Monday, June 22. 2009UK's 23rd Green Open Access Mandate, Planet's 87th: Roehampton University![]() ![]() (Twenty-four thesis mandates have also been registered since the invitation to register those as well was announced at ETD 2009, but this is still an underestimate: please do register your institution's mandate if it has one!) Roehampton University Wednesday, June 17. 2009Harvard's 4th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate; Planet's 86th![]() ![]() the Graduate School of Education. (Stay tuned for the 5th (proposed) mandate from Harvard Medical School.) Monday, June 15. 2009EOS: New worldwide organization for universities promoting open accessProfessor Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège, in ![]() The context for the establishment of the EOS forum has been: • the findings of the ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of Scientific Publications Markets in Europe’ (European Commission, DG Research, project report, January 2006) • the subsequent major conference in Brussels in February 2007 held jointly by the European Commission’s DG Research and DG Information and Media, ‘Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age’ • the outstanding success of the research community’s petition on Open Access to Scientific Information to the European Commissioner for Research (summary of petition and its presentation) • the recommendations on Open Access of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) • the mandatory policy on Open Access to research it funds under the Seventh Framework Programme from the European Research Council • the European University Association recommendations on Open Access adopted by the EUA Council in March 2008 Our first meeting was held at the University of Liege on 18 October 2007 (The Liege Convention). We reconvened at the University of Southampton on 4 April 2008 during the Open Repositories 08 (OR08) conference. Our next general meeting will be in Geneva in June 2009. This website will report on developments of relevance to the mission of EnablingOpenScholarship and will provide members with news and details of forthcoming meetings, briefings and discussion sessions. Anyone who is interested in enrolling their institution as a member, or in attending an EOS meeting or briefing session, is invited to email the convenor of the group, Dr Alma Swan (contact details). Saturday, June 13. 2009On Proportion and Strategy: OA, Non-OA, Gold-OA, Paid-OA![]() TWELVE OA STATISTICS AND THREE CONCLUSIONS #1: The vast majority of current (peer-reviewed) journal articles are not OA (Open Access) (neither Green OA nor Gold OA ). #2: The vast majority of journals are not Gold OA.A peer-reviewed journal article is Green OA if it has been made OA by its author, by self-archiving it in an Open Access Repository (preferably the author's own institution's OAI-compliant Institutional Repository) from which anyone can access it for free on the web. #3: The vast majority of journals are Green OA.(Note that the c. 10,000 journals indexed in SHERPA/Romeo do not include most of the Gold OA journals, although these would all be classed as Green too, as all Gold OA journals also endorse Green OA self-archiving. Romeo does, however, index just about all of the top journals in just about every field.) #4: The vast majority of citations are to the top minority of articles (the Pareto/Seglen 90/10 rule).Of the 10,000+ journals whose OA policies are indexed in SHERPA/Romeo, over 90% endorse immediate deposit and immediate OA by the author: 63% for the author's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint) and a further 32% for the pre-refereeing preprint. #5: The vast majority of journals (or journal articles) are not among the top minority of journals (or journal articles). #6: The vast majority of the top journals are not Gold OA. #7: The vast majority of the top journals are Green OA. #8: The vast majority of article authors would comply willingly with a Green OA mandate from their institutions and/or funders.The relation between point #1 (the vast majority of articles are neither Green OA nor Gold OA) and point #7 (the vast majority of the top journals -- and indeed also the vast majority of all journals -- are Green OA) is this: Although the vast majority of journals endorse Green OA self-archiving by the author (and are hence Green) the vast majority of authors do not yet act upon this Green light to deposit. That is why the Green OA mandates by institutions and funders are needed. #9: The vast majority of institutions and funders do not yet mandate Green OA.Ninety-five percent (95%) of authors surveyed (by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives, for JISC), in all fields and all countries, have stated that they would comply with a mandate to self-archive from their universities and/or their funders (over 80% of them say they would do it willingly). However, the vast majority do not self-archive spontaneously, without a mandate. #10: The vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals.There are somewhere around 10,000 universities and research institutions worldwide. So far, 51 of them -- plus 36 research funders -- have mandated (i.e. required) their peer-reviewed research output to be made Green OA by depositing it in an OA repository. #11: The vast majority of the top Gold OA journals are paid-publication journals. #12: The vast majority of institutions do not have the funds to subscribe to all the journals their users need. Because of the serials crisis, institutional library acquisitions budgets are overstretched. The same is true of research funders' budgets. I think two strong conclusions follow from this: C1: The fact that the vast majority of Gold OA journals are not paid-publication journals is not relevant if we are concerned about providing OA to the articles in the top journals. The implication is: It is vastly more productive (of OA) for universities and funders to mandate Green OA than to fund Gold OA.(Whether institutions and funders elect to fund Gold OA after they have mandated Green OA is of course an entirely different question, and not a matter of urgency one way or the other. These statistics and conclusions about practical priority are intended only to illustrate the short-sightedness of funding Gold OA pre-emptively, without mandating Green OA, if the goal of institutions and funders is to provide Open Access to their research output.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Definitive Answer: IIISee also: ![]() CS: "[D]espite what is written on [Wiley/Blackwell's] website, I remain concerned by some other information I received, and by the wording on their copyright form, which appears to contradict the information on their website."Colin, please let me preface my reply with a reaffirmation of the fact that I think your efforts on behalf of OA and filling OU's IRs with OA's target content are extremely valuable, timely and welcome, both for OU and for OA. If I venture to offer some practical advice, it is in no way intended to imply that your work is less than precious. I am merely suggesting ways in which it can be made ever more effective. And one of those ways is to reassure authors by putting their (largely naive and groundless) worries about copyright at ease, rather than reinforcing them. The default explanation and advice to OU's authors regarding their right to deposit their refereed, accepted final drafts in OU's repository should (in my judgment) be the following: That, I think, is the only advice an institution and its repository should be giving its authors, to inform and reassure them about (1) their right to deposit and (2) their right to set access to their deposit as OA.(1) Every final draft can and should be deposited in OU's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is absolutely no legal obstacle to doing this, without exception; publisher policy and copyright are completely irrelevant to making this deposit. But none of this advice will have much effect one way or the other until and unless OU adopts an OA mandate: The best institutional reassurance to its authors is an official institutional deposit mandate. The correct and complete advice (in my view) is (1) - (4) above. More (e.g., fretting about contradictory formal statements by publishers) would be just reinforcing author worries rather than reducing them.[T]he principal purpose of mandates themselves is to reinforce researchers' already-existing inclination to maximise access and usage for their give-away articles, not to force researchers to do something they don't already want to do.CS: "By posting on this issue, I am simply sharing information with the repository community to help us make informed decisions on behalf of our depositors. One of the biggest selling points when advocating open access self-archiving is to reassure our academics that we know what we are doing when it comes to checking publishers’ copyright and self-archiving policies. Depositors are placing their faith in our knowledge and expertise, and therefore I certainly do not think it is a mistake to be thorough." Nor do authors need to resort to "faith." In cases where they have any "reasonable doubts" they should simply set access provisionally as "Closed Access," rather than not depositing at all -- or depositing only after any embargo has elapsed. CS: "For green OA to be successful, it must be sustainable. For it to be sustainable, it needs to offer a good service."For green OA to be sustainable, it has to be mandated. Otherwise there is nothing to sustain. Repository managers and library staff trying to beg, borrow or appeal deposits through reassurances about legality will never come anywhere near filling an IR with its target OA content. What is needed is an official institutional deposit mandate. CS: "If academics think (rightly or wrongly) that we are placing them at risk by making decisions based on cherry-picked statements that suit us, I think most would not see this as providing a good service. Therefore, is it not a strategic mistake to not consider carefully any publisher mixed messages?"I think that there might be an underlying premise here to the effect that: the way to fill an IR is to provide unmandated authors with a proxy deposit service together with reassuring legal advice. My own view, for what it's worth, is that this premise is profoundly erroneous: that (1) - (4) is all that repository managers and librarians need to do for authors (though if for some reason they really wish to, they can do their keystrokes for them too). Any further effort and energy (apart from the technical maintenance of the IR, including the all-important incentive: IRstats) will be most fruitful if directed toward persuading the university (as well as its individual faculties, schools, departments and labs) of the necessity, feasibility and benefits of adopting a Green OA deposit mandate, rather than fussing about publishers' self-contradictory policy statements. We have to keep reminding ourselves that self-archiving is entirely in the hands of the research community, not the publishing community -- but those hands (or rather their fingertips) need to be mandated into movement: It is useful for the research community to keep reminding itself that the only thing that stands between them and universal OA is keystrokes. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, June 12. 2009The Argument Against (Premature) Gold OA Support![]() ![]() SS: "Are green and gold open access independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money?I welcome this dialogue with Stuart Shieber, who, with his patient, resourceful, tireless efforts at Harvard succeeded in achieving consensus on the adoption of what is indisputably the most important and influential of Green OA self-archiving mandates to date – a historic milestone and turning point for the entire global OA movement. Although Green and Gold OA are definitely not independent of each other, their interdependence is subtle and not at all the simple, parallel complementarity that many imagine it to be. I will try to show why worry about Gold OA at this time is indeed a waste of time (though it is not a waste of time to explain to those who are worrying about Gold OA how and why their worries are groundless). I will also try to show why spending money pre-emptively -- whether redirected from the university’s (serials-crisis-burdened) library acquisitions budget or from funding agencies’ scarce research funds -- to pay for Gold OA at this time is indeed a waste of money (though it will not be a waste of money if and when gold OA’s time actually comes – which it certainly has not done yet). I will argue that all efforts by universities – the universal research providers – should be directed toward doing what Harvard (thanks to Stuart) and 85 other institutions, departments and funders have already done, which is to mandate Green OA (i.e., to require the immediate deposit in the institution's OA repository of all peer-reviewed journal articles, irrespective of whether they are published in a subscription-based journal or a Gold OA journal). Once (1) universal mandates have made Green OA universal and (2) if and when that universal Green OA in turn makes journal subscriptions unsustainable, then and only then is it time for a transition to paying for peer review on the Gold OA model: not before, when what is urgently needed is far more OA -- which is provided by implementing Green OA mandates to deposit all journal articles, not by paying needlessly for Gold OA journal publishing. Moreover, the price for Gold OA then -- when it is actually needed -- will be much lower than what is being asked now, pre-emptively, when subscriptions are intact and Gold OA is not yet needed. And the money to pay for Gold OA (then) will come out of the windfall savings from the very same institutional subscription cancellations on which this if/then scenario is predicated, rather than out of universities’ already overstretched library budgets and/or funders' overstretched research budgets. SS: "Enaction of green OA policies at universities requires the broad support of faculty and administration, and careful attending to their wholly reasonable concerns. Chief among these is the following argument against a green OA policy:And the Kantian reply to this wholly reasonable concern is that if and when there is cancellation pressure on journal publishers – whether commercial or learned-society publishers – they will need to cut costs and downsize to providing only those services for which there is still a demand. Those essential services (as Stuart goes on to agree below) consist of peer review and the certification of its outcome with the journal’s “imprimatur” – i.e., the journal name and its track-record for quality. And that service will be paid for by authors' institutions, per outgoing peer-reviewed journal article published, out of a fraction of their total annual windfall savings released by the cancellation of what they had previously been paying for, per journal subscription, to access the incoming peer-reviewed articles from other institutions. The products and services (and their associated costs) that will have been phased out in the downsizing under cancellation pressure from universal Green OA will have been the print edition, the online edition, access provision (subscription fulfillment), archiving and preservation. All of these will instead have been offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional Green OA IRs worldwide. Hence the only thing left to pay for will be the peer-review (and possibly some copy-editing), with its outcome certified by the journal's name. Yes, downsizing means downsizing, and that means revenue loss for both commercial and learned-society publishers. And learned societies do perform “good works” (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) that are currently supported from their publishing revenues. If institutions and authors are interested in continuing to subsidize those good works after subscription collapse and a transition to Gold OA, then that too can be added to the asking price. But I strongly doubt that institutions and authors will want to continue subsidizing learned societies' good works (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) as a surcharge on their Gold OA publication fees (as they do now, indirectly, through subscription fees). Let’s wait and see. It certainly makes no sense at all to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively now, when subscriptions are doing fine and what’s urgently lacking is universal OA! SS: "This worry is by far the most common one that I encountered in working with three Harvard faculties in passing green OA policies, and still encounter as I work with the remaining faculties at Harvard and talk with other institutions."The worry certainly has a long pedigree. I have been tracking it since at least the early 1990’s. For years now it’s been #19 in the Self-Archiving FAQ (along with 33 other equally groundless worries underlying that "Zeno's Paralysis" that have been delaying OA). The right response has been available for just as long, but it needs to be clearly explained on every occasion that #19 arises... SS: "Of course, there are a lot of “might”s in the worry. But, it doesn’t matter that there is no evidence that such a scenario will transpire, and that there is in fact evidence against it. (The case of physics is well known.) It doesn’t matter that many of the steps in the process may not occur. I myself have recapitulated these counterarguments many a time. What is important is that it certainly might occur, it is consistent with the laws of economics (even if not dictated by them), and most importantly, it is widely perceived as being a real possibility. For that reason alone, it is important to have a response."It is consistent with the laws of economics that if and when universal Green OA ever does make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of recovering the costs of peer review, then that will at the very same time generate the subscription cancellation savings out of which to pay those costs! That is the very core of the counterargument for #19. But from a clear explication of that, it also follows that there is no need (or source) to make any extra payment for Gold OA until and unless universal Green OA makes subscriptions become unsustainable. The logic of this cause/effect scenario needs to be spelled out, clearly, to ensure that it is understood by naive authors when worry #19 arises (quite naturally and predictably) in their minds. SS: "Let me first dismiss two inadequate responses:Access may be "the least important of the services that journals currently provide," but access is what the Open Access movement is about, and for! And it is technology -- the new online medium -- that made OA possible. And unimportant as access may be as a journal service, it is of paramount importance to researchers.[SH] “Once mandates become universal, even if the journal affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which universal mandates will have solved, completely!”If all that journals provided were access, then this response would be entirely correct. However, access is the least important of the services that journals currently provide—least important because technological advances have led to the ability to provide access at essentially zero marginal cost by the authors themselves. (1) But first, there seems to be a misunderstanding here: The journal affordability problem is that institutions don’t have enough money to subscribe to all the journals whose articles their users might need to access. I don’t think Stuart disagrees that if and when all articles are made Green OA, (hence all users can access them all), the fact that institutions don’t have enough money to subscribe to all the journals whose articles their users might need to access becomes a far less urgent matter than it is today, at a time when all users still cannot access all articles. That's the fundamental difference between the journal affordability problem and the article accessibility problem. (2) The “dystopia” to which Stuart is referring is subscriptions becoming unsustainable as the means of paying for peer review, imprimatur (and a variety of unspecified “production services”). (3) But the premise of the subscription collapse hypothesis is that (institutional) subscriptions collapse, which means that each institution's funds to pay for peer review, imprimatur (and a variety of unspecied “production services”) are released (by the cancellations) to be used for payment in a universal transition to Gold OA fee-based publication in place of subscription fee-based publication. (4) In contrast, that very same money is right now tied up in paying for subscription fee-based publication – while users still have next to no Green OA (without mandates). (5) Hence the only real urgency today is to provide universal Green OA. (6) And it would be the “dystopia” of universal Green-OA-induced subscription collapse that would eo ipso generate the “potentiality” to pay for publication via Gold OA (but only if and when universal Green OA actually does generate subscription collapse). (7) So the urgency that we should not postpone is that of mandating Green OA universally, rather than that of finding a way to pay for a Gold OA that institutions don’t yet need, while they are still paying for publication via subscriptions. By the way, there seems to be a logical oversight in supposing that if "dystopia ensued [because of universal Green OA], then all... [journal] services (other than access) would be lost." This cannot be right. It is peer-reviewed journal articles that Green OA mandates require authors to deposit. Without those peer-reviewed articles there would be nothing to provide access to! Hence what Stuart must mean here by "dystopia" is universal Green OA + subscription collapse leading to journal collapse, which then destroys both journals and Green OA! This would be a perfect example of an “evolutionarily unstable strategy” – if it weren’t for the obvious and natural transition scenario, whereby peer-reviewed journals don’t collapse, but simply downsize to become what they always had been, if considered medium-independently, namely: providers and certifiers (with their journal name and track-record) of peer-review quality-level; and institutions pay journals (out of their windfall subscription cancellations savings) for continuing to provide this longstanding, essential service. (The journal titles, editorial boards, referees and track-records of those publishers who may not be interested in downsizing to peer-review service provision alone should subscriptions become unsustainable can and will of course migrate to other publishers who will be happy to take them over on the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Journal migration itself is nothing new.) That may sound dystopic to those who want to sustain the current scale and revenues of journals (print edition, the online edition, access provision, [subscription fulfillment], archiving and preservation) come what may, rather than downsize to just peer review. But it does not sound dystopic to those who want universal OA, come what may, and have no particular problem with journal publishing having to downsize to just providing peer review alone as a consequence. But supply and demand can be allowed to decide: If institutions decide they want to use their windfall savings from Green-OA-induced subscription collapse to pay for more than just peer review, they are certainly welcome to do so... (In the meanwhile, does it not make more sense to calm the worry about “dystopia” by drawing the natural transition scenario and self-faq #19 to the attention of worriers, rather than by needlessly throwing scarce money at it, prematurely, and at inflated prices, while journal budgets are still tied up in subscriptions and it is OA itself that is missing and urgently needed?) If the goal is to "make it possible for a publisher to convert a journal to a gold OA business model," then how can it be that "gold OA journals are at a systematic disadvantage against subscription-based journals"? Conversion means we are talking about the very same journals! It sounds as if Stuart may be talking about conversion but thinking about competition between subscription journals and Gold OA journals.[SH] “If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate Green OA for now, and then let supply and demand decide, given universal Green OA, whether and when to convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and for what product, and at what price.”SS: "A response that “the market will solve this problem down the line” is not sufficient for two reasons. Until there is universal Green OA, the institutions and funders have no choice -- or need -- other than to keep "subsidizing" subscriptions to the journals that their authors want and need now. Indeed that is their obligation. The only additional thing institutions and funders need to do is mandate Green OA. There’s no need to start-up or subsidize or otherwise favor new Gold OA journals. (A handful were enough to demonstrate – for those who had any doubts – that peer-reviewed journals are peer-reviewed journals, regardless of their cost-recovery model, and that a natural cost-recovery model [Gold] is available as a viable alternative if and when subscriptions should ever prove unsustainable.) “Hybrid” subscription/Gold journals are in a sense experimenting with a transition mechanism, by offering an “open choice” between the two alternatives – but not only is there no reason, yet, for authors’ institutions and funders to take up their Gold OA option, but it is almost certainly vastly overpriced, and will only start to look attractive once the needless add-ons (and their costs) that are currently co-bundled with it (print edition, the online edition, access provision, [subscription fulfillment], archiving and preservation) have been phased out under cost-cutting pressure from the universal availability of Green OA. It seems not only unnecessary but downright profligate to pay hybrid Gold OA’s asking price today. Much the same is true of paying to publish in pure-Gold OA journals today too: It’s fine for those who have cash to spare. But if all you want is OA, Green OA is the cost-free way to provide it. And institutions and funders trying to tilt the balance so as to favor today’s Gold OA journals over today’s subscription journals by providing the funds to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively, when it’s not even needed, strikes me as singularly short-sighted (even though it is touted as the far-sighted strategy!): Paying for pre-emptive Gold OA today -- when it is completely unnecessary if OA is all you want -- not only diverts attention and action from the obvious, cost-free way to provide OA (Green OA, through Green OA mandates), but it also helps to lock in the co-bundled obsolescent add-ons and their extra costs into the current Gold OA asking price and modus operandi. Pure Gold journals have phased out the print edition, but they are still far from having downsized to just peer-review service provision alone. (By the way, I would not be writing any of this if we were already well on the way to universal Green OA mandates worldwide [instead of only 85/10,000ths of the way, as we are today]; for then all we would stand to lose would be some money. But the pre-emptive and premature preoccupation with Gold OA today is also losing us attention and action that should be dedicated to universalizing Green OA, and that's my only real concern.) SS: "I return to the underlying issue, which is assuaging the worries of faculty considering green OA policies who are imagining the possibility of the dystopian scenario. The natural response is to assure the worrier that there is a reasonable alternative business model in the wings, namely gold OA. And to make that assurance plausible, we must address the viability of gold OA journals in a realistic way, at least under the same universalization that leads to the dystopian scenario. That is what the open access compact that I discussed at Cal Tech and elsewhere is intended to do."If the underlying issue is assuaging groundless worries about the “dystopian scenario” then the logical, evidential and practical bases of the worries should be addressed with the logical, evidential and practical answers. When it has been the publisher lobby raising these same groundless worries, we have known how to answer them, decisively. Why then, when it is naive authors who are raising some of the very same worries, do we not share those decisive answers with them too, instead of just throwing money at it, needlessly and distractingly, as if the groundless worries had some intrinsic validity? There is no need to subsidize Gold OA today, in order to assuage worries about Green OA destroying journals: Describe the Gold OA cost-recovery model, point out some of the viable (and in some cases, like PLoS, top-rank) Gold OA journals in existence today as proof that the model is indeed viable, explain the quid pro quo transition scenario that naturally arises if and when universal Green OA should ever make subscriptions unsustainable, and then focus on the one thing that is urgently needed for all of this to happen, namely, universal Green OA mandates. Once Green OA mandates are safely universalizing, then any institution or funder that has cash to spare can spend as much of it as it likes on Gold OA. But not now, when talk of Gold OA just distracts -- and talk of spending extra money on it deters -- from mandating Green OA. SS: "In summary, a university that commits to the open access compact will more easily be able to answer objections against green OA policies specifically because it has an approach to long-range support for gold OA publishing, not in spite of it. The two models are inextricably tied.Most universities don't yet mandate OA and most are also not as wealthy as Harvard. Why would one imagine that universities become more likely to adopt a Green OA mandate if it is coupled with a commitment to spend money on Gold OA? (The opposite outcome sounds much more likely, with universities failing to mandate Green OA, but thinking that they are doing their bit for OA by providing some funds for it -- as University of California and University of Calgary, for example, have done.) For the dystopian fears of faculty, give them facts and figures; don’t couple them with proposals to squander funds needlessly. Apart from the palliative facts (about the quid pro quo in the collapse/transition scenario), Gold OA should not be further mentioned until the Green OA mandate is successfully adopted. (After that, spend away – but please don’t make that supererogatory and superfluous expense part of the best-practice model that is meant to inspire the rest of the planet’s 10,000 universities and research institutions to follow Harvard’s lead and mandate Green OA!) SS: "Let me conclude by arguing against a view that support for the open access compact is at best “a needless waste of scarce research funds.”It is as difficult to have to disagree occasionally with Stuart Shieber as it is to have to disagree occasionally with Peter Suber. Both have made monumental contributions to OA. Both have displayed dedication and resourcefulness on a scale that will be sooner or later recognized to merit the eternal gratitude of the worldwide research community in perpetuo. Both have a profound and detailed grasp of virtually all the intricate OA issues. (The circumspect summary paragraph above by Stuart, for example, is as close to spot-on in its mastery of the subtle nuances of the Gold OA issue as a reasonable person could wish.) So please do not take the relatively small points on which I sometimes have to diverge from Stuart or Peter as any sort of aspersion on their invaluable and unabating contributions to OA, for which I feel nothing but admiration and gratitude. With that preface, let me close by demonstrating, again, that I am not a reasonable [sic] person! (1) Any needless cost at all associated with adopting and implementing a Green OA mandate is a deterrent to arriving at consensus on adoption, not an incentive. (2) Minimal costs for Harvard U are not necessarily minimal for HaveNot U. (3) The way to explain the possible eventual transition to universal Gold OA is via its causal antecedent: universal Green OA. (4) The way to allay worries about Learned Society Publishers’ future after universal Green OA is to explain the simple, straightforward relation between institutional subscription collapse and institutional subscription cancellation savings, and how it releases the funds to continue paying for publication via Gold OA. (And remind faculty that if their institutions really want to keep subsidizing Learned Society publishers' "good works" (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) as they are now through subscription-fees, they can certainly continue to do so through publication fees too, as a surcharge, on the Gold OA model, if they wish.) (5) Reserve any plans for promoting pre-emptive payment of Gold OA fees for those institutions that have already mandated Green OA (and preferably only after we are further along the road from 85 mandates to 10,000!). (6) Pre-emptive payment for Gold OA before universal Green OA just retards and distracts from providing and mandating Green OA. Moreover, it is incoherent and does not scale ("universalize"): It is like an Escher drawing, leading nowhere, even though it seems to. Dixit. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, June 11. 2009ROARMAP Now Registers Open Access Thesis/Dissertation Deposit Mandates Too![]() In preparation for the announcement, Professor Arthur Sale on June 9 registered all 17 of Australia's thesis deposits, and since the announcement, University of Trieste and Cranfield University have registered their thesis deposit mandates. Actually, OA thesis deposit mandates have been growing for years. (Please include the date of adoption, if possible. when registering.) The reason ROARMAP had not been recording OA thesis mandates until now was that refereed-research deposit mandates had not yet become sufficiently widespread and well-known, so there was some risk that OA mandates would be identified exclusively with thesis deposit mandates. But now that there are already a respectable number of refereed-research deposit mandates, adding the thesis mandates into ROARMAP should help accelerate the adoption of both kinds of mandates by universities. Indeed, each university should integrate the two kinds of mandates into a unified policy on archiving, managing, assessing and showcasing its own research output. So please do register your own university's OA thesis mandates as well as its OA refereed-research mandates in ROARMAP -- for the record, for the continuously updated growth table, and for the growth curves (which will soon be continuously updating too), as well as in order to encourage further adoptions by other universities. Open Access provision is a fundamentally reciprocal process. Provide OA in order to maximize the impact of your own research output, and also to encourage others to do likewise, maximizing your access to their research output: "Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive unto you"! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, June 9. 2009Norway's 2nd Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate; Planet's 85th![]() NORWAY institutional-mandateROARMAP: full list of institutions OA Self-Archiving Policy: University of Bergen Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives: Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) [growth data] Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy: ID/OA-policyAdded by: Ingrid Cutler (Senior Executive Officer) Ingrid.Cutler AT ub.uib.no on 09 Jun 2009Results from publishing at the University of Bergen should be made publicly accessible in electronic archives for peer-reviewed journal articles Wednesday, June 3. 2009UCL adopts UK's 22nd Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate; Planet's 84th![]() ![]() University College London (UCL) has just adopted the UK's 22nd (and the world's 84th) mandate to make all of its research output Open Access (by depositing it in UCL's Institutional Repository, UCL Eprints). With its 13 funder mandates and 9 institutional/departmental mandates so far, the UK still has the planet's highest proportion of Open Access Mandates. But the world is catching up (see Figure)! Dr. Alma Swan of Key Perspectives and University of Southampton has just documented how mandates to provide Open Access to research output have almost doubled globally in the year that has elapsed since Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted the world’s 44th Open Access mandate in May 2008. The world's first Open Access mandate was adopted in 2002 by the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). Southampton had previously designed, in 2000, the first free, Open Source software for creating Open Access Institutional Repositories, Eprints, now used the world over. In 2004 the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology (as urged by evidence provided by Southampton University and Loughborough University) recommended “that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online [and] that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.” Research Councils UK went on in 2006-2008 to make a clean sweep, with all seven councils mandating Open Access in 2006-2008. But Alma Swan's analysis shows that the UK is at last going to lose its lead, as the global growth spurt of OA mandates we had all been awaiting appears to have begun, at long last. The globalization of Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates is of course something that all UK universities heartily welcome as a win/win outcome, optimal and inevitable for research and researchers worldwide. Open access is essentially reciprocal. The only way every university on the planet can gain open access to the research output of every other university on the planet is by each providing open access to its own research output: "Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive unto you.” So Kudos to UCL and to Gaia: Many happy returns!
Monday, June 1. 2009ETD2009 Keynote: Integrating University Thesis and Research Open Access Mandates
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The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society. The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)
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