Thursday, November 8. 2007NIH Open Access Bill and Green/Gold Conflation: Still Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul![]() Please do whatever you can to dispel this error as it is really holding up progress. In most cases, it is merely the result of ignorance or misunderstanding. But in the case of those who are lobbying against the NIH Bill, it is deliberately being used as a way to impugn Green OA Self-Archiving mandates by pretending they are Gold-OA publishing mandates. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum UUK report looks at the use of bibliometrics![]() Comments on UUK Press Release 8 November 2007:What metrics count as "bibliometrics"? Do downloads? hubs/authorities? Interdisciplinarity metrics? Endogamy/exogamy metrics? chronometrics, semiometrics? There is evidence that bibliometric indices do correlate with other, quasi-independent measures of research quality - such as RAE grades - across a range of fields in science and engineering.Meaning that citation counts correlate with panel rankings in all disciplines tested so far. Correct. There is a range of bibliometric variables as possible quality indicators. There are strong arguments against the use of (i) output volume (ii) citation volume (iii) journal impact and (iv) frequency of uncited papers.The "strong" arguments are against using any of these variables alone, or without testing and validation. They are not arguments against including them in the battery of candidate metrics to be tested, validated and weighted against the panel rankings, discipline by discipline, in a multiple regression equation. 'Citations per paper' is a widely accepted index in international evaluation. Highly-cited papers are recognised as identifying exceptional research activity.Citations per paper is one (strong) candidate metric among many, all of which should be co-tested, via multiple regression analysis, against the parallel RAE panel rankings (and other validated or face-valid performance measures). Accuracy and appropriateness of citation counts are a critical factor.Not clear what this means. ISI citation counts should be supplemented by other citation counts, such as Scopus, Google Scholar, Citeseer and Citebase: each can be a separate metric in the metric equation. Citations from and to books are especially important in some disciplines. There are differences in citation behaviour among STEM and non-STEM as well as different subject disciplines.And probably among many other disciplines too. That is why each discipline's regression equation needs to be validated separately. This will yield a different constellation of metrics as well as of beta weights on the metrics, for different disciplines. Metrics do not take into account contextual information about individuals, which may be relevant.What does this mean? Age, years since degree, discipline, etc. are all themselves metrics, and can be added to the metric equation. They also do not always take into account research from across a number of disciplines.Interdisciplinarity is a measurable metric. There are self-citations, co-author citations, small citation circles, specialty-wide citations, discipline-wide citations, and cross-disciplinary citations. These are all endogamy/exogamy metrics. They can be given different weights in fields where, say, interdisciplinarity is highly valued. The definition of the broad subject groups and the assignment of staff and activity to them will need careful consideration.Is this about RAE panels? Or about how to distribute researchers by discipline or other grouping? Bibliometric indicators will need to be linked to other metrics on research funding and on research postgraduate training."Linked"? All metrics need to be considered jointly in a multiple regression equation with the panel rankings (and other validated or face-valid criterion metrics). There are potential behavioural effects of using bibliometrics which may not be picked up for some yearsYes, metrics will shape behaviour (just as panel ranking shaped behaviour), sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Metrics can be abused -- but abuses can also be detected and named and shamed, so there are deterrents and correctives. There are data limitations where researchers' outputs are not comprehensively catalogued in bibliometrics databases.The obvious solution for this is Open Access: All UK researchers should deposit all their research output in their Institutional Repositories (IRs). Where it is not possible to set access to a deposit as OA, access can be set as Closed Access, but the bibliographic metadata will be there. (The IRs will not only provide access to the texts and the metadata, but they will generate further metrics, such as download counts, chronometrics, etc.) The report comes ahead of the HEFCE consultation on the future of research assessment expected to be announced later this month. Universities UK will consult members once this is published.Let's hope both UUK and HEFCE are still open-minded about ways to optimise the transition to metrics! References 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. 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. Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton. 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. 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). See also: Prior Open Access Archivangelism Postings on RAE and metricsStevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, November 7. 2007OA: Not OK, But Not DOA Either![]() "I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us. It is not the pace of our scholarly and scientific research that will look risible, nor the tempo of technological change. On the contrary, the astonishing speed and scale of both will make the real anomaly look all the more striking.But Gallagher is not quite right that "most scientists became indifferent about Open Access." The syndrome is not quite indifference but a combination of ignorance and indolence (Swan 2005) concerning what is already demonstrably in their own best interests and fully within their reach. I have dubbed the syndrome "Zeno's Paralysis" (Harnad 2006); the affliction is, fortunately, curable. The medicine is OA self-archiving mandates (Harnad 2001, Harnad et al. 2003; Harnad 2007) by researchers' institutions and funders. And those mandates are on the way. The inertia is and always was merely a matter of keystrokes: getting those digits to deposit those digits. "Publish or perish" mandates managed to induce otherwise busy, curiosity-driven researchers to find the time to set their (peer-reviewed) findings to paper, and self-archiving mandates will now ensure the few additional minutes it takes to make all published papers immediately and permanently accessible free for all their potential users online, rather than just for those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published (Carr & Harnad 2005). To close, a few loose ends: (1) OA is not about journal affordability but about research accessibility.References Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton. Esposito, J. (2007) Open Access 2.0. The Scientist 21(11) 52 Gallagher, R. (2007) OA: OK? The Scientist 21(11) 13 Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature 395 (6698): 127-128 Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12). Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French versions: Harnad, S. (2003) Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: Pp. 77-103. ] Harnad, S. (2004) June 27 2004: The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" at 10. American Scientist Open Access Forum. June 27 2004. Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos. 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. Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35. Poynder, R. (2004) Ten Years After. Information Today. October 2004 Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, November 6. 2007Should Institutional Repositories Allow Opt-Out From (1) Mandates? (2) Metrics?![]() The colleague asked: (1) Is the book chapter that [identity deleted] is soliciting an example of Open Access?(1) Yes, Open Access (OA) books are instances of OA just as OA articles are. The big difference is that all peer-reviewed journal/conference articles, without exception, are written exclusively for research usage and impact, not for royalty income, whereas this is not true of all or even most books. Articles are all author give-aways, but most books are not. So articles are OA's primary target; books are optional and many will no doubt follow suit after systematic OA-provision for research articles has taken firm root globally. (Also important: article deposit in the IR can be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as Southampton ECS and RCUK have done, but book deposit certainly cannot -- and should not -- be mandated.) (2) Yes, download metrics, alongside citation metrics and other new metric performance indicators can and should be listed in CVs, website stats and IR stats. In and of themselves they do not mean much, as absolute numbers, but in an increasingly OA world, where they can be ranked and compared in a global context, they are potentially useful aids to navigation, evaluation, prediction and other forms of assesment and analysis. (We have published a study that shows there is a good-sized positive correlation between earlier download counts and later citation counts: Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2006) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8) pp. 1060-1072.) (3) Yes, download statistics can be -- and will be -- abused, as many other online innovations (like email, discussion lists, blogs, search engines, etc.) can be abused by spammers and other motivated mischief-makers or self-promoters. But it is also true that those abuses can and will breed counter-abuse mechanisms. And in the case of academic download metrics inflation, there will be obvious, powerful ways to counteract and deter it if/when it begins to emerge: Anomalous download patterns (e.g., self-hits, co-author IP hits, robotic hits, lack of correlation with citations, etc.) can be detected, named and shamed. (It is easier for a commercial spammer to abuse metrics and get away with it than for an academic with a career that stands at risk once discovered!) (4) No, researchers should definitely not be able to "opt out" of a deposit mandate: That would go against both the letter and spirit of a growing worldwide movement among researchers, their institutions and their funders to mandate OA self-archiving for the sake of its substantial benefits to research usage and impact. There is always the option of depositing a paper as Closed Access rather than Open Access, but I think a researcher would be shooting himself in the foot if he chose to do that on account of worries about the abuse of download statistics: It would indeed reduce the download counts, usage and citations of that researcher's work, but it would not accomplish much else. (On the question of opting out of the display of download (and other) metrics, I have nothing objective to add: It is technically possible to opt out of displaying metrics, and if there is enough of a demand for it, it should be made a feature of IRs; but it seems to me that it will only bring disadvantages and handicaps to those who choose to opt out of displaying their metrics, not only depriving them of data to guide potential users and evaluators of their work, but giving the impression that they have something to hide.) I would also add that the invitation to contribute a book chapter by [identity deleted] might possibly be a scam along the lines of the bogus conference scams we have heard much about. The public availability of metadata, papers and metrics will of course breed such "invitations" too, but one must use one's judgment about which of them are eminently worth ignoring. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, November 1. 2007Institutions: Don't Just Cancel Journals; Mandate Self-Archiving![]() For some time now, the reply from the MP Institutes and German universities has been: "We cannot mandate!" But of course they can! The policy need not be coercive; it need not have sanctions for noncompliance. It need merely be officially adopted. And there are obvious and simple administrative ways to make it worth researchers' while to comply (if the enhanced research impact that OA vouchsafes is not enough): Simply declare the IR as the official institutional submission format for all performance review for its employees! So there are no administrative barriers. Nor are there any legal barriers: For performance review, it is sufficient to deposit the final, revised, refereed, accepted draft -- the postprint -- immediately upon acceptance for publication, and set access the postprint full-text as Closed Access (administrative access -- with only the bibliographic metadata, not the postprint, visible webwide) rather than immediate Open Access (if the journal in which the article is published is non-Green and demands an embargo). (Since the only thing that has been standing between us and 100% OA for years now is keystrokes, an administrative keystroke mandate is all that is needed. The increasingly palpable benefits of OA itself will take care of the rest, as carrots, rather than sticks.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, October 31. 2007RePEc, Peer Review, and Harvesting/Exporting from IRs to CRs![]() Re: the current RePEc blog posting, "New Peer Review Systems": Experiments on improving peer review are always welcome, but what the worldwide research community (in all disciplines, economics included) needs most urgently today is not peer review reform, but Open Access (OA) to its existing peer-reviewed journal literature. It's far easier to reform access than to reform the peer-review system, and it's also already obvious exactly what needs to be done and how, for OA -- mandate RePEc-style self-archiving, but for the refereed postprints, not just the unrefereed preprints -- whereas peer-review reforms are still in the testing stage. It's not even clear whether once most unrefereed preprints and all refereed postprints are OA anyone will still feel any need for radical peer review reform at all; it may simply be a matter of more efficient online implementation. So if I were part of the RePEc community, I would be trying to persuade economists (who, happily, already have the preprint self-archiving habit) to extend their practise to postprints -- and to persuade their institutions and funders to mandate postprint self-archiving in each author's own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR). From there, if and when desired, its metadata can then also be harvested by, or exported to, CRs (Central Repositories) like RePEc or PubMed Central. (One of the rationales for OAI-interoperability is harvestability.) But the primary place to deposit one's own preprints and postprints, in all disciplines, is "at home," i.e., in one's own institutional archive, for visibility, usage, impact, record-keeping, monitoring, metrics, and assessment -- and in order to ensure a scaleable universal practise that systematically covers all research space, whether funded or unfunded, in all disciplines, single or multi, and at all institutions -- universities and research institutes. (For institutions that have not yet created an IR of their own -- even though the software is free and the installation is quick, easy, and cheap -- there are reliable interim CRs such as Depot to deposit in, and harvest back from, once your institution has its own IR.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, October 24. 2007Meeting to Promote Open Access Mandates in Brazil![]() NIH Green OA Mandate Now Passed By US Senate: No Need for Universities to Keep Waiting to Implement It![]() Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, October 23. 2007AAAS (Green), Nature (Pale-Green), ACS (Gray)![]()
AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint; hence there is nothing we need to convince AAAS of![Identity Deleted]: "At the AAAS 2007 meeting held in San Francisco, Tony Hey, in his presentation to a panel chaired by Christine Borgman, made the point that some form of open access to text and data would be the norm in about ten years from now. Ironically, AAAS [along with ACS] is among the few leading professional societies which opposes open access tooth and nail! What can we do to convince the AAAS management (as well as the ACS management) to see the point that is obvious to us? Some believe that AAAS opposes OA while commercial publishers such as Nature Group supports OA in some form..." (Indeed, it is Nature that back-slid to pale-Green in 2005: Nature started out being Green, but then introduced a 6-month embargo on self-archiving coinciding with the announcement that the NIH agreed had agreed to embargoes.) But it is ACS (American Chemical Society) that is Gray. And although it is a good idea to keep trying to convince them, my own guess is that ACS will be among the very last of the publishers to go Green. ACS was rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM. (The other two were rumored to be Elsevier, which is fully Green, and Wiley, which is Pale-Green). ACS is the Learned Society with the biggest and most remunerative publishing operation. With Chemical Abstracts they make a lot more money than the American Physical Society (APS), which was the very first of the Green publishers, and which set the standard for all the rest. The strongest weapon against the ACS's Gray policy is the movement for data-archiving. (The two strongest contingents of the movement for data-archiving are in Biology and in Chemistry; I have branched this to Peter Murray-Rust, Jeremy Frey, and Michael Hursthouse.) The chemical research community, accustomed to the status quo, with Chemical Abstracts and the other ACS products and services, is one of the most quiescent on the movement to provide OA to journal articles, but they can be roused on the subject of data-archiving. And, ironically, ACS is also the most vulnerable there: Other publishers, since they do not publish data, have no big stake in data-archiving, one way or another. But for ACS, data-archiving (just like article-archiving) represents (or appears to them to represent) a risk to their revenue-streams. So chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. And in chemistry, of all fields, the two are very closely coupled, since many chemical publications (e.g. in crystallography) consist of just the description of a new molecule. See: (1) Southampton Crystal Structure Report Archive/EPSRCSo NSF is a potential ally in influencing the ACS. So too would be NIH (if it weren't the victim of ACS's successful anti-OA lobbying at the moment); and the UK's EPSRC (which is obviously conflicted on this issue, being the last of the UK funding councils to still hold out as non-Green!) One last point: Please do not confuse a publisher's stand on Gold OA (publishing) with their stand on Green OA (self-archiving). Gold OA is welcome, but it is Green OA that is urgently needed. In this regard, AAAS (Green) is fully on the side of the Angels, whereas Nature (Pale-Green) is not. The only two differences between AAAS and Nature are that (1) AAAS is still (nominally) supporting the "Ingelfinger Rule" on prepublication preprints (but that is not a legal matter, and those authors who wish to ignore the unjustified and unenforceable Ingelfinger Rule can ignore it). and (2) Nature has begun to experiment with Gold. This experimentation can be cynical and self-serving, but it is not, I think, in the case of Nature. In the case of ACS, however, which has begun to "experiment" with the Trojan Horse of "AuthorChoice," it has become the only Gray publisher, as far as I know, to have the temerity to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green! ![]() On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Alma Swan replied: Alma Swan: "There is no need to shame Nature because those who think self-archiving is worth doing, do it despite Nature's embargo, as I showed by my little study on Nature Physics: see "Author compliance with publisher open access embargoes: a study of the journal Nature Physics."I agree completely with Alma: It is, and always has been, perfectly possibly -- and practised -- to go ahead and self-archive with impunity, sensibly ignoring all the formal nonsense about only being allowed to post on "a Windows-based personal website on Tuesdays if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle"! Those who elect to self-archive spontaneously are sensible enough to know that the "permissions barriers" are in reality all just so much unenforceable Wizard-of-Ozzery. But the fact remains that only about 15% of researchers elect to self-archive spontaneously! That is why the mandates are needed. And whereas rightly dismissing the posturing of publishers as mere Wizard-of-Ozzery is an easy option for individual authors, already inclined to self-archive spontaneously (as generations of Green self-archiving computer-scientists and physicists and others have by now amply demonstrated), it is not an easy option for most institutions and funding agencies contemplating the adoption of formal self-archiving mandates. They must adopt a policy that is not only practically feasible, but also formally legal. (Even there, I don't think the institutions are at any real risk, but they are at a perceived risk.) That is why -- despite being in possession of her strong, welcome, and compelling evidence on how many Nature authors do self-archive immediately indifferent to Nature's shameful 6-month embargo -- Alma is a co-author of the optimal institutional (and funder) self-archiving policy, which recommends (if you cannot agree on the stronger version, which is to require immediate deposit and immediate, unembargoed Open Access) a weaker compromise, namely, the ID/OA mandate: require immediate deposit, but merely encourage immediate OA -- allowing the option of a Closed Access embargo period for the likes of Nature authors): "[drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement]"So, yes, the embargoes are a paper tiger, but we still have to offer a formal policy option that treats their appearance of being real as if it were really real, and can be adopted universally without any worry about illegality, or even the appearance of illegality)! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum The Gathering ForceOn her own blog, OptimalScholarship, Alma Swan has blogged the historic U. Liège OA meeting that launched EurOpenScholar Photo by and (c) 2007 Derek Ramsey
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