Friday, March 27. 2009OA and P2P: The Similarities and Dissimilarities![]() "On the affinities and disaffinities among free software, peer-to-peer access, and open access to peer-reviewed research."a talk by Stevan Harnad on March 26 at: Free Software and Beyond: The World of Peer Productionthe 4th Oekonux and P2P Foundation Conference. Manchester, UK, 27-29 March 2009. SUMMARY: Free/Open Software (notably the first Free Software for creating OAI-compliant Open Access Institutional Repositories, EPrints, created in 2000, distributed under the GNU license, and now used worldwide) has been central to the growth of the Open Access Movement. However, there are also crucial distinctions that need to be made and understood, among the movements for (1) Free/Open source software, (2) Open Access (to peer-reviewed research), (3) P2P file-sharing, (4) Open Data, (5) Creative Commons licensing, and (5) Wikipedia-style collective writing. Open Access (OA) is focussed primarily on refereed research articles. The crucial distinctions revolve mostly around (a) the fundamental difference between author giveaway vs. non-giveaway work and (b) the functional differences between the re-use/re-mix/re-publication needs for peer-reviewed research article texts on the one hand, and data, software and other kinds of digital content on the other. Thursday, March 19. 2009The Need to Cross-Validate and Initialize Multiple Metrics Jointly Against Peer Ratings![]() (1) Citation counts are only one (though an important one) among many potential metrics of research performance. (2) If the RAE peer panel raters' criteria for ranking the universities varied or were inconsistent between RAE 2001 and RAE 2008 then that is a problem with peer ratings rather than with metrics (which, being objective, remain consistent). (3) Despite the variability and inconsistency, peer ratings are the only way to initialise the weights on metrics: Metrics first have to be jointly validated against expert peer evaluation by measuring their correlation with the peer rankings, discipline by discipline; then the metrics' respective weights can be updated and fine-tuned, discipline by discipline, in conjunction with expert judgment of the resulting rankings and continuing research activity. (4) If only one metric (e.g., citation) is used, there is the risk that expert ratings will simply echo it. But if a rich and diverse battery of multiple metrics is jointly validated and initialized against the RAE 2008 expert ratings, then this will create an assessment-assistant tool whose initial weights can be calibrated and used in an exploratory way to generate different rankings, to be compared by the peer panels with previous rankings as well as with new, evolving criteria of research productivity, uptake, importance, influence, excellence and impact. (5) The dawning era of Open Access (free web access) to peer-reviewed research is providing a wealth of new metrics to be included, tested and assigned initial weights in the joint battery of metrics. These include download counts, citation and download growth and decay rates, hub and authority scores, interdisciplinarity scores, co-citations, tag counts, comment counts, link counts, data-usage, and many other openly accessible and measurable properties of the growth of knowledge in our evolving "Cognitive Commons." Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220, Trondheim, Norway. Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18. Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3). Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J. W., Champion, T. and Harnad, S. (2006) Extending journal-based research impact assessment to book-based disciplines. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton. Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47. Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. Harnad, S. (2008) Self-Archiving, Metrics and Mandates. Science Editor 31(2) 57-59 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 Harnad, S. (2009) Multiple metrics required to measure research performance. Nature (Correspondence) 457 (785) (12 February 2009) Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35. Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista. MIT Adopts World's 70th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate
![]() Full list of institutions Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (US* institutional-mandate) http://web.mit.edu/ Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives [growth data] http://dspace.mit.edu/ Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy Passed by Unanimous of the Faculty, March 18, 2009 The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason. To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost's Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty. The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty. The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible. Monday, March 16. 2009Harvard's 3rd Green OA Mandate, Planet's 69th: John F. Kennedy School of Government![]() And yet another well-deserved round of congratulations to Stuart Shieber, Faculty Director of the OSC and the architect of this remarkable (and seemingly unending) series of Green OA mandates from Harvard! (Harvard Medical School looks like it will be next!) One can only echo what is stated at the end of the press release, which is that although this is the world's 69th Green OA self-archiving mandate, "none are... as far-reaching as the one put forth at Harvard"! (Nor, I might add, is there now any better model for emulation worldwide.) -- S.H.
Saturday, March 14. 2009Scaling to Global OA: Parallel Local Green/Gold Is OK, But Gold Alone First, No Way
![]() IA: “Researchers’ apathy toward voluntary self-deposit (except in narrow disciplines) has begun to be viewed by some as an indicator of indifference – if scholars truly cared (the argument goes), the game should be changing much more rapidly, since they themselves are the true owners of the system.”It is not quite accurate to say that researchers are apathetic about self-deposits. Rather, most universities and funders (with the exception of the 68 that have already done so) seem to be apathetic (or, more accurately, narcoleptic) about mandating self-deposit (Green OA). The attitude of researchers themselves has been surveyed in several international, interdisciplinary studies, and their expressed view is consistent: "The vast majority of authors (81%)...[in a Key Perspectives] international, cross-disciplinary author study on open access [with] 1296 respondents... would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." (Swan 2005) ![]() These author attitude-survey outcomes have since been confirmed in actual author behavior by Arthur Sale, whose studies have shown that, if (and only if) deposit is actually mandated, authors do indeed self-deposit, and their deposit rates rise from the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) rate of c. 15% to approach 100% within about 2 years of the adoption of the Green OA mandate. The 68 university and funder mandates to date are further confirming this (including NIH’s delayed upgrade to a mandate, with deposits up from <5% before the mandate to 60% within the first year of adoption). ![]() ![]() ![]() The three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving until it is mandated are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need Green OA mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to deposit their research article output in their institution's repository, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper. UC renewing Springer’s fleet of 2000 journals may have merits of its own, but apart from that it seems a pricey way to spare UC authors’ a few minutes’ worth of (Green OA) keystrokes. IA: “The same can be said of author-sponsored gold OA (it is not that hard for an editorial board to resign and take its journal elsewhere – at least it should not be, if there were an obvious somewhere else to go).”But a rather crucial difference is that universities and funders can mandate that their employees and fundees self-deposit, but they cannot mandate that their employees and fundees resign from editiorial boards, nor can they mandate that publishers provide Gold OA, as publishers are neither their employees nor their fundees. Universities and funders can pay publishers to provide OA, evidently, but it is the wisdom as well as the scalability of that strategy that is at issue here! What looks as if it will work locally for one university, dealing with one publisher, does not scale up to 10,000 universities doing it with the publishers of 25,000 journals, not even for the subset of those journals that each university currently subscribes to: Annual university subscriptions to incoming journals or journal-fleets are fundamentally different from annual university “memberships” in exchange for the publication of outgoing articles: Articles are not published on the basis of an annual journal/publisher quota but on the basis of the individual peer-review outcome, per article, per journal. IA: “Gold OA journals that require a one-to-one correspondence between ‘membership’ fees and author uptake are beginning to lose library support”Exactly. (And "memberships" would never have had library support in the first place, if their incoherent scaling scenario had been thought through in advance, as above.) Librarians have been at the vanguard of the Open Access movement from the beginning, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince the faculty in other disciplines university-wide to deposit, as well as to convince the university itself to mandate deposit. There is now something the Library Faculty can do on its own, to provide an example for the rest of the university, along the lines of Arthur's Sale's suggestion that rather than just waiting for university-wide mandates, "patchwork mandates" should be adopted at the laboratory, department or faculty level. The Library Faculty at Oregon State University has just shown the way, adopting the planet's first Green OA Mandate by a Library Faculty. IA: “My own conversations and observations lead me to believe that for most authors, the difficulties and uncertainties, rather than the desirability of the outcome, are the main obstacle. But if academic administrators believe that researchers don’t care, then support for institutional repositories, which entail their own costs, will wither in difficult times. Large acts are needed, ones which place a significant amount of research output on an open access footing in ways that capture people’s interest and imagination. Harvard’s mandate is certainly one such act.”You seem to have answered your own question: Mandate Green OA, as Harvard did. And as to difficult times: We're in them! And there are few lower-cost investments for a university today -- a linux server, a piece of free software, a few days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year sysad maintenance time... plus the adoption of a (free of charge) Green OA self-archiving mandate -- that can generate benefits anywhere near the order of magnitude of the benefits of OA. IA: “UC’s largescale arrangement with a major publisher is another...”Not unless you can explain how it is to scale from just an ad hoc local arrangement between one university (even one as big as UC) and one (big) fleet-publisher to something that can work for all universities and all journals without dissolving into Escher-drawing incoherence. IA: “In UC’s arrangement with Springer, UC-authored articles will be deposited in our eScholarship repository. If enough other institutions followed suit (and 3 other European organizations have already preceded us), a large number of papers in those journals will be available in institutional repositories. Some of my librarian colleagues (the ones most skeptical of this experiment) have told me that if that happens, their institutions will cancel, and the system will convulse.”Please explain to me how paying for Gold OA for a university’s own article output, in a particular journal or journal-fleet, via a university subscription/membership for that journal or journal fleet, will induce cancellations of that journal or journal-fleet: Who will cancel? The nonsubscribing institutions? (They have nothing to cancel.) The subscribing institutions? But then what happens to their own authors’ Gold OA output to that journal or journal-fleet? And what happens to their own users’ need for access to that journal or journal-fleet, if the Gold OA is no longer being paid for? And how do you cancel journals when they are still part Gold OA and part not? My guess is that not even a small fraction of these awkward contingencies has even been considered by UC, let alone thought-through, in this somnambulistic plunge into institutional gilded OA deals. Nor is it in any publisher’s interest, in negotiating a Big Deal like this, to awaken their client to any of these troublesome complications (since complications concern how that client is to deal with that publisher's competitors, further down the road, once this particular “Big Deal” is no longer the only deal in town...). Just to clarify: My beef is not at all with Springer, for trying to make the best deal they can. Springer is fully Green on immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by their authors. That means Springer is squarely on the Side of the Angels, insofar as OA is concerned. My beef is with the naivete of the universities who keep somnambulating toward the Escherian glitter without first grasping the green that is within their reach: Mandate Green OA and then make whatever subscription/membership deal you like and can afford. Just don't go for the Gold without first grasping the Green! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, March 13. 2009Planet's 1st Library Faculty Green OA Mandate: 7th US Mandate, 68th Worldwide![]() The OSU mandate is even the optimal ID/OA (DDR) mandate, as Peter notes below. To the Library Faculty at Oregon State University, who have now put their own work where their heart (and hard work) is, kudos! -- SH Comment [from Peter Suber]. Kudos to the OSU Library Faculty Association (LFA) for this strong policy. I applaud the mandatory language, the dual deposit-release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access), and the clarity in making waivers apply only to OA, not to deposits. I like the way the LFA will help faculty deposit their articles as well as obtain better terms from publishers. You can classify this as a "faculty vote" policy, as opposed to an administrative policy, and as a departmental rather than university-wide policy. Now that the library faculty have taken the lead, it's time for other departments and divisions of OSU, already operating under a policy to encourage self-archiving, to strengthen their policy as well. Posted in OA News by Peter Suber at 3/13/2009 05:13:00 PM Wednesday, March 11. 2009Another Winning Article From OA's Chronicler and Conscience: Richard Poynder![]() I may be writing a critical commentary shortly, but in the meantime, all I can do is highly recommend it to everyone with any interest in the exciting current developments in Open Access (OA). It will bring you up to speed with the OA movement and also give you a shrewd and penetrating peek at OA's possible future. Agree or disagree, you cannot fail to be informed, and impressed. The OA movement is fortunate indeed to have Richard Poynder as its chronicler, conscience, and gadfly laureate. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, March 9. 2009University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA![]() Stevan,Ivy, Apologies. Now fixed, and comments enabled. Here is a response via email which you’re welcome to post to your blog if you wish. I’m also responding on the SPARC OA Forum list.My inference was based on this passage from the Scientist article: I hope you'll agree that the description is ambiguous, to say the least, and not least because "Big Deal" negotiations with publishers are always a quid-pro-quo bargaining matter, so that whether or not it was monetized in the form of an explicit surcharge, the upshot is the same: UC subscribes to the Springer fleet as a package, and part of the package deal is that OA fees for UC authors publishing in those journals are waived."University of California Libraries... minted an agreement with the publishing giant Springer so that all articles written by UC-affiliated authors would be published with full and immediate open access in any of Springer's 2,000-odd journals, even if the rest of the articles in the journals are subscription-only. Under the arrangement, UC authors retain the copyright to their work and don't have to pay additional fees on a per-article basis. In exchange, the publisher receives an undisclosed sum of money that is 'part and parcel of our standard licensing arrangement with Springer'..." UC does not at all conflate journal affordability and research accessibility; rather, we have an institutional responsibility to address both issues, and believe we can do so in a principled and sustainable manner, by redirecting our support for research publication from the ‘readership’ side of the transaction to the publication side.I will try to translate this into more explicit and transparent terms in order to clarify the underlying dynamics and to show that it all leads in an unscalable and unsustainable direction: (1) Yes, UC needs both to (1a) provide access to the research output of other institutions for UC researchers and to (1b) provide access to UC research output for researchers at other institutions. (2) Responsibility 1a is fulfilled by negotiating the best possible deal with publishers for journal subscriptions/licenses and responsibility 1b is fulfilled by adopting a Green OA self-archiving mandate for all UC research output, as Harvard, Stanford, NIH, and over 60 other universities and funders worldwide have done (for the research output of their own faculty and fundees). (3) UC's journal affordability problem is addressed directly by 1a; and 1b is UC's local contribution to solving the global research accessibility problem. (4) It should already be transparent that if other universities follow Harvard's, Stanford's and UC's example with 1b, then the research accessibility problem is solved: 1b is a solution that scales. (5) It does not require much more analysis to see that once universal Green OA mandates by institutions and funders have solved the research accessibility problem, (5a) the journal affordability problem becomes a far less pressing one; and that (5b) universal Green OA is likely (though not certain) to lead eventually to subscription cancellations and a transition to Gold OA publishing, with each institution redirecting some of its own subscription cancellation savings to pay for its own authors' Gold OA publishing fees. (6) What requires a bit more reflection is to see that for all this to happen, Green OA (1b) must come first: Until all research is OA, UC researchers do not have access to whatever journals UC cannot afford to subscribe to. And until all research is OA, UC cannot cancel journals to which its researchers need access. (7) Now it is true that if, mirabile dictu, the publisher of every journal that UC can afford were to offer UC the same sort of "Big Deal" Springer has offered -- "subscribe to our journal(s) at our asking price and your institution's authors can have Gold OA for free" -- and if every research-active institution bought into that deal for every journal it could afford, then that too would (probably) be enough to provide universal OA: But consider the probability -- and the price! (8) Universal "Big Deal" Gold would buy universal OA at the price of (8a) locking in current journal prices and (8b) locking in all their currently co-bundled products and services (print edition, online edition, peer review); and (8c) what institutions would be negotiating with each publisher annually thereafter would no longer be journal subscriptions and journal subscription prices, but the institution's own researchers' continuing right to publish in each of those journals. (9) This is of course an absurd and dysfunctional outcome, because journal-level subscriptions and article-level publication charges have fundamentally different units. (One is an entire, annually renewable, incoming journal or fleet of journals from a single publisher, the other is single, one-at-a-time, outgoing articles, destined for different journals and publishers, and depending in each individual case on the outcome of peer review for their acceptance, rather than on just the annual payment for the service of peer review.) (10) Hence negotiating Gold OA on the "Big Deal" license model is incoherent and is neither scaleable nor sustainable: It means locking in everything that is co-bundled with a subscription today, at today's prices, and treating that as the unit of the transaction even when the unit of transaction must clearly cease to be the journal or the publisher, as the practice spreads across all institutions as well as all journals and publishers competing for their annual "membership" dues. Consortial collective bargaining for all this would just make this oligopoly even more absurd. ![]() Our Springer arrangement is one such initiative; our support for SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, is another.SCOAP3 is likewise a co-bundled, price-lock-in "membership" scheme, but it matters much less, because it is being pushed through in the only field that already has near 100% Green OA self-archiving without its having to be mandated. Ensure 100% Green OA in all other fields and the silliness of lock-in Gold OA membership schemes will likewise matter far less. They matter now precisely because they are distracting sleepy institutions from the urgent need to mandate Green OA (or giving them the golden illusion that it will not be necessary). In these and other efforts, UC seeks to redirect library funds toward open access publishing in order to both foster more unfettered access to research and provide financial support to the scholarly publishing system at the point in the publication chain where a truer market relationship exists – between authors and the journals in which they publish – in the hope that the cost of research publication can be brought down thereby over the long term.This may sound as if it makes sense in these abstract terms, but once it is looked at more closely, as I have just done above, in (1) - (10), it proves to be incoherent. (a) Redirecting library funds from subscriptions to OA publication charges before all research is OA is paying for what other subscribing institutions are already paying for (the publication of your own institution's outgoing articles) and for what can already be had without having to pay even more (the mandated self-archiving of your own institution's outgoing articles). (b) Redirecting library funds from subscriptions to OA publication charges before all research is OA is locking in publishers' current asking-prices and co-bundled products and services. (c) As to "provid[ing] financial support to the scholarly publishing system at the point in the publication chain where a truer market relationship exists – between authors and the journals in which they publish" -- that's precisely what this sort of "membership Big Deal" is not doing, as you will quickly see if you just try to scale it up in your mind, across journals, publishers and time: The "market relationship" is at the level of an individual outgoing article, on a particular occasion, and is dependent on the outcome of peer review; it is not an annual incoming journal quota, the way subscriptions are. Hence it makes no sense to treat it as an annual individual institutional "membership" fee, let alone a global consortial one. (d) As to the hope of bringing journal costs down: again, this is conflating the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem. -- Indeed, unless UC mandates Green OA, it is letting affordability get in the way of accessibility, even though the latter is fully within reach. (e) And if you have any doubts about my contention that this local solution is incoherent and is neither scalable nor sustainable, please spell out for me how you envision a university -- formerly an annual subscriber, now an annual "member" of countless Gold OA journals -- will negotiate its annual "membership" payments from year to year with each journal, while its researchers need to go on publishing? Will there be annual acquisitions and cancellations of the right to publish in each journal? (This is yet another symptom of conflating the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem.) Articles will be deposited into UC’s eScholarship Repository through our Springer arrangement, also supporting the institutional deposit that you favor.It is not the deposit of articles whose Gold OA status has been paid for with hard cash that I favor! Those articles are already OA (and at quite a price). What I favor is the mandatory deposit of all institutional research output, irrespective of whether it is published in an OA or a non-OA journal. If UC does go ahead and mandates Green OA, then all my objections are immediately mooted, because although these additional publisher deals are still incoherent, premature, unscalable and unsustainable, they no longer matter. However, if these local subscription/membership deals are being pursued instead of mandating Green OA, then they matter very much, because they are needlessly and thoughtlessly retarding the universal OA that is already within reach. (And that is why I call them "somnambulism.) The deposited articles will be the final published versions, avoiding the concerns about version control that can arise through deposit of final author manuscripts. We think this is a very good arrangement indeed, and we negotiated it while wide awake.I wish I could agree, but in fact everything you have said by way of reply unfortunately confirms the opposite: "version control" is not the OA problem: version absence is. The ones who are fussing about the importance of having the publisher's PDF are not all those would-be users worldwide who cannot access 85% of annual published articles at all today, in any version. The latter is the problem that Green OA mandates are designed to solve. The "version control" problem is trivial, and will be taken care of by the institutional repository software: Please take care of the far more urgent and consequential version-provision problem first. I write this all in the fervent hope that UC -- the biggest single player in the US OA arena -- will take the long-awaited step that will help awaken the slumbering giant, and make the dominoes fall worldwide at long last: Mandate Green OA. Best wishes, Stevan Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Harvard Mandate Adds ID/OA to its FAQ![]() ![]() This would make Harvard's mandate the optimal Green OA Mandate model, now ready for all universities worldwide to emulate: rights-retention (with optional opt-out) plus Immediate-Deposit (without opt-out). And please remember that the three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving spontaneously are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to self-archive, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper. The Harvard mandate now has all the requisite ingredients for performing this facilitating function: Deposit itself is required, but negotiating rights-retention and making the deposit OA can be waived if there are reasons to do so. One cannot ask for a better policy than this: Its worldwide adoption will bring us OA as surely as nightfall is followed by day. -- Stevan Harnad From Peter Suber's Open Access News Sunday, March 8. 2009On "Gold Fever," HR 801, and Matters of Substance![]() "coglanglab" writes:No, there are OA publishing models. OA itself just means free online access. OA ≠ OA publishing. OA is not a "model." Nor are researchers, making their own published articles freely accessible online, nor their institutions and funders, mandating it, a "model." Maybe lexical markers will help: OA (free online access) can be provided in two different ways. OA provided through OA journal publishing is called "Gold OA". OA provided through author self-archiving of non-OA journal articles is called "Green OA." You have unfortunately contracted the (widespread) syndrome of "Gold Fever," whose only perceived goal becomes Gold OA! But the OA problem is not journal affordability or economic models, it is research accessibility. Gold fever conflates the two, whereas both the NIH Mandate and the HR 801's attempt to overturn it are about Green OA. "coglanglab": "everybody... understands that these [mandatory Green OA] policies hurt subscription-based journals"Everybody? Not those in the best position to know, apparently, namely, the publishers whose authors have been making their articles (Green) OA the most and the longest: Swan (2005) Mandated Green OA might or might not eventually lead to Gold OA. That is all just hypothetical conjecture and counterconjecture. What is certain is that it will lead to OA itself: free online access. And that is what the OA movement is all about and for."we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)" "coglanglab": "papers still need to go through peer-review and publication"And your point is...? NIH mandates providing Green OA to fundees' final drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles. "coglanglab": "we have two models: subscription-based journals... and open-access journals"Yes. And we have one OA -- free online access -- which can be achieved quickly and surely once Green OA is mandated. And that is what both the NIH Mandate and the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it are about. The rest is all distracting and profitless speculation about models for publication cost-recovery, not OA, which means free online access. "coglanglab": "[Harnad's] focus is not on open-access journals... so he has some stake in pointing out that there are other open-access models" My focus is on OA, so I have a stake in pointing out that a focus on Gold OA cost-recovery models is missing the point of the NIH policy, which is about mandating Green OA. And OA is not a "model"; it is free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles. "coglanglab": "If these policies make the subscription-based journals less profitable, then the open-access journals presumably become more competitive"Gold Fever, again: The purpose of the NIH policy is to provide OA -- free online access to the peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from NIH funding -- which it is doing as a matter of certainty by mandating Green OA. The rest is irrelevant speculation and counterspeculation about hypothetical sequelae. "coglanglab": "If the open-access policies force subscription-based publishers to raise their own publication fees or go out of business, this presumably should help open-access journals..."If they do and if it does, then presumably it will. But this is all just hypothetical speculation. What the NIH mandate actually does, with certainty, is provide OA (free online access), remember? And access -- not speculative economics -- is what the OA is about, and for. "coglanglab": "if there are good reasons to believe that policies like those of NIH and Harvard harm open-access journals and subscription journals alike, then I'd like to know..."There are good reasons to believe that universal mandated Green OA might eventually induce a transition to Gold OA and there are also good reasons to believe it might not. But what is certain is that that universal mandated Green OA will provide universal OA -- and that the Conyers Bill (HR 801), if passed, will slow or stop that. So it might be a good idea to restrain the impulse to just keep speculating and counterspeculating about future publishing cost-recovery models and focus instead on providing universal OA while we are still compos mentis and in a position to profit (mentally) from it. And that requires defeating the Conyers Bill. "coglanglab": "I'm not really sure what Harnad was getting at in pointing out that some non-profit journals also support Conyers' bill..."The opposition to Green OA mandates like NIH's comes from journal publishers who argue that it will reduce their revenues and might eventually make the subscription model unsustainable. They may be right or they may be wrong. But they definitely include both for-profit and non-profit publishers. And, to repeat, OA is free online access to (peer-reviewed) research. OA's purpose is to solve the research accessibility problem. (Not all would-be users can afford to access all research output online today.) Gold OA cannot be mandated. (Publishers are not the fundees or employees of research funders and institutions; the money to pay for Gold OA publishing is currently tied up in subscriptions; research funds are already scarce; and authors don't like to be told where to publish, nor to be required to pay for it.) But Green OA can be mandated, and is being mandated, by NIH plus 66 further funders and institutions worldwide, with many other mandate proposals on the way. If we can shake off the Gold Fever just long enough to reach for the Green OA that is fully within our grasp, we will have reached (at long last) the optimal, inevitable (and long overdue) outcome for research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the R & D industry, students, teachers, the developing world, and the tax-paying public who fund the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted. Gold Fever instead focuses obsessively on publishing economics: the publishing tail, that has for too long been wagging the research dog. Green OA mandates are simply the research community taking into its own hands the matter of providing free online access to their own peer-reviewed research output. Whether the peer review service costs continue to be paid via subscriptions, or are instead paid via Gold-OA fees covered out of subscription cancellation savings is a minor matter concerning the dog's tail. We should stop letting that tail wag the dog, by focusing on mandating Green OA (and defeating Conyers-like Bills that try to oppose it), today. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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