Friday, July 22. 2011The JSTOR downloading caper: Open Access is creator give-away, not consumer rip-off![]() [UPDATE (2013): Alas, they were not, with tragic results: Adam Swartz 1986-2013] ...as they have been by JSTOR once it becomes clear that he was (as I hope!) only data-mining what he downloaded, not redistributing it. Breaking into a locked room and computer at MIT is not ethical except if something far more important and justifiable is at stake -- but Swartz will be pardoned for that peccadillo too. Yet access to retroactively scanned journal article databases is definitely not the same sort of "primal right" as access to current, born-digital articles, where the access is willingly provided by their authors, at no cost to themselves or the user. In other words, author give-away is not the same thing as user rip-off. Back-scanning and archiving services may well be over-charging, substantially, relative to their expenses, and that should be challenged and remedied, but the remedy is not theft. I hope the JSTOR downloading caper will not be conflated or even associated with the legitimate worldwide efforts by researchers to give and get open access to one another's own refereed research. Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Thursday, July 21. 2011More on failing to grasp the Gratis OA within reach because of over-reaching for the Libre OA that is not![]() Peter Murray-Rust (PMR) misses the main advantages of Gratis Green OA (GrGrOA): (1) Immediate GrGrOA has far smaller obstacles, being already endorsed by over 60% of journals (including almost all the top journals).This contrasts with Libre Gold OA (LiGoOA): (1') LiGoOA is not yet endorsed by any journal other than the small proportion of LiGoOA that already exist (say, about 10%, and that does not include most of the top journals).All the LiGoOA advantages PMR seeks will come, but before we reach LiGoOA we have to reach GrGrOA, and we won’t reach it by over-reaching: GrGrOA will simply inherit LiGoOA’s bigger obstacles. (And what comes with the territory with GrGrOA is searching, downloading locally, reading, saving locally, data-crunching, printing off; that’s all. But it’s incomparably more than what we have now, without GrGrOA.) PMR: "There is a difference between the size of an obstacle and the number of obstacles. I agree that there is quantitatively more opportunity for self-archiving than LiGo."And for mandating 100% of it. And that's what OA is about: Reaching 100% OA, at long last. PMR: "I do not understand the phrase “almost-OA”."Articles deposited as Closed Access but semi-automatically requestable via the repository's email eprint request Button. 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 OnlinePMR: "This figure [ % Gold OA] is growing"But not fast enough. And unlike Green, cannot be accelerated with mandates. Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011 PMR: "You assert opinions [SH: 'LiGoOA cannot be mandated']Please describe how (and who) you propose to mandate (i.e. require) LiGoOA, that is, require authors to publish in Libre Gold OA Journals. PMR: "Another axiom [SH: 'before we reach LiGoOA we have to reach GrGrOA, and we won’t reach it by over-reaching: GrGrOA will simply inherit LiGoOA’s bigger obstacles']"Please describe how you propose to persuade authors who are not even providing GrGrOA to their articles, published in their journals of choice, for free, to pay instead to publish them in LiGoOA journals. (And then describe how you propose to mandate it, if they demur.) PMR: "You and I differ as to what is formally allowable [with GrGrOA]"If it's not "searching, downloading locally, reading, saving locally, data-crunching, printing off" as I said, then what is formally allowable with GrGrOA, by your lights? PMR: "I don’t see why the amount of something alters the rate of growth"It doesn't. It's just that the rate of growth of Gold OA is way too slow. The current growth rate will not even reach 60% Gold OA before 2026, whereas Green OA mandates have been reaching 60% Green OA within two years of adoption for years now: Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers, Open and Shut, 19 June 2011 PMR: "Libre costs the reader nothing. Yes, we have a prisoner’s dilemma, or a transition process. I would argue that the final state of full Libre will cost less than the current toll-access. But we are in the land of opinions, not logic."It is the author who pays for Gold OA, not the reader. And it is the author who provides Gold OA, not the reader. So it is not a Prisoner's Dilemma but an Escher Impossible Figure. Green OA mandates can cure the paralysis for Gratis Green OA, and this is a matter of evidence and logic, not opinion. What's your alternative, for curing paralysis for Libre Gold OA? PMR: "I would urge funders to insist on Libre content"Good luck! But reality is that most funders don't even insist on Gratis content yet. Might it not be better to start to try to succeed in urging them to insist on at least that, first? PMR: "authors to insist on financial support from either funders or their institutions"If authors want, and can provide Gratis Green OA for free (and don't even bother to do it until/unless mandated), what leverage do they have with their funders (when research funds are already scarce) or with their institutions (whose spare funds are locked into subscriptions) -- even if authors bother to insist at all on what they don't even bother to do themselves for free? PMR: "libraries cancelling as many toll-journals as possible"Libraries are already cancelling as many toll journals as possible, but they can't cancel the must-have ones until/unless their institutional users can get access to their contents some other way. That's the Escher Impossible Figure (not a Prisoner's Dilemma). And what will resolve it is mandating Green OA, which, once Green OA is universal, allows the libraries to cancel their subscriptions, releasing the institutional windfall savings to pay for a universal conversion to Gold (and Libre!) OA. PMR: "development of new and imaginative and lower-cost ways of publishing"Gold OA publishing -- once all access-provision and archiving (and their costs) have been offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories -- will already reduce the cost of publishing to just the cost of peer review. All it takes to see this is a little imagination (but for that, you have to be able to defer immediate gratification on Libre OA!). PMR: "Stevan has asserted [SH: 'if we start with an objective of 100% OA… we need to start by backing green OA, which has a clear strategy…. Ultimately we want the same thing, but it’s how we get there, and how quickly… that really matters'] as an axiom for 10 years. I don’t agree. And as important, Gratis OA is no use to me, while continuing to legitimise the ownership of material inappropriately"But perhaps you'll allow that Gratis OA may be of use to many other would-be users, in many fields -- and that the fields for which Libre OA is more urgent than Gratis OA, if any, may be far fewer… Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Tuesday, July 19. 2011KlausGrafs KlausGraffiti scheinen für einige Grund immer schriller und koprolalischer zu werden...![]() "Harnad kippt seine dogmatische Jauche... KlausGraf - am Montag, 18. Juli 2011, 17:28 - Rubrik: Open Access Kommentar verfassen http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/34630904/ Sunday, July 17. 2011Open Access FAQ from Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen needs corrective updates![]() The misunderstandings are mostly in the form of two unreflective reversals of practical and strategic priorities, insisting, prematurely, on far less urgent and important and much less reachable OA goals, while neglecting or even rejecting far more urgent and important OA goals that are already fully within reach. (1) Gratis OA vs Libre OA: Gratis OA is (1a) free online access to refereed journal articles. Libre OA is (1a) free online access to refereed journal articles (1b) plus certain further re-use and re-publication rights.This kind of counterproductive over-reaching is a formula for yet another decade of attaining minimal OA of any kind. For correctives, see the longstanding BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ and especially #23 ("Version Control"), #31 ("Waiting for Gold"), #36 ("Re-Use") and #37 ("Permissions"). The ADW FAQs need to be corrected and updated to explain and advocate that the worldwide research community should first grasp what is already fully within its immediate reach, namely, Green Gratis OA self-archiving -- through institutional and funder Green Gratis OA self-archiving mandates (requirements). Only after the immensely valuable immediate benefit for research that is already within reach (universal Green Gratis OA) has been grasped should we be thinking of going on to Gold OA publishing and Libre OA re-use/republication rights.
Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Friday, July 1. 2011Richard Poynder Interviews Peter Suber, Leader of the Leaderless OA Revolution![]() ![]() "Peter Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution" Open and Shut [& Information Today] 1 July 2011. Congratulations to Richard Poynder for another timely, incisive and insightful OA interview. And heartfelt admiration and gratitude to the undisputed leader of the leaderless OA revolution, Peter Suber! …Which doesn't prevent me from mentioning two minor strategic matters! (1) It is a good idea to recommend, as Peter does, that non-Green publishers channel any opposition or apprehension they may have concerning OA or Green OA self-archiving mandates into embargoing Green OA self-archiving instead of lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates. But I don't think it's a good idea to encourage Green OA publishers like Springer (or Elsevier, or APS or any of the other 60% of publishers who are already Green on immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving) to backslide into embargoes rather than lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates! Let those publishers who wish to lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates do so, if they wish. The benefits -- to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, students, and the tax-paying public -- are so overwhelming that lobbying against Green OA mandates is extremely unlikely to be successful, especially regarding institutional mandates. For whereas not all research is funded, virtually all of it, funded and unfunded, originates from universities and research institutions. Anti-mandate lobbying has had some success in delaying the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates at the government funder level, but it has no leverage at the institutional level. (2) The broad-spectrum, low-selectivity, pass/fail mega-journal certainly has a potential niche today (whether OA or non-OA), but not only is that not the only way, the best way, or the most economical way for researchers to provide OA for their articles (Green OA self-archiving is), but it does not provide the level of quality control that the users of the top journals in each field need and depend on: Deferring that for "postpublication" peer review is not only the equivalent of embargoing it (and with a much less certain outcome), but it deprives authors of the level of immediate scrutiny and feedback that they expect and need from today's top journals, while also depriving users of the immediate indicators of a paper's quality level. The immediate purpose of OA is to free the entire hierarchy of peer reviewed journals, such as they are, from access-barriers for all potential users: the purpose is not to flatten the peer review quality hierarchy and wait for pot-luck thereafter! Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Wednesday, June 29. 2011Megajournals, Quality Standards and Selectivity: Gaussian Facts of LifeSUMMARY: It is obvious that broad-spectrum, low-selectivity, pay-to-publish mega-journals -- whether Open Access or not Open Access -- can help meet many researchers' need to publish today, but it is certainly not true that that's the only way, the best way, or the most economical way to provide Open Access to their articles. ![]() For some forms of human performance -- e.g., driving or doctoring -- we are satisfied with a pass/fail license cut-off. For others, such as sports or musical performance, we prefer finer-grained levels, with a hierarchy of increasingly exacting -- hence selective -- performance standards. But, as a matter of necessity with a finite (though growing) population and a bell curve with tapered tails, the proportion (and hence the number) of candidates and works that can meet higher and higher performance standards gets smaller and smaller. Not only can everyone and everything not be in the top 10% or the top 1% or the top 0.1%, but because the bell curve's tail is tapered (it is a bell, not a pyramid), the proportion that can meet higher and higher standards shrinks even faster than a straight line. Scholars and scientists' purpose in publishing in peer-reviewed journals -- indeed, the purpose of the "publish-or-perish" principle itself -- had always been two-fold: (1) to disseminate findings to potential users (i.e., mostly other scholars and scientists) and (2) to meet and mark a hierarchy of quality levels with each individual journal's name and its track-record for the rigor of its peer review standards (so users at different levels can decide what to read and trust and so quality can be assessed and rewarded by employers and funders). In principle (though not yet in practice), journals are no longer needed for the first of these purposes, only the second -- but for that, they need to continue to be selective, ensuring that the hierarchy of quality standards continues to be met and marked. It is obvious that broad-spectrum, low-selectivity, pay-to-publish mega-journals -- whether OA or not OA -- can help meet many researchers' need to publish today, but it is certainly not true that that's the only way, the best way, or the most economical way to provide OA for their articles: Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).Peer review itself, however, will, like homeostasis, always "defend" a level, whether that level is methodological soundness alone, methodological soundness and originality, methodological soundness, originality and importance, or what have you. The more exacting the standard, the fewer the papers that will be able to meet it. Perhaps the most important function of peer review is not the "marking" of a paper's having met the standard, but helping the paper to reach the standard, through referee feedback, adjudicated by an editor, sometimes involving several rounds of revision and re-refereeing. Since peer review is an active, dynamical process of correction and improvement, it is not like the passive assignment of a letter grade to a finished work -- A, B, C, D. Rather, an author picks a journal that "defends" a target grade (A or B or C or D), submits the paper to that journal for refereeing, and then tries to improve the paper so as to meet the referees' recommendations (if any) by revising it. There are, in other words, A, B, C and D journals, the A+ and A journals being the highest-standard and most selective ones, and hence the least numerous in terms of both titles and articles, for the Gaussian reasons described above. A mega-journal, in contrast, is equivalent to one generic pass/fail grade (often in the hope that the "self-corrective" nature of science and scholarship will eventually take care of any further improvement and sorting that might be needed -- after publication, though "open peer review"). Maybe one day scholarly publication will move toward a model like that -- or maybe it won't (because users require more immediate quality markers, and/or because the post-publication marking is too uncertain and unreliable). But what's needed today is open access to the peer-reviewed literature, published in A, B, C and D journals, such as it is, not to a pass/fail subset of it. Hence pass/fail mega-journals are a potential supplement to the status quo, but not a substitute for it. Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Thursday, June 23. 2011Elsevier & IOP Still Fully Green & Angelic: Just Ignore Incoherent Distinctions![]() A Green publisher is a publisher that endorses immediate self-archiving of their authors' accepted final drafts (but not necessarily the publisher's version of record) free for all on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication. That's all it takes for a publisher to be Green (and to be on the Side of the Angels). In the new language that some Green publishers have jointly adopted for their copyright transfer agreements recently, some new conditions have been added, based on three distinctions. Not all Green publishers have added all three conditions (Elsevier, for example, has only added two of them, IOP all three), but it does not matter, because all three distinctions are incoherent: They have no legal, logical, technical nor practical substance whatsoever. The only thing that a sensible person can and should do with them is to ignore them completely. Here they are. (The actual wording in the agreement will vary, but I am giving just the relevant gist.) (1) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but you may only do it on your personal institutional website, not in your institutional repository.This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website and your institutional repository are just institutional disk sectors with different (arbitrary) names. (2) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but you may not do it where there is "systematic distribution."All websites are systematically harvested by google and other search engines, and that's how most users search and access them. (I think what the drafters of this absurd condition may have had in mind is that you may not deposit your paper on a website that tries to systematically reconstruct the contents of the entire journal. They are perfectly right about that. But an institutional repository certainly does not do that; it simply displays its own authors' papers, which are an arbitrary fraction of any particular journal. If there is anyone that publishers can -- and should -- go after, it is 3rd party harvesters that reconstruct the contents of the entire journal.) (3) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but not if you are mandated to do it (i.e., you may if you may but you may not if you must).Authors are advised to advise their publishers, if ever asked, hand on heart, that everything they do, they do out of their own free will, and not out of coercion (and that includes the mandate to publish or perish). If anyone is minded to spend any more time on this nonsense than the time it took to read this message, then they deserve everything that's coming (and not coming) to them. Elsevier and IOP authors: Just keep self-archiving in your IRs, exactly as before, and ignore these three silly new clauses, secure in the knowledge that they contain nothing of substance. Stevan Harnad Enabling Open Scholarship Sunday, June 19. 2011Richard Poynder Interview: How Fast Is Open Access Growing?![]() Open Access by Numbers Open and Shut, 19 June 2011
Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship Wednesday, June 15. 2011SPARC Europe's OA Suggestions to EC: Part Sense, Part Nonsense, Part Irrelevance![]() ![]() SPARC Europe's OA suggestions to the EC are part sense, part nonsense, part irrelevance:SUMMARY: Calling for Green Gratis OA Mandates makes sense. Calling for Libre OA, extra Gold OA funds, or double-standards for journal quality does not. Call for the reasonable. Grasp the reachable. And trust nature to take care of the rest. Sense: - Open Access means immediate access, without delaying mechanisms[assuming that what is meant here is to extend the EC Green OA self-archiving mandates] Nonsense: - Open Access in Institutional Open Access Policies should refer to “Libre” Open Access: free to access and free to re-use[Libre OA asks for much more than Gratis OA (free online access) and we are nowhere near having Gratis OA yet. It is counter-productive to over-reach and ask for more when you don't even have the less. Mandating Green Gratis OA will eventually lead to Libre OA too, but demanding Libre OA now will lead nowhere for many more years to come.] - communicate that the quality of Open Access peer-reviewed journals is equal to the quality of subscription peer-reviewed journals[Utter, utter nonsense, parroted year in and year out by an endless succession of well-meaning know-naughts: The quality of a peer-reviewed journal is what it is, regardless of its cost-recovery model. Is the EC supposed to give a-priori quality bonuses to journals, based on whether or not they happen to be OA, rather than letting them earn it, with their peer-review standards and quality track-records, like all other journals?] - call for subscription-based publishers to allow authors and institutions to deposit metadata into Open Access repositories and to support Creative Commons licensing of these materials[Why call for this, since authors can already deposit their metadata? What publishers should be called upon to do is simply to endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, as over 60% of journals already do ("being on the side of the angels"] Irrelevance: - make funding available to cover the costs of Open Access publishing[Does the EC have spare funds for this? What is needed is OA, not more money to pay publishers. Institutional subscriptions are paying for publication already. What is needed is to mandate Green Gratis OA self-archiving. If and when funds are needed to pay for Gold OA publishing, they will come from the release of the institutional subscription funds through cancelation.] - call for subscription-based publishers to start the transition of subscription journals towards Open Access["Calling on publishers to start the transition" will have no effect and is hence irrelevant. Mandating Green OA, in contrast, will generate OA, and then the publishers will start planning for a transition of their own accord as a natural matter of course if and when mandated Green OA begins causing cancelation pressure.] - provide an infrastructure enabling publisher content to be harvested and deposited into institutional repositories[What is needed is not an infrastructure. What is needed is a mandate to deposit.] Stevan Harnad Enabling Open Scholarship Friday, June 10. 2011Aureatio Praecox: The Three Reasons Gold OA Is Premature![]() JSZCZ: After collecting free e-journals for more than ten years I'm amazed to read a phrase like this one produced by Steven Harnad.All OA content -- whether green or gold -- is welcome, valuable and important. That is not the issue. The issue is how to increase OA content.SH: "But gold OA is still premature (whether for journals or books)."I have concentraded on journals in humanities and social sciences and have more than 12.000 for the moment. To get a realistic idea of how much OA content there is, how fast it is growing, and what scope there is for accelerating its growth, it is not enough simply to count Gold OA items. You have to calculate the annual proportion of Gold OA items, as well as their growth rate, and you have to compare them with the annual proportion and growth rate of Green OA items. The underlying question is: Which is the surest and fastest way to reach 100% OA, now? And the answer is: by mandating Green OA, not by waiting for Gold OA: (a) The total annual percentage of journal articles that are OA today averages somewhere between 20% and 30%, and it varies by field. (b) Out of the overall annual 20-30% OA, according to the 2010 estimates of Bo-Christer Björk for 2009, in the Thompson-Reuters-ISI-indexed journals the proportion of Green OA was 2/3 and the proportion of Gold OA was 1/3. In non-ISI-indexed journals the relative proportions of the OA subset were reversed (2/3 Gold, 1/3 Green). (According to Ulrich's there are about 25,000 peer-reviewed journals across all disciplines today. ISI indexes about the top 20% of them, and about 7% of those 10,000 ISI-indexed journals [but mostly not the top ISI journals] are Gold OA: one wonders what proportion of the 32,000 EZB Gold OA journals -- or of Jan Szczepanski's 12,000 Gold OA humanities and social science journals -- are peer-reviewed journals.) (c) Out of the overall annual 20-30% OA, according to the 2010 estimates of Bo-Christer Bjork for 2009, in all disciplines except the biomedical ones, the proportion of Green OA was much higher than the proportion of Gold OA. In the biomedical disciplines the relative proportions were reversed. The overall percentage of OA was lowest in the biomedical disciplines. Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273.(d) In 2010 Springer publishers estimated that for ISI-indexed journals, growth is 3.5% annually and gold OA growth is 20% (of current Gold OA) annually, so in 10 years the overall percentage of Gold OA will have increased from 8% Gold OA out of all (ISI) articles published in 2010 to 27% Gold OA out of all (ISI) articles published in 2020: (e) In contrast to the overall annual percentage of OA (20-30%) and Gold OA's growth rate that will take us from its current 8% to 27& in 2020, institutions that mandate Green OA provide over 60% OA, and and keep climbing toward 100% within a few years. Hence there are three reasons Gold OA is premature, and (e), above, immediately reveals the first and most important of them: 1. Green OA Can Be Accelerated By Mandating It: Green OA depends only on the research providers -- institutions and funders -- and can hence be accelerated to 100% by mandating it. Gold OA depends upon publishers; institutions and funders cannot mandate it, hence cannot accelerate its growth. (However, mandating Green OA is also likely to accelerate the eventual transition to Gold OA; but first it will provide OA -- 100% OA -- and OA is the primary target and hence the priority of the OA movement.) 2. The Economic Benefits of Green OA Are Greater And More Immediate Than Those of Gold OA: Houghton et al have shown that there are considerable economic benefits to be expected from both Green and Gold OA, but the benefit/cost ratio of Green OA is much higher. Harnad, S. (2010a) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1). pp. 55-59.3. The Money to Pay for Gold OA Is Still Tied Up In Institutional Journal Subscriptions and the Asking Price For Gold OA Is Still High: The vast majority of journals (and almost all the top journals) are still subscription-based. That means that the potential institutional funds to pay for Gold OA are still tied up in institutional subscriptions, which institutions cannot cancel unless the contents of the journals are accessible to their users by another means. That other means is Green OA -- once it is universally mandated. This is also how Green OA mandates can accelerate the transition to Gold OA. And it is the third reason Gold OA is premature. When distributed Green OA institutional repositories take over the entire function of text-generation, access-provision, and archiving, journals will be able to cut costs by terminating their paper and online editions and providing only the service of peer review, certifying the outcome with the journal name. That means the post-Green-OA cost of Gold OA will then be much lower. 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.About Gold OA books I have little to say, except that their proportion (out of all book, or even out of all scholarly/scientific books) is minuscule, cannot be accelerated by mandates, and involves a conflict of interest for royalty-seeking authors -- whereas for journal article authors it does not. Rather the opposite: journal article authors are losing potential usage and impact if only users at subscribing institutions can access their articles. That -- not absolute Gold OA item counts -- is the reality today. Stevan Harnad Enabling Open Scholarship http://www.openscholarship.org
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