Saturday, April 7. 2007
![](uploads/fwo.serendipityThumb.jpg) From Driver News: "After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories. This needs to be done at the latest one year after the publication date, to increase visibility and impact. More information on the conditions can be found in their general agreement for researchers."
![](uploads/idoa.serendipityThumb.png) This is indeed good news, but could easily be made even better by upgrading the mandate to Immediate Deposit (ID/OA): Setting access to the deposited article as Open Access can be delayed for up to a year (if FWO allows it and the author so chooses), but the deposit itself must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, so the article's metadata are immediately visible webwide. (1) "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"
(2) "The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate" ![](uploads/eprint.serendipityThumb.png) (If the author chooses to delay setting Open Access (OA) to a deposit, access can be initially set as Closed Access (CA) until the chosen release date. Meanwhile, each Repository's "Fair-Use Button" can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to all would-be users webwide who see the deposit's metadata: Requesters need merely paste in their own email addresses and click, thereby sending an automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST to the author, who need merely click to authorize having one individual eprint of the deposit emailed to the requester.)
(3) "EPrints 'Request eprint' button"
(4) "Two Happy Accidents Demonstrate Power of "Eprint Request" Button" Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, April 5. 2007
![](uploads/amscilogo.jpg) Alma Swan's article " Open Access and the Progress of Science" has just appeared in American Scientist (the journal) May-June Issue 2007.
![](uploads/amsci.serendipityThumb.jpeg) You can join the American Scientist Open Access Forum, post discussion to the Forum, and view the complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion (1998-2007) on providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online.
Sunday, April 1. 2007
![](uploads/rcuk.serendipityThumb.gif) ![](uploads/stfc.serendipityThumb.jpg) As announced in Peter Suber's Open Access News, on 1 April 2007 two UK Research Councils, PPARC and CCLRC merged into a single Council: Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). PPARC had already mandated Green OA Self-Archiving; CCLRC had "strongly encouraged" it. STFC mandates it. That means that instead of 5 out of 8 UK Research Councils mandating OA, 5 out of 7 now mandate OA.
![](uploads/earth.serendipityThumb.jpg) Worldwide, we have reached 23 Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates adopted (9 institutional, 3 departmental, 11 funder mandates, including the European Research Council, ERC) plus 6 more proposed (1 multi-institutional, 5 funder mandates), two of them ( FRPAA in the US and EC A1 in Europe) big ones.
See Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)
SUMMARY: The formula for distinguishing which of the scholarly and scientific societies are on the side of the angels will be simple to reckon. By Their Works Shall Ye Know Them: The societies that are Green on author self-archiving -- and are not lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates -- are practising what they preach, which is the promotion of science and scholarship. Those that oppose Green OA self-archiving mandates (in the name of their other "good works," such as funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) are not. Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director of the American Geophysical Union appears to be on the side of the angels, even though he seems to think the underlying issue is research preservation (rather than what it really is: research access, usage and impact, the productivity and progress of scholarship and science).
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, in response to " Mobilising Scholarly Society Membership Support for FRPAA and EC A1," Fred Spilhaus, Executive Director, American Geophysical Union, wrote, in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: "Were open access in the best interests of advancing science societies would be supporting it now." The purpose of Open Access (OA) is to maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted. "It is as hard for a society executive to know what to oppose as it is to know what we should be supporting on the OA side." The American Geophysical Union is completely Green on author self-archiving. That means it is on the side of the angels -- except if it is also lobbying against Green OA Mandates such as FRPAA or EC A1. "Please don't characterize us with the commercial publishers." The Society publishers that are Green on author self-archiving and are not lobbying against the FRPAA Green OA mandate are certainly not like the publishers -- commercial or society -- that are. "There is no other way those most interested in assuring that the record of a discipline is not lost can assure that will not happen except to do it themselves and that is why there are societies." ![](uploads/rcmace.serendipityThumb.jpg) I hope there are more reasons for learned societies to exist than just preservation, because preservation can and will be taken care of in the digital era quite expeditiously. I would say that there are still other reasons for learned societies' existence, such as to implement peer review and certify its outcome (with their journal name), to host meetings, perhaps to fund scholarships, to lobby (but not to lobby against OA!) -- and possibly also to sell a paper edition of the journals as long as there is still a demand for it. "government can not be trusted to do so." Digital preservation need not be entrusted to government. Research institutions will preserve their own (published) article output, self-archived in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs). And for good measure (and backup) the distributed and mirrored IR contents can be harvested into various Central Repositories (CRs), including learned society repositories, if they wish.
But lest there be any misunderstanding, the purpose of the FRPAA Green OA mandate is not research preservation but research access and impact.
And the Green OA mandates that require direct central self-archiving in a CR (such as PubMed Central (PMC) or a funding agency CR) are not sensible or optimal. All self-archiving should systematically be done in the researcher's own institution's IR, the primary research provider. (The only exceptions should be unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have an IR; for them there are CRs to deposit in directly for the time being.)
CRs like PMC can then harvest from the IRs.
See: "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" "Funding agencies of all kinds operate in their own interest... None have a primary mission in the protection of the knowledge base;" The locus of deposit is a relatively minor issue; and, to repeat, OA self-archiving is not being mandated for the sake of preservation but for the sake of access and impact.
Public, tax-payer-funded funding agencies presumably act in the tax-paying public's interest. "Academic institutions standing alone do not have the capacity to guarantee all knowledge." No one institution (or society) can, but a distributed network of them, with back-up and redundancy certainly can.
"Societies are one vital resource, academic institutions are another... One without the other is the woof without the warp, a flop." Agreed, but neither here nor there, insofar as the substantive issue under discussion is concerned, which is the passage of Green OA self-archiving mandates such as the FRPAA -- and overcoming publisher lobbying against them, whether from commercial or society publishers. "Instead of shouting about the moral rectitude of OA and other irrelevant issues how about looking at the whole problem. The development and protection of the knowledge base needs to be optimized. Optimizing one aspect is likely to be deleterious in other parts of the system." No one at all is shouting about moral rectitude. The purpose of OA is to maximise research access, usage and impact, thereby maximising research productivity and progress, in the interests of research, researchers, their research institutions, their research funders, the R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit research is funded and conducted. "Time, Price, Quality - Pick any two." Yes indeed: And at the same time: Mandate self-archiving, and self-archive.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Friday, March 30. 2007
SUMMARY: Some Scholarly Society officers are adopting the very same stance as commercial publishers -- opposing the Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates that are being adopted and proposed worldwide -- but they are opposing them in the name of protecting the society's publishing revenue streams for the sake of funding the society's "good works" (funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) -- and they are doing so on behalf of their memberships, without consultation, disclosure, or answerability.
The memberships have to be informed of this, and that renouncing OA to guarantee their society's publishing revenue streams so they can subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying would amount to members agreeing to subsidise these things with their own lost daily research impact and income. Members will be shocked once their societies' publishing revenue books are opened and they see how small a proportion of their society's publishing profits is actually being used for these good works rather than to increase their publishing division's size, staff and perquisites, exactly as with any commercial publisher.
Scholarly society meetings, scholarships and lobbying should sustain themselves in other ways in the OA era, rather than by reducing members' research impact. Reducing research access is the exact opposite of the purpose of a scholarly society. Raising the registration fee for meetings, and adjusting membership fees to the level agreed upon for the funding of scholarships and lobbying makes the system far more open and answerable to the real needs of the membership.
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Andrew A. Adams wrote: "On the subject of Scholarly Society Publishers, you agree that it is likely that the heads of scholarly societies will be lining up alongside the commercial publishers in lobbying against OA mandates in the US. Since most scholarly societies are semi-democratic bodies, we need to try to mobilise OA advocates to use those democratic avenues to transform the Scholarly Societies into lobbyists for instead of lobbyists against, OA. Of course, as always, this requires the time of OA advocates.
"I will have a think about how we can support each other in these efforts (your slides on OA are one example of how we can support each other and by sharing, reduce the burden on each of us), and then possibly put a message on the general list with suggestions, the first of which is noting that "decisions are made by those who turn up" and suggesting that at minimum OA advocates need to make the time to attend their scholarly societies' AGMs, and preferably to stand for election as officers of the societies on a platform of OA advocacy (and business change to secure the future of the societies IF Green OA were to undermine their publishing income)."
You are right that scholarly society members need to be specially mobilised by OA advocates now, to get them aware and on-side. I think David Prosser and Fred Friend in the UK and Heather Joseph and Peter Suber in the US are in the best position to guide a systematic campaign to mobilise support for EC A1 and FRPAA from the society memberships. Many of the societies have signed the EU or US petitions (although obviously the most important membership targets are those whose officers have not signed).
The specific goal would be to inform members about the great likelihood that their own officers will be actively lobbying against Green OA mandates (FRPAA and EC A1), and hence the need to make the will of the grassroots membership known, heard and felt.
The core issue is that Scholarly Society officers are taking exactly the same stance as commercial publishers (either opposing OA altogether, or opposing the OA Green Mandates that are designed to reach OA), but they are doing so in the name of protecting the society's publishing revenue streams for the sake of the society's "good works" (which consist of funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) -- and they are doing so in the name of their memberships, without consultation, disclosure, or answerability. Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor
Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society
Open Letter from Fellows of the Royal Society
A real tragedy
The memberships have to be very clearly informed of this, and of the fact that renouncing OA in favour of protecting their society's publishing revenue streams in order to ensure that they can continue to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying would amount to the individual members themselves agreeing to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying with their own lost daily research impact and income, lost because would-be users of their work are being denied access to their work because their institutions cannot afford subscription access to it (the supplementary access that the Green OA Mandates are specifically meant to provide).
The findings on the way self-archiving doubles research usage and impact in all fields should be made very clearly known to the membership, so they fully understand and appreciate the central causal contingency that is actually at issue in all of this: Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact Advantage
Houghton, J. & Sheehan, P. (2006) The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings. Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University
Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).
The solution is very simple: Scholarly society meetings, scholarships and lobbying should sustain themselves in other ways in the OA era, rather than by reducing members' research impact. Reducing research access is the exact opposite of the purpose of a scholarly society. Raising the registration fee for meetings, and adjusting membership fees to the level agreed upon for the funding of scholarships and lobbying makes the system far more open and answerable to the real needs of the membership.
(I am certain that members will be appalled once the publishing books are opened and they see how small a proportion of their society's publishing profits is actually being used for these good works: The books will show that those scholarly societies that have any sizeable publishing profits to speak of tend to use them, like all other publishers, to increase their publishing division's size, staff and perquisites, not to fund "good works." The American Chemical Society is the prime example of this. Publishing has become a state-within-a-state in the profitable societies, and that is why they sound so much like commercial publishers, differing only in the fact that they can add a specious note of self-righteousness to their resistance to OA, citing their "good works." The remedy, of course, is to remind the membership of the actual mandate of scholarly societies, which is to promote the scholarship, not to profit from limiting it.)
Moreover, a long period of peaceful coexistence between subscription revenues and Green OA self-archiving mandates is still ahead of us, because it takes time for the mandates to take effect, with OA growing anarchically across all journals, not individually, journal by journal. Even in fields that have had 100% Green OA for years now -- notably the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, which have both attested to this publicly -- Green OA self-archiving has not yet produced any detectable decline in subscription revenues. Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.
Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE. Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, March 29. 2007
Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. To appear in: Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, 25-27 June 2007, Madrid, Spain. ![](uploads/issi.serendipityThumb.gif) ![](uploads/rae2008.serendipityThumb.gif)
Abstract: Scientometric predictors of research performance need to be validated by showing that they have a high correlation with the external criterion they are trying to predict. The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) -- together with the growing movement toward making the full-texts of research articles freely available on the web -- offer a unique opportunity to test and validate a wealth of old and new scientometric predictors, through multiple regression analysis: Publications, journal impact factors, citations, co-citations, citation chronometrics (age, growth, latency to peak, decay rate), hub/authority scores, h-index, prior funding, student counts, co-authorship scores, endogamy/exogamy, textual proximity, download/co-downloads and their chronometrics, etc. can all be tested and validated jointly, discipline by discipline, against their RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and metric RAE in 2008. The weights of each predictor can be calibrated to maximize the joint correlation with the rankings. Open Access Scientometrics will provide powerful new means of navigating, evaluating, predicting and analyzing the growing Open Access database, as well as powerful incentives for making it grow faster.
To read full-text, click here. Comments welcome.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Tuesday, March 27. 2007
Once again, the reader would probably do better to read Peter Suber's incisive but gentle critique of the stunningly "confused and confusing" report of the Australian government's Productivity Commission on Public Support for Science and Innovation. My own uncharitable rant, from when I first laid eyes on it yesterday, follows below:
What a word salad is the Australian government Productivity Commission report on Public Support for Science and Innovation. All that jabber, a lot of it incoherent, but what it amounts to is a total confusion about Green and Gold, OA self-archiving and OA publishing, institutional repositories and central repositories, embargoes, and what needs to be mandated and how (and why). A perfect entry-way for the Trojan Horse of paying the asking price for pre-emptive Gold OA instead of just mandating Green OA. (Doesn't even seem to realize that combining payment with embargoes is adding insult to injury!)
A mess. They should take it back and try (seriously this time) to think it through, clearly, and reduce it to the few sentences it merits. And those sentences are already known: Mandate Green OA self-archiving of all published articles in Institutional Repositories (deposit required immediately upon publication, even if provisionally in Closed Access). Fund Gold OA only if you really have the spare change; otherwise, wait until it's needed: If/when institutional subscriptions are unsustainably cancelled, use (part of) the institutional savings to pay for the Gold OA publication charges for institutional research output. Not before! That's all that's needed. The rest is all confusion and folly.
![](uploads/oanews.serendipityThumb.gif) Readers of this blog who do not regularly read Peter Suber's splendid Open Access News (OAN) should! OAN provides a wealth of immediate information about OA developments. It has been my first (and most frequent) daily port of call for years now.
Yesterday Peter did two characteristically fair and gentle -- but resolutely firm -- rejoinders to the increasingly shrill (but remarkably shallow) attempts by representatives and partisans of some -- certainly not all, possibly not even most -- sectors of the journal publishing industry to oppose the growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates being adopted and proposed by research funders and universities worldwide.
The two articles Peter rebuts are by Brian Crawford, Chairman of the PSP Executive Council of AAP and an editorial by the CEO of ALPSP about a similar -- but somewhat more reasoned -- article by Nevada librarian Rick Anderson. As usual, the claim is that the Green OA self-archiving mandates that have been adopted and proposed will destroy journals and peer review by destroying subscription income. As usual, the reply is that (1) there is to date no evidence at all that Green OA self-archiving will not co-exist peacefully with subscription-based cost-recovery, but (2) if and when it no longer does, then there will be a conversion to Gold OA publishing-fee-based cost-recovery, paid for out of the very same money that institutions now spend on subscriptions, money they would have saved in having cancelled subscriptions (not money redirected from research). But the fact that 100% OA is both attainable via the Green OA mandates and highly beneficial -- to research, researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public that funds the research -- is beyond dispute. Research is not funded and conducted in order to guarantee the journal publishing industry's current revenue streams and current ways of doing business.
For Peter's much gentler rebuttals, please see: Crawford PSP/AAP Rebuttal and Anderson ALPSP Rebuttal
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Sunday, March 25. 2007
![](uploads/euro.serendipityThumb.jpeg) I append below another brilliant suggestion from the redoubtable N. Miradon (who may be retired but hardly retiring -- and tireless!) in the form of a proposed letter to European MPs and MEPs about the forthcoming EC deliberations on Open Access policy.
If I have not misunderstand, N. Miradon has drawn to our attention here an existing EU/EC policy under which it would be possible to implement an ID/OA mandate for EU research funding with no further legislative or consultative changes required at all!
( See comments further below: It looks to me as if pointing this out to the EC would be the shortest and easiest route to the adoption of the EC A1 recommendation -- since strongly supported by the Brussels Open Access Petition -- to implement Green OA self-archiving, for, in effect, it is already mandated! The only thing that still needs to be specified is trivial and noncontroversial: the locus and mode of submission and storage of the already mandated publication. Currently it needs to be sent in by email; the only change needed is to require it to be deposited in a Closed Access URL in an Institutional Repository! More about this below.)
A few suggestions are added below concerning the all-important locus of deposit of the published research documents.
It is very important (in order to generate a coherent, systematic, universally scaleable solution) that the default locus of deposit should be specified as the researcher's own ( OAI-compliant) Institutional Repository (IR). Other loci are possible if the researcher's institution does not yet have an IR: there are numerous possible Central Repositories (CRs), national and international, and the EU could perhaps also provide one of its own; but the preferred locus should be the researcher's own IR. The EU policy will also help encourage research institutions to create their own IRs if they have not done so already, and to fill them also with their non-EU-funded research output. That will complement the funded research and make all European peer-reviewed research output OA, maximising its usage and impact:
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
" Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)
" Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
" France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories" (started Oct 2006)
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?
A few comments and suggestions on N. Miradon's text: On Sat, 24 Mar 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
This is about the forthcoming parliamentary discussions of "Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation".
I have drafted a letter to my MP and to my MEP. Copy of my draft letter below the fold.
I would be v grateful if you could read my letter for errors and omissions, and send corrections to me off list (or post them here).
And if you have 2 minutes to spare, perhaps you could send something like this to your own deputé/ member of parliament.
N. Miradon
Dear Member of Parliament/Member of the European Parliament:
I understand that Parliament has received a Communication from the European Commission "On Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation". There is an accompanying "Staff Working Paper" - details in footnotes [1] and [2] below.
The reason for this letter is to ask you to pursue some questions which are relevant to "Access, Dissemination and Preservation" of scientific information; but which the Commission papers do not seem to mention.
I am a retired research scientist. I have always found that the European Research programmes are well structured at the start, but that it is difficult to find the results at the end. The problem is that the scientific information that is produced by each EU research project is dispersed through publications in a multitude of books, journals, pamphlets and Commission and other web pages.
I would add here that depositing them in an interoperable OAI-compliant repository would be optimal, preferably the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR).
So I would like to ask why all published results from EU-supported research projects cannot be grouped together and made available via one well-organised EU web page or 'portal'.
The web page or portal can be harvested from the EU researchers' IRs, or it can consist of a list of the projects, or the papers resulting from the projects, together with a link to their URL in the IR in which they are deposited.
I think that it is reasonable to ask the Commission to do this. The three necessary constituents of a 'portal' are -
(i) the published research documents,
(ii) a web site,
(iii) a data standard for classifying and linking the documents.
The OAI protocol is the standard for making the IRs interoperable. There may need to be some further tag for specifically selecting EU funded publications.
The European Commission already possesses (i) and (ii) and (iii);
(i) The Commission's "Seventh Framework Programme Grant Agreement" already requires that every research contract funded under the Seventh Framework Programme should send to the Commission an electronic copy of every publication produced, and that the Commission shall, with appropriate safeguards, be authorised to publish every document sent to it - see footnote [3].
This existing EU/EC policy is already a godsend, as it already provides the basis for the EU to adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate (ID/OA) (also called the "dual deposit/release strategy") without any further need of legislation or consultation:
As the EU already requires (i.e., mandates) both (1) the electronic copy of the publication, and (2) the right to make it OA (if and when the copyright agreement with the publisher allows it), the only thing left to stipulate is how "send[ing] to the commission an electronic copy" should be done, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the form of depositing it in the researcher's own IR (preferably, or in a OAI-compliant CR otherwise), in immediate Open Access if possible, otherwise in Closed Access -- and merely sending the commission the URL for the (Closed Access) deposit!
The EU can harvest the document if it wishes, or link it in a portal. The only change involved here is a specification of the mode of submission for what has already been mandated by the EC.
" Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"
" Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)"
Dual Deposit/Release Strategy
A National Open Access Policy
(The NIH had a similar opportunity to do this in 2004, but failed to take notice.)
" A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy(Oct 2004)"
(ii) The Commission already has numerous web pages from earlier Framework Programmes, each showing the reports of its particular research projects - some examples are listed in [4].
(iii) The Commission has already developed a "Common European Research Information Format". The Commission has also sent it to the member states as a formal recommendation - see [5].
However the Commission has not yet managed to join up (i) + (ii) + (iii) So, for the results of EU research projects, "Access, Dissemination and Preservation" are substandard. I have sketched some of the current rather untidy situation in footnote [4].
It is of course understandable that a large bureaucracy should sometimes fail to join up the various elements under its control.
It is also understandable that bureaucracies should not draw attention to internal problems in their published Papers.
However I trust that you and your colleagues will investigate the matter when you discuss "On Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation".
It should not be too difficult or expensive for the Commission to ensure that the publications that are sent to the Commission, are made available on the websites that the Commission runs, using the information format which the Commission itself recommends.
And through links to the researcher's own IR.
If this is done, then all published documents from the research that is funded in the Seventh Framework Programme will become available over the web. Industry, research workers and citizens will all benefit - and they should be grateful to the Commission and to you.
Yours sincerely
N. Miradon
Footnotes
1. "Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation {SEC(2007)181}" / COM/2007/0056 final /
in English, French and German.
2. "Commission staff working document - Document accompanying the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation {COM(2007) 56 final}" / SEC/2007/0181 final /"
3. "FP7 Grant Agreement - Annex II General Conditions Version 20.12.06 ISC clean 3."
Article II.30 (Dissemination) says - "... Furthermore, an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission at the same time for the purpose set out in Article II.12(2) if this does not infringe any rights of third parties."
And Article II.12. (Information and communication) says - "... 2. The Commission shall be authorised to publish, in whatever form and on or by whatever medium, the following information: ... the details/references and the abstracts of scientific publications relating to foreground and, where provided pursuant to Article II.30, the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication; ..."
Compare the above to the ID/OA Mandate (or "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy"):
"Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication... but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author..."
4. The "Fifth framework programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (1998 - 2002)" was divided into thematic programmes and horizontal programmes (TP and HP).
Programmes TP and HP were divided into sub programmes, and each sub programme was further divided into key actions (KA).
Here are the starter web pages of TP1
TP 1 Quality of life and management of living resources
TP 1, KA 1
TP 1, KA 2: ?
TP 1, KA 3
TP 1, KA 4
TP 1, KA 5
TP 1, KA 6
TP 1, KA 7:
Note that each of these pages has a different design, and that none of them has a search engine.
If you are looking for particular information, you may also need to look through the rest of the structure (web pages not listed here)
1 Thematic programmes
TP 2 User friendly information society
TP 3 Competitive and sustainable growth
TP 4 Energy, environment and sustainable development
2 Horizontal programmes
HP 1 Confirming the international role of community research
HP 2 Promotion of innovation and encouragement of participation of SMEs
HP 3 Improving human research potential and the socio-economic knowledge base
5. CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) was developed with the support of the EC (European Commission) in two major phases: 1987-1990 and 1997-1999. It is an European Union Recommendation to member states. Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Saturday, March 24. 2007
Below is a posting, with permission, of an offline exchange with Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice. I have labelled the dramatis personae and indented for chronology. (The title "Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice" is mine, not Jan's.)
Jan argues that paying for Open Choice Gold OA at this time, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing, would not be double-paying for OA.
I argue that it would be.
Jan argues that mandating Green OA -- as ERC, ARC, NHMRC, 5 RCUK research councils, and a growing number of universities have done, and as FRPAA, NIH, EC, CIHR and EURAB propose to do -- will destroy journals and peer review.
I argue that it will provide OA -- and that if it ever does cause subscription cancellation, then that will be the time to convert to Gold OA, paying the institutional Gold OA publishing costs out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings themselves, rather than pre-emptively double-paying, as we would be doing if we did it now, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing.
(I will let Jan have the last word in this posting and will reply separately to a few of his points in my next posting. My surmise is that the careful reader of this exchange will not need my subsequent reply -- though this surmise could be wrong.)
Stevan Harnad From: Jan Velterop (VELTEROP)
To: Stevan Harnad (HARNAD)
HARNAD: Jan, may I post this? I've removed the nonsubstantive parts that do not need not be aired in public. Chrs, S
VELTEROP: Stevan, If you include my further comments, you may post. Best, Jan On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:HARNAD: The main substantive points are: (1) Paying for optional OA Gold today is double-paying...
VELTEROP: Answer: Nonsense. Paying for access to content is not the same as paying for having your article published with OA. At no point is the same article paid for twice.
HARNAD: Can we count this up, slowly:
(a) A journal sells subscriptions.
(b) Subscriptions cover publication costs plus profits. Let's say $3000 per article published.
(c) That same journal now begins to offer Open Choice: $1500 to make your article free online, instead of having it accessible only to those with a paid subscription.
In what sense is the publication of that article not being double-paid for? VELTEROP: That's clear to anyone who understands how journals work: The open access articles are simply not part of the subscription. As if they were published in a 'parallel' journal with the same editor and editorial board. This doesn't only happen to open acces articles, but publishing history is strewn with sponsored supplementary material that, whilst carrying a journal's mark, was made available for free and not part of a subscription. HARNAD: (Please don't reply that the author is not paying twice. I of course meant the publisher is being paid twice.) VELTEROP: Of course authors are not paying twice. Authors, and readers for that matter, are rarely paying at all. That's all done vicariously by the institution, mostly the library. And the publisher is not paid twice for the same thing, however much you twist it. HARNAD: And recall that this is all being rehearsed in the context of the claim that Green self-archiving would destroy journals because it would destroy their subscription base and no longer make it possible to pay the costs of publishing.
To which my reply has always been that subscriptions pay the cost of publishing, and if and when subscriptions are cancelled, hence no longer paying the cost of publishing, then the cancellation savings can be redirected to pay for the cost of publishing. Before that, publishing is being double-paid for. VELTEROP: I know that your reply has always been thus. That doesn't make it correct. I'm not denying that there may be a cost of transition from subscriptions to gold OA. That's been highlighted many times before, notably by PLoS before they even were publishers themselves. Your method has a cost as well. A much greater one. You favour, by implication, although you refuse to see it that way, the demise of journals, and with that the destruction of a system and infrastructure of peer-reviewed publishing. Of course that can be built up again after the existing journals have gone out of business. But it will take a very long time. The benefits of OA are substantial, but that price, making the transition of one phase to the next via a phase of destruction, is too high in my view. That's why I favour a transition without such drastic drawbacks. HARNAD: Hence authors should self-archive (Green), not pay for Gold, now (for a hybrid Open Choice journal: if they wish to publish in a pure Gold journal, like BMC or PLoS, they are not double-paying). VELTEROP: In what way is Open Choice different from 'pure' gold? Have you forgotten that 'open access' was explicitly declared a property of an article, not of a journal or a publisher? (look here if you need to refresh your memory). Why not pay for gold? Why are you making such an issue of that? Are you the guardian angel of university administrators and research funders now, too? How would paying for gold threaten your cherished self-archiving? Did it escape your attention that gold is green plus a lot more? When your campaign for self-archiving was just that, it at least had the benefit of an intellectually honest quest. Now that you are showing a keen interest in making any transition impossible unless via destruction, using financial arguments, you've lost your focus, and, in my view, your credibility. For the avoidance of doubt: I'm not against green. What I think is not a good idea is mandates for self-archiving. If they are successful (and why else would they be proposed), they carry too high a price, as I explained above. VELTEROP: Consider this analogy: you take a subscription to a newspaper and subsequently you wish to place an ad in it. You'll be asked to pay for the placement of the ad. In your reasoning this would mean that you'd be double-paying. You may be paying more than you did before, but you'd be paying for different things. To call it double-paying is misleading.
HARNAD: I'm afraid I don't see the analogy at all. The crucial difference is that my own article is my ad, and I am saying that that ad's author (me) should be mandated (by his employer/funder) to put a supplementary copy of his own ads online for free, not pay their publishers to do it, while their publishers are still being fully paid by their subscribers. They don't need more money from me, to do what they are doing already, plus what I can do for myself, for free (without "destroying the newspaper"). VELTEROP: As I indicated, analogies are not perfect. In the case of an article (your 'ad'), it gains quite a lot by being published in the journal. What you are doing, is taking that 'gain', without bothering to care how that gain is acquired and paid for (other than throwing the ball into the librarian's court and say: "you paid for it in the past and you shall keep paying for it in the future, and if not, there will be some 'deus ex machina' salvaging any ailing journal"), and attach it to your self-archived copy. You can, at any time, publish your article online. When you need the journal 'label' to give it professional credibility is when you go to a publisher. Not giving him your article, mind you, but asking for a service. Performing that service costs money and subscriptions are a poor way of providing that money. Article processing charges are much better because they remove any need to restrict access in any way. VELTEROP: Analogies, as always, are not perfect. Unlike the newspaper analogy, and for Academia as a whole, any 'extra' payment is temporary.
HARNAD: It sounds here as if you are conceding, after all, that there is double-payment being received... VELTEROP: Of course there is a cost of transition, as I said above. But that's a cost of transition, not paying twice for the same thing. The cost of transition your method incurs, destruction of the journal infrastructure, is much greater. VELTEROP: This is unfortunate, but a consequence of a drawn-out transition in which not all libraries in one go switch from subscriptions to article charges as a way of sustaining peer-reviewed journals.
HARNAD: We are not talking about changing the ways subscribing libraries sustain peer-reviewed journals. We are talking about supplementing subscription access with author-provided free online access, today. If there is indeed one day to be a transition to Gold OA, let that transition be driven by cancellations, and funded by the cancellation savings, not pre-empted now, by double-payment (and at a price that may well be a good deal higher than it will be if the transition is preceded and driven by Green OA). VELTEROP: Who is 'we' here? I am indeed talking about changing ways of sustaining peer-reviewed journals. Your idea of having any transition funded by cancellation savings is predicated (without realising it, I suspect) on the completely unrealistic premise that all journals are being published by this one 'Ueber-publisher'. Any librarian who thinks he's double paying, can just cancel whatever he feels he can afford to cancel and re-use the funds for OA publishing. Any funder who thinks there is a risk of double payment can stipulate that out of the 58% of overheads typically taken off research grants, OA publishing is paid in the form of article processing charges, instead of non-OA publishing in the form of subscriptions. VELTEROP: At our initiative, we are in active discussion with a number of library consortia and some major research and funding institutions to find proper ways of avoiding any double payment, if and where it might occur. I'll announce them as soon as the ink is dry.
HARNAD: If institutional libraries are foolish enough to prepay the asking price for Gold now, by redirecting all their subscription budgets, there will not be a single murmur of protest from me if both the publishers support and the libraries' institutions adopt a Green OA mandate.
But if this absurd bargain is made in place of a Green OA mandate, I shall certainly do my level best to make all parties see the folly of their ways. VELTEROP: What's 'absurd' about working on a sustainable way to make the transition from subscriptions without OA, to OA publishing? HARNAD: (2) For a Gold (or hybrid Gold) OA publisher to oppose Green OA mandates is, at best, to oppose OA...
VELTEROP: Answer: This is weird reasoning, Stevan, and repeating it doesn't make it any better. We're gold, we're green (and by the way, gold includes green - not the other way around), and we feel that mandates should not be employed in the innately liberal world of science.
HARNAD: If Springer were (as it is) Green (i.e., endorses immediate Green self-archiving) and did not at the same time try to oppose Green OA mandates (as Springer does), then we would be in the scenario I described above, and Springer would not be blame-worthy (for trying to make an extra buck): only the institutions who took Springer up on it without mandating Green OA would be balmy. VELTEROP: Feel free to keep on calling institutions and funders 'balmy', authors 'stupid' or 'ignorant', publishers 'blame-worthy', et cetera, but don't expect to be taken seriously. VELTEROP: If a cultural norm emerges, like is the case with having to publish with peer-review, then fine. And if, and only if, a mandate is deemed justifiable, then it should be a mandate for open access, not a mandate for open access by such or such a means.
HARNAD: Researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals. That's a given. Journals recover their peer-review costs from subscriptions. That's a current fact. Alongside that, and (until/unless there are unsustainable cancellations as a result), mandating Green OA self-archiving is a completely independent matter, a matter that is entirely between an author and his institution or funder. Publishers should have no say in it whatsoever. (And, a fortiori, no say in the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate [ID/OA], which doesn't even notionally need the publisher's blessing or endorsement for the deposit.) VELTEROP: Much of the added value of a journal is concentrated in its 'trademark' attached to the article. This trademark, and therefore its added value, is easily pilfered. This is a problem for publishers, of course. And a lot of thinking goes into how to deal with that. If you were to argue for a self-archiving mandate for articles without indicating where and when they were published, in other words without appropriating the 'gain' while not taking responsibility for supporting the way this gain is generated, then that would be fine.
PS. Where not explicitly stated that I do speak for Springer, I speak for myself.
Jan Velterop VELTEROP: I didn't argue for mandating direct deposit in a CR
HARNAD: (Sorry: When you singled out IRs as one of my "orthodoxies" I thought you were defending direct deposit in CRs (as BMC does). I withdraw those points.)
VELTEROP: You should feel free to post this
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