKSS, etc., but it is independent of the problem of open access – not even the same digital documents are at issue! The green OA versions need preservation too, and the institutional repositories and harvesters can and will ensure that their contents will remain freely accessible online indefinitely. But that is not the problem of the preservation of the digital version of record. ![]() (Question 4) “Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that take advantage of existing publisher archives and encourage innovation in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring long- term stewardship of the results of federally funded research?” Again, the publisher archives contain the publisher’s version-of-record. It is worthwhile pursuing long-term preservation plans for this digital content, but it has nothing to do with providing Open Access. Access to the green OA version is not provided by publishers, it is provided by authors and their institutions, on a distributed basis, and it is further supported and strengthened by multiple central harvesters of the distributed OA repository content (either the metadata plus links to the full-texts or the metadata plus the full-texts themselves). It would be an enormous strategic mistake to entrust open-access provision to publishers. That is not, and should not be, the publishers’ function. It would be suffused with conflict of interest: The subscription publisher’s primary interest today is to protect and preserve payment for access, come what may (via subscriptions, site-licenses or pay-per-view). OA is the antithesis of that: ensure that research is accessible online to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe. The interim compromise is to allow publishers to control access to the version-of-record, on paper and online, but to mandate that the author’s peer-reviewed final draft is made accessible online free for all in the author’s institutional repository. Open-access provision should not be put under the control of publishers. Complying with a funder OA mandates should be done by the fundee (and monitored by the fundee’s institution); it should not be entrusted to the publisher. ![]() (Question 5a) “What steps can be taken by Federal agencies, publishers, and/or scholarly and professional societies to encourage interoperable search, discovery, and analysis capacity across disciplines and archives?” The one essential step needs to be taken by Federal Research agencies (as well as by universities and research institutions). That step is to mandate the deposit of all peer-reviewed research output in the researcher’s institutional repository. It is providing that annual OA content (80-90% of it still not yet OA today) that will motivate powerful new developments in interoperable search, discovery and analysis tools across repositories and disciplines. There is no incentive for developing powerful new tools now, while the OA content is still so sparse (only 10-20% of research is spontaneously being made OA today, unmandated; see Figure 7; cf. Figure 4.). ![]() Figure 7. Global Green and Gold OA percentages for the top journals (indexed by Thompson-Reuters-ISI), the unindexed journals, and all journals. The reasons for the green/gold differences in percentage are that (1) about 10% of all journals are gold, (2) a much smaller percentage of the top journals are gold, (3) all journal articles can be self-archived, and (4) over 60% of non-gold journals have already endorsed green OA self-archiving. Cf. Figure 3 and Figure 4.Publishers (whether commercial or scholarly) can help by endorsing and supporting green OA self-archiving by their authors (as over 60% of them, including virtually all the top journals, have done already), but only authors’ funders and institutions can ensure that the author self-archiving actually gets done, by mandating it. (Question 5b) “What are the minimum core metadata for scholarly publications that must be made available to the public to allow such capabilities?” The OAI core metadata – author, date, title, publication, etc. – are the minimum for interoperability. They can be enhanced and made more powerful; the urgent priority, however, is not to enrich the metadata but to provide the OA content itself. OAI is more than enough for most uses of peer-reviewed journal articles – by researchers, harvesters, and the public. What is needed is the articles themselves. And for that, deposit must be mandated. Once the OA content is there, the hard part is done: Futher enriching the metadata and capabilities is the easy part, and will be a welcome challenge, taken up by many skilled and creative developers – once there is a database that makes it worth their while (by making it worth the users’ while to relay on it – as 20% certainly does not). (Question 5c) “How should Federal agencies make certain that such minimum core metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these publications can be easily found and linked to Federal science funding?” To repeat, OAI-interoperability is more than enough already. What is missing is not metadata, but OA content. And the solution is to mandate deposit. Once the content is there, the motivation to generate ever richer metadata will follow. ![]() (Question 6) “How can Federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of public access policies to U.S. taxpayers, and their investment in the peer-reviewed literature, while minimizing burden and costs for stakeholders, including awardee institutions, scientists, publishers, Federal agencies, and libraries?” The one, simple, cost-free step that federal agencies can and should take to maximize the uptake, usage, applications and impact of peer-reviewed research is to mandate (i.e., require) that the final, peer-reviewed draft of all federally funded research be deposited (“self-archived”) in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (as over 50 research funders [including NIH] and almost 200 universities and research institutions worldwide [including Harvard and MIT] have already done). Federally mandated green open access self-archiving of federally funded research maximizes the investment in research for the following nine stakeholders -- (1) researchers (scientists), (2) research institutions (awardee institutions and their libraries), (3) research funders (Federal agencies), (4) the vast R&D industry, (5) students, (6) teachers, (7) the developing world, (8) journalists, and the (9) public whose taxes fund the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted (US taxpayers) – as well as for (10) the uptake, applications, impact and progress of research itself. It is by maximizing research impact and progress that mandating OA maximizes the return on U.S. taxpayers’ investment in research. See Figure 1 and: Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact AdvantageMandating convergent institutional deposit rather than divergent institution-external, central deposit also minimizes the burden and cost – for researchers, institutions and funders – by minimizing and distributing the archiving effort as well as the cost across institutions. Publishers. It is a very widespread and deep error to reckon the potential gains or losses from providing or not providing open access in terms of gains or losses to the publishing industry. Peer-reviewed research journal publishing is a service industry. It exists in the service of research, researchers and research progress, which are vastly larger and more important economically than research journal publishing itself, as a business. It is hence the research publishing industry that must adapt to the powerful new potential that the online era has opened up for research, researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, teachers, students, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. Not vice versa. Economically speaking, it would be a great mistake to conceptualize this new situation as research, researchers and the R&D industry having to compromise their newfound potential to maximize the research progress – along the lines that have now been made possible by the online era -- in order to protect and preserve the current revenue streams and M.O. of the publishing industry, which evolved for the technology and economics of the bygone Gutenberg era of print on paper. Research having to adapt to publishing would amount to the publishing tail wagging the research dog. It must always be kept clearly in mind that the peer-reviewed research publishing industry exists as a service industry for research, not vice versa: Publicly funded research is entitled to the full scientific and public benefit opened up for it by the online media. The research publishing industry can and will continue to evolve until it adapts naturally to the new demands and needs of the online age of open access to research. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan. ![]() (Question 7) “Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer- reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?” Peer-reviewed journal articles. All researchers want immediate OA for their published articles (whether published in journals or in refereed conference proceedings) in order to maximize their access, uptake, usage, applications, citations and impact -- but not all researchers will want there to be immediate OA for their books, book-chapters or data. Funding agencies should not try to mandate what researchers don’t all want to provide willingly, and certainly not in the first instance. That would diminish the credibility of OA itself as well as making it harder to get author consensus, compliance and good will. Where possible, if the author and publisher both agree, the deposit of publications – over and above refereed journal articles and refereed conference papers – such as book chapters, books and research data should be encouraged as well, but on no account should it be mandated (required). Bare Minimum Essentials The minimum should be to mandate that: (i) the fundee’s revised, accepted refereed final draftBelow are further steps that can be encouraged (but not mandated): (i) Author’s final draft. Where possible, if the publisher endorses immediate unembargoed Gratis OA, the deposit can be the publisher’s version-of-record rather than (or in addition to) the author’s refereed, accepted final draft. (Most of the 60% of journals that endorse immediate, unembargoed OA, endorse it for the author’s final draft only, not for the publisher’s version-of-record. This constraint must be kept in mind: it is a small liability, but a far bigger asset.) (ii) Peer-reviewed journal articles. Where possible, if the author and publisher both agree, publications in addition to refereed journal articles and refereed conference papers (book chapters, books) as well as research data should be deposited as well. (iii) Immediate deposit. Where possible, if the publisher agrees (as over 60%, including most of the top journals, already do), the deposit should be made gratis OA immediately upon deposit; the remaining 40% must still be deposited immediately too, but making access to them OA may be embargoed for at most an X-month OA embargo (length of X to be decided, but preferably not more than 6 months). (During any OA embargo, individual requests from individual researchers for an individual copy of the Closed Access deposit for research purposes, can be automatically relayed by the institutional software to the author for authorization, and an individual copy can be automatically emailed to the requester by the software upon authorization by the author. This helps tide over research needs during the embargo.) Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)(iv) Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally. Deposit should always be in the author’s own institutional repository, with the institution helping to monitor and ensure compliance with funders’ deposit mandates. Once embargoes have elapsed, deposits can be automatically harvested by central, discipline-based repositories such as PubMed Central. (This is (a) to facilitate the adoption and implementation of complementary mandates by institutions, mandating deposit of unfunded research articles too, and (b) to ensure that authors only ever have to deposit once.) Harnad, S. (2008) How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates. Open Access Archivangelism 369 (2 March 2008)(v) Gratis OA (free online access). Where possible, if the author and publisher both agree, access to the deposit can be made not just gratis OA (free online access) but libre OA (free online access plus various re-use rights). (Note that with free online access what aready comes with the territory is clicking, on-screen access, linking, downloading, local storage, local print-off of hard copy, and local data-mining by the user, as well as global harvesting and search by engines like google. Many authors will not want to allow others to make and publish mash-ups of their verbatim texts. Journal article texts are not like music, videos, software or even research data, out of which creative modifications and remixes can be valuable. All scholars and scientists want their findings and ideas to be re-used, applied and built-upon, but not that their words should be remixed in mash-ups.) Suber, Peter (2008) Gratis and libre Open Access. SPARC Open Access Newsletter, August 2008 Friday, December 23. 2011Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model
On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 Professor Bernard Rentier -- Rector of the Université de Liège, Vice-President of the FRS-FNRS and Chairman of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) -- announced on the Global Open Access List (GOAL):
I am sure that many readers will not quite realize the significance of this development in Belgium, so I would like to spell it out: This represents the first instance of extending one of the key features of Professor Rentier's "Liege model" institutional repository deposit mandate (ID/OA) from a research institutional mandate to a research funder mandate. The Liege model institutional mandate is (i) to require depositand, in order to ensure compliance, (ii) to designate institutional repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review.The FRS-FNRS is the research funding council for French-speaking Belgium. Its Flemish-speaking counterpart, FWO, mandated OA deposit in 2007, but, like most funder mandates, FWO did not specify where to deposit, and did not provide any system for monitoring and ensuring compliance: FRS-FNRS has has now designated institutional repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications in support of a research funding application. This one stipulation has six major knock-on benefits: It not only: (1) extends the Liege institutional mandate's compliance/monitoring clause to funder mandates,but it also (2) helps integrate institutional and funder mandates,Bravo FRS-FNRS! Let us hope other research funders world-wde will adopt (or upgrade to) the Belgian model. How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates Stevan Harnad ![]() Thursday, December 22. 2011Priorities: Mandating, Providing and Defining Open Access (Gratis and Libre)![]() PM-R: “Stevan Harnad… argues inter alia that gratisOA (e.g. through Green, CC-restricted) rather than libreOA (e.g. through Gold, or CC-BY) should be adopted...”Actually, I argue that Gratis Green OA rather than Libre OA should be mandated (by researchers’ institutions and funders), because: (1) 100% OA is reachable only if we mandate it; (2) only Green OA self-archiving (not Gold OA publishing) can be mandated; (3) all researchers want to provide Gratis OA (free online access); (4) not all researchers want to provide Libre OA (free online access plus remix and republication rights); (5) all disciplines need Gratis OA; (6) not all disciplines need Libre OA; (7) Gratis OA is much more urgent than Libre OA; (8) 100% Gratis OA is already reachable, 100% Libre OA is not; (9) publisher restrictions are less of an obstacle for Gratis OA; (10) mandating Green Gratis OA is not only the fastest, surest and cheapest way to reach 100% Gratis OA but it is also the fastest, surest and cheapest way to reach Gold OA and Libre OA thereafter. PM-R: “If we restrict ourselves to STM publishing (where almost all of the funders’ efforts are concentrated) there is not a shred of evidence that any author wishes to restrict the re-use of their publications through licenses.”(a) OA is not just for STM articles: it’s for peer-reviewed research in all disciplines (b) It is not just funders who are mandating OA but also institutions, for all research, funded and funded, in all disciplines (c) Ask, and you will find more than a shred of evidence that not all authors (not even all STM authors) want to allow their verbatim texts to be re-mixed and re-published by anyone, without restriction. (d) What all authors want re-used and re-mixed are their ideas and findings, not their verbatim texts. (e) STM authors do want their figures and tables to be re-used and re-published, but with Green Gratis OA, that can be done; it is only their verbatim texts that they don’t want tampered with. PM-R: “Most scientists don’t care about Open Access. (Unfortunate, but we have to change that)”Most still don’t know about it, and those who do are afraid to provide it, even though it has been demonstrated to be beneficial for them and their research (in terms of uptake, usage, applications, citations, impact, progress). And that’s just why OA mandates are needed. PM-R: “Of the ones that care, almost none care aboutdetails. If they are told it is “open Access” and fulfils the funders’ requirements then they will agree to anything. If the publisher has a page labeled “full Open Access – CC-NC – consistent with NIH funding” then they won’t think twice about what the license is.”What they care about in such cases is not OA, but fulfilling their funders’ (and institution’s) requirements. That’s why OA needs to be mandated. Most funders mandate only Gratis Green OA because it has fewer publisher constraints and fewer and shorter embargoes. But the advantage of mandating that the author’s version be made OA is that it makes it easier to give permission to re-use (the author’s version of) the figures and tables. If consensus can be successfully reached on mandating Libre OA rather than just Gratis OA, all the better. But on no account should there be a delay in adopting a Gratis OA mandate in order to hold out for Libre OA. Gold OA (whether Gratis or Libre) cannot be mandated, either by funders or institutions, and is hence not an issue. Funders and institutions cannot dictate researchers’ choice of journal; nor can they dictate publishers’ choice of cost-recovery model. PM-R: “Of the ones who care I have never met a case of a scientist – and I want to restrict the discussion to STM – who wishes to restrict the use of their material through licenses. No author says “You can look at my graph, but I am going to sue you if you reproduce it” (although some publishers, such as Wiley did in the Shelley Batts affair, and presumably still do).”The discussion of OA cannot be restricted to just STM, any more than it can be restricted to just Chemistry. Authors, mostly ignorant of OA as well as of rights and licenses, mostly haven’t given any of them much thought. But I can only repeat, even if they have not yet thought about it, many authors, including STP authors, would not relish giving everyone the right to publish mash-ups of their texts. Graphs and figures are a different story; authors are happy to have those re-used and re-published in re-mixes by others (with attribution), and, as noted, the fact that the Green Gratis OA version is the author’s final draft rather than the publisher’s proprietary version of record makes this much simpler. (For the graphs in their version-of-record, some publishers might conceivably think of suing for this; but authors certainly would never do it, for their Green Gratis OA versions. So that’s another point in favor of Green Gratis OA.) PM-R: “the OA movement … Cannot agree on what “open access” means in practice”They can agree, and they have agreed: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre PM-R: “the OA movement… Spends (directly or indirectly) large amounts of public money (certainly hundreds of millions of dollars in author-side fees) without changing the balance of the marketThe OA movement spends no public money. Perhaps you mean Gold OA journal authors? And the objective of the OA movement is not “changing the balance of the market.” Its objective is OA – Gratis, and, where needed, Libre. PM-R: “the OA movement… Has no clear intermediate or end-goals”The OA movement’s end-goal is Gratis OA (free online access) and, where needed, Libre OA (free online access plus re-use, re-mix re-publish rights). Where Libre OA is needed, Gratis OA is an intermediate goal. PM-R: “When I find an Open Source program, I know what I am getting. When I find an Open Access paper I haven’t a clue what I am getting”.You can be almost 100% sure that what you are getting is the peer-reviewed, final, accepted draft. And with that, researchers whose institution cannot afford access to the publisher’s version of record would be almost 100% better off than they are now. And that’s why the first priority is mandating Green Gratis OA self-archiving. (The disanalogies between Open Access and Open Source are too numerous to itemize.) PM-R: “When I publish my code as Open Source I can’t make up the rules. I must have a license and it must be approved by OSI”But OA is about peer-reviewed research, and there it is the refereed and editor that must approve the article. PM-R: “the OS community cares about what Open Source is, how it is defined, how it is labelled and whether the practice conforms to the requirements…. By contrast the OA community does not care about these things”.As stated earlier, the OA (advocacy) community knows what OA (Gratis and Libre, Green and Gold) and what their respective “requirements” are. It is not the OA advocates who don’t care enough about such things; it is, unfortunately, the researcher community: the ones who need to provide the OA content. And what’s missing isn’t a definition of OA, but OA. PM-R: ““Open Access” was defined in the Budapest and other declarations”.And the definition – not etched in stone but evolving – has been revised and updated: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre PM-R: “Everyone (including Stevan) would agree that this is now consistent with what is (belatedly) being labelled as OA-libre. Note that Stevan was a signatory to this definition of Open Access”.I signed and helped draft the first OA definition, but at that time I was not yet aware of nuances whose importance has since become apparent, requiring a revision of the definition. PM-R: “My immediate concern is that unless we organize the definition, labelling and practice of Open Access we are simply giving OA-opponents or OA-doubters carte blanche to do whatever they like without being brought to account. We are throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars in a wasteful fashion. We are exposing people to legal action because the terms are undefined”.I’m afraid I’m lost here: Who are “we”? OA advocates? What money are we throwing away? Perhaps you means authors and their funders, spending money on Gold OA that is Gratis rather than Libre? Well, I agree that’s a waste of money, but not because the OA’s Gratis but because Green OA needs to mandated before it makes sense to pay for Gold OA. PM-R: “If you try to re-use non-libre material because it was labelled “Open Access” you could still end up in court”.Highly unlikely (especially if you’re re-using graphics from the author’s draft rather than the publisher’s version-of-record). But if you have access to it at all, you’re already better off than those researchers who do not: And that’s the primary problem OA was defined and designed to fix. PM-R: “As a UK taxpayer I fund scientists to do medical research (through the MRC). The MRC has decided (rightly) that the results of scientific research should be made Open. But they are not Open according to the BOAI declaration”.They are Gratis OA (after an embargo period). Once all research is Gratis OA (and immediately upon acceptance for publication), Libre OA’s day will come. PM-R: “Individuals such as Stevan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, [have] relatively little coordination and no bargaining power”True. But we did coordinate on the updating of the definition of OA. And EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) will attempt to guide and coordinate the OA policy-making of universities and research instititions, worldwide. But OA advocates, individually and collectively, are not the ones with the power to provide OA: the ones with the power to provide it are researchers themselves. And the ones with the power to mandate that they provide it are their institutions and funders. PM-R: “So my simple proposal is that we need an Open Access InstituteLet’s publish our papers in whatever is the best journal for them, but let’s concentrate on persuading institutions and funders to mandate that we make them Green OA. I look forward to PM-R’s explanation of why he does not agree.
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