Thursday, November 9. 2006Informal Polyglottal Contest: PostGutenberg Publish-or-Perish
In the Gutenberg Galaxy of print-on-paper, right up to the present day, researchers have had a quasi-universal "mandate" to make their findings known: "Publish or Perish".
The reason was that findings buried in a file drawer may as well not have been found at all. Publishing the findings makes it possible for other researchers to use, apply, and build upon them. In today's PostGutenberg Galaxy of globalised bits-on-line, we need to generalize and universalise the old Gutenberg mandate in a simple and natural way: Researchers need to maximise access and usage by making their research freely accessible to all users online: Instead of mailing paper reprints of their articles to would-be users who request them, an inexhaustible supply of online eprints needs to be provided by self-archiving all published articles, free for all, in each researcher's Open Access Institutional Repository. Prompted by a proposal by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives to find a catchy French PostGutenberg gloss of "Publish or Perish," a number of candidates immediately come to mind, both in English and in French. So let's have an (informal, unofficial) contest. (No prize, but the winner is likely to become the OA movement's slogan for the PostGutenberg extension of the Publish or Perish mandate.) Please email candidates to me (harnad AT soton dot ac dot uk), not to the American Scientist Open Access Forum. I will then post them collectively (with the names of proponents, or anonymously: please indicate your preference) for a vote. Here are a few to get you started: Multilingual entries are welcome! Alma Swan wrote:ENGLISH: "The challenge is - in all languages - to get the [new] wide meaning and the alliteration!" [fore or aft](There is already a Hungarian gloss "Kiadsz vagy Kimaradsz" (roughly "give out [= publish] or get left out"] by Tamas Somogyi of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and soon, I hope, in Portuguese...) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, November 4. 2006Mandating the Conversion of Subsidised Non-OA Journals to OA?On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Jean-Claude Guédon [J-CG] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: J-CG: "Samples available certainly place the [proportion of journals that are subsidised at] closer to 50% than to 5%."I am afraid I'm still not sure that's accurate (or if so, what it means). If it were really true that half of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals are subsidised, it would be important to know which half -- top or bottom? This is not snobbery: The need for OA is definitely top-down insofar as the user-end need for access is concerned. What users need first and foremost is access to the articles in the best journals. And on the author-end, although all authors yearn for more impact, the findings are that the size of the OA Advantage is greater for the higher quality articles (the "Quality Advantage," QA) in that the proportion of self-archived articles is higher in the higher citation brackets. (This is the effect that some have interpreted -- wrongly, in my opinion, -- as a non-causal Self-Selection effect, or Quality Bias, QB, rather than QA. There is both a noncausal QB and a causal QA component in the OA advantage, and I am betting QA is the bigger component). The majority of articles are not cited at all, and for the worst of them, making them OA does not help! OA allows the best work -- the work destined to be used and built upon -- to be used fully, and to be built upon purely on the basis of its quality and relevance, no longer limited by its affordability (hence accessibility). Even if half of a country's national journals are subsidised, it does not follow that half of that country's research output is published in its national journals, let alone subsidised journals. (And that's without even asking which half.) J-CG: "I am not sure one can compare hypothetical... money that might have been earned... with actual cash outlay [in pitting money actually spent on subsidising journals against the hypothetical monetary value of lost potential research impact]."I'm afraid that here I disagree very fundamentally: Although the serials crisis definitely helped alert us to the OA problem, historically, OA is not in fact about saving money spent on journals -- neither the money spent on subscribing to overpriced journals nor the money spent subsidising journals. It is about ending the needless loss of potential research access and impact. And the estimates of the amount of money lost because of that access denial are the real measures of the cost of not providing OA. Neither journal prices nor journal subsidies are measures of that real, preventable loss to research progress and productivity. J-CG: "Every sample examined so far, outside the US, UK and Australia, shows levels of subsidies that go from significant to almost total. Why play skeptical on this issue? "I am still skeptical because my question about proportion of journals subsidised was not about what proportion of a country's national journals are subsidised, but about what percentage of that country's research output is published in subsidised journals (by discipline -- and, to get an even better idea: by quality-bracket). J-CG: "Side by side, mandating self-archiving and pushing, perhaps even mandating, the conversion of subsidized journals to OA would help reach OA faster."In my opinion, complicating and handicapping the (still not yet adopted) self-archiving mandate proposals with journal-conversion mandates at this time would make it harder, not easier, to get the self-archiving mandates adopted at all -- especially because it would couple mandates with funding commitments. Moreover, until the question of the true proportion of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (by discipline, as well as their standing in the quality hierarchy) is answered, it is not even clear what marginal gains in OA are to be expected from trying to convert subsidised journals to OA. There is nothing wrong with continuing efforts to convert non-OA journals into OA journals, including the subsidised non-OA journals, but I do not think this should be conflated or combined with the efforts to get the OA self-archiving mandates adopted. (And, to repeat, once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned. It reverts to just being a matter of the evolution of journal publishing: No more access/impact problem making it seem urgent -- though I do think that reaching 100% OA through self-archiving mandates is likely to accelerate journal reform too.) J-CG: "Many journals of a "national" reach... tend not to appear in [Ulrich's or ISI]"The question still stands: What percentage of those journals is subsidised? And there is a second question: Would it help or handicap the prospects of adoption for OA self-archiving mandates to try to add subsidised-journal-conversion clauses to them? Mandates are adopted by research institutions and funders and applied to the research output of their employees and fundees. Subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would be addressed to an entirely different constituency. Moreover, OA self-archiving mandates would already cover all the contents of all journals, subsidised or unsubsidised. J-CG: "in the social sciences and the humanities... top-down distinctions are much more difficult to establish."No doubt. But the percentage of research output in subsidised journals should be much less difficult (than that) to establish. J-CG: "how does one determine if a Finnish journal on Finnish literature, published in Finnish, is inferior or superior to a Dutch journal on Dutch literature, written in Dutch?"No need to compare Finnish journals to Dutch journals. Just Finnish research output in subsidised journals to total Finnish research output. (If there is a way to estimate relative quality, that would be helpful too, as would separate tallies by discipline.) J-CG: "If impact factors do not work well as tools to rank journals, how does one go about deciding what is top and what is down?"There are other ways to rank journals, but point taken: Where quality ranking is unavailable, percentage of research published in subsidised journals, by discipline, without a quality estimate, will do. J-CG: "in each discipline... the pecking order is there, but... not always clearly visible [from] SCI or Ulrich's."Then use the pecking order, not SCI, to estimate the relative quality of subsidised and unsubsidised journals. (Ulrich's does not rank.) J-CG: "Stevan's disbelief in the significant reality of subsidized scholarly journals..."It seems reasonable to ask for percentages, by discipline, in order to weigh the significance of this reality. J-CG: "In the debates with opponents to OA... estimates of lost money because of access denial... [have] never gained much traction..."The traction of the access/impact argument is not meant to be with the opponents of OA, but with the beneficiaries of OA (and of access/impact), namely, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders (for the sake of research usage/impact, productivity, progress). The potential mandator of OA self-archiving is the research community itself -- research funders and institutions -- not the publishers who oppose OA. Lost subscription money is a matter of concern to publishers, and shortage of subscription money is a matter of concern to librarians, but the former are unwilling and the latter unable to mandate either OA self-archiving or conversion to OA publishing. Hence the traction for OA needs to be with research institutions and funders. Any potential traction from subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would depend entirely on the percentage of subsidised journals and the willingness of the subsidisers to mandate conversion. (But if access/impact loss had no traction with subsidisers, what would have traction? Why is subsidising non-OA journals bad, if not because of access/impact loss? "Monetising" access/impact loss is merely estimating how bad that access/impact loss is.) J-CG: "These are two different, parallel strategies. The whole of the BOAI document was also very clear on this point."BOAI was about OA, not about OA mandates. We've come a long way since December 2001... It leaves us with one route (green) to 100% OA (self-archiving) that depends only on the research community itself -- the research providers and users, their institutions and funders -- and that can be 100% mandated.SH: "once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned."J-CG: "One could argue symmetrically that once all journals have turned OA, self-archiving is moot insofar as OA is concerned. So where does that leave us?" And another route (gold) that depends on converting journals, hence on journal publishers, most of whom are not so inclined; and if conversion is mandatable at all, it is mandatable only for the subsidised journals, whose percentage and distribution in the quality hierarchy is not known (but unlikely to be very high). In other words, one route (green) that, once mandated, is certain to deliver 100% OA, and another route (gold) that, even it can be mandated for some unknown percentage of journals, is likely to leave us waiting for 100% OA for a long, long time to come. I'd go with the sure road. Many thanks to Kimmo Kuusela for the prompt provision of data on Finland's research output, by discipline! On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Kimmo Kuusela wrote:On the question of whether the proportion of national research output published in subsidised national journals is closer to 5% or 50%, the answer for Finland overall is closer to 5%; but looked at by discipline, for arts, humanities and social sciences it is closer to 50%. (The overall average is presumably 16% because of the lower relative proportion of articles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.) "[T]he relative weight of each discipline in the category of refereed journal articles was as follows:On the basis of these data, if I were a Finnish researcher, institution or funder, I would hope that (1) all Finnish researchers would be required by their funders and institutions to self-archive all their refereed journal articles and that (2) all subsidised Finnish journals would be required by their subsiders to make their online editions open access. I don't think trying to combine (1) and (2) into a single mandate would make much sense, since not only would the requirees -- researchers in (1), publishers in (2) -- not be the same in the two cases, but it is not even clear that the requirers -- research institutions and funders in (1), journal subsidisers in (2) -- would be the same either. Hence it would be best if the two were pursued separately, in parallel. It is also worth noting that (1) would already moot (2), since 100% OA self-archiving would include the OA self-archiving of the subsidised 16% too! But I agree with Jean-Claude Guedon that this is no reason not to pursue the subsidised option (2) in parallel: just don't wrap (2) into (1) (at least not until (1) is adopted!). It would be splendid if we could see data from other countries (along with their discipline data) along the lines Kimmo Kuusela has provided for Finland. (Arthur Sale has already made a stab for Australia, though I'll bet there are a few subsidised journals still lurking in the Aussie outback somewhere, possibly in the arts?) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, November 3. 2006Anthropomorphic Tail Wags Anthropological Dog![]() [Source: Peter Suber's Open Access News] Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum First Things First: OA Self-Archiving, Then Maybe OA PublishingBecause converting journals to OA publishing requires the willingness of the journals to convert, and that willingness is not there (with good reason, as the experiment puts their current revenue streams at risk, and it is not at all clear yet whether the cost-recovery model will scale, and is sustainable at this time). And because OA is for the benefit of research, researchers, and the public that funds them. It is by and for researchers that research is provided. So mandating self-archiving, by and for researchers, can and is being done, and it has already been demonstrated to work successfully. No "policing" necessary, just a formal mandate. Nor is either self-archiving or the mandating of self-archiving cumbersome, time-consuming or expensive.Sale, Arthur (2006) The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles. First Monday 11(10) October. What is cumbersome and time-consuming is waiting and trying to convert journals to OA publishing, one by one, instead of researchers just providing OA by and for themselves, now. And what is expensive is for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders, and their funders funders (the tax-paying public) to keep needlessly losing potential returns on their investment in research, in the form of research uptake, usage, applications, citations, productivity and progress.Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. And it is for the journals, not the researchers, that converting to OA publishing right now is risky and expensive. For if journals ever do eventually convert, then the institutional subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to cover OA publication costs. It's just that journals will not take the risk of converting of their own accord right now, and they certainly cannot be mandated to do it. And as subscriptions are not yet being cancelled, there is no extra cash available to pay OA publishing costs. (A self-archiving mandate for researchers might possibly set the cancellation process into motion, but that is not the objective of OA: The objective of OA is OA, and self-archiving mandates will already have provided OA irrespective of whether they eventually go on to generate cancellation pressure.) CA: "[Some] OA advocates... think that they must either archive all the peer-reviewed journals again in OA (in which case national licenses, implemented worldwide, would surely be cheaper and quicker in converting research articles into a public good) "It is not journals that are self-archived by authors, it is each author's own journal articles, in their own institutional repositories. That is the obvious and optimal way to supplement non-OA access with OA access for those would-be users who cannot afford the non-OA access. It is not a substitute for journal publishing. National licenses are a non-starter: Not only would they be encouraging oligopoly, but they would be spending non-existent money (poached from research funds?) to pay for what is already being paid for via subscriptions today. What is needed now is OA, not a means of funding what is already funded. (If and when OA self-archiving should ever generate unsustainable cancellation pressure, then that will be the time to talk about redirecting funds from the windfall subscription savings to cover publication costs.) CA: "or else clone the traditional journal online but charge the author"The traditional journal is already cloned online (virtually all journals are hybrid today) and the only issue is, once again, conversion to OA publishing: Publishers cannot and need not be cloned or coerced into converting. If research, researchers, their institutions and their funders want and need OA so badly -- and they do -- then they need simply provide it for themselves, by mandating OA self-archiving. CA: "Both solutions are neither creative nor adequate: they are fundamentally incompatible with the technology and economy of the internet. The WWW Galaxy means that dissemination is cheap and certification is expensive - a reversal of the premises of the Gutenberg Galaxy, in which peer review was cheap and printing costly."Peers review for free and the cost of peer review has gone down, not up, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy (sic). But peer review is implemented by autonomous, answerable journals, with answerable track-records for quality. Apart from the Gutenberg-era function of text-generation and access-provision, now obsolescent, journals are merely peer-review service-providers and certifiers. But the demand for the journal's official paper and online editions has not yet subsided, so it is all wrapped in one non-OA product, paid for by subscription/licenses. Unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get journals to convert to OA publishing (at a rate faster than the glacially slow rate at which they are converting now), it is better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe. And unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get researchers to self-archive voluntarily, it is likewise better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe. (Theorizing about the severing of peer review from access-provision certainly won't do it!) CA: "Surely, it is important to think through the consequences for open access to research articles? It seems amazing that OA advocates would go about re-erecting price barriers by ignoring the possibility of providing publishing services that are free to readers and authors -- like ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc."(1) Arxiv, SSRN and RePec (and CogPrints, and Citeseer, and OAIster and Google Scholar) are not publishing services. (2) They are access-provision mechanisms. (3) That is the very same thing what author self-archiving in Institutional Repositories -- and institutional and funder mandates to do so -- amounts to. (4) And all those articles continue to be submitted to and published in peer-reviewed journals. Those are all supplements to -- not substitutes for -- journal publishing. OA publishing is indeed a substitute for non-OA publishing, but not nearly enough publishers are doing it, and there's no way to mandate them to do it. And it would be absurd for the research community to wait until they decide to do it, since the research community can already mandate itself to provide OA today, by supplementing non-OA access with self-archived OA access, immediately. I agree that author charges today are premature. CA: "Indeed, how do we justify author charges of USD 1000, 2000 or even 3000 per article when there is positive proof that open access to research articles may be had for USD 1, 2 or 3 per article?"No one needs to justify them: Those authors who can pay them, and wish to, should go ahead and pay them. Those who cannot, should self-archive (and their institutions and funders should mandate they do it, extending their existing publish-or-perish mandate to publish-and-self-archive, for the good of the research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and the public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is being performed). CA: "The WWW Galaxy heavily favours the severance of the certification of knowledge claims from the dissemination of research papers."Separating peer review provision from access provision in the PostGutenberg Galaxy. So far, so good (though perhaps that should be from exclusive access provision). CA: "Underlying this shift is the emergence of an academic cyberinfrastructure based on open transmission protocols and open-source software that, in turn, favours open content and open access."To the extent that "knowledge claims" refers to new research findings, reported in peer-reviewed journals, what's new is the Internet, and the possibility of supplementing the existing ways of providing access to peer-reviewed research (viz, journal subscriptions) with new ways (viz, making a version freely accessible online). CA: "'Openness' is fundamentally compatible with the knowledge-based economy if market profits are made from nonexclusive rights."This is a bit too general, but if you mean nonexclusive rights to provide access, then that sounds fine (for peer-reviewed research). CA: "The present conflict between scholars and commercial publishers around "open access" is based on a misunderstanding,"The conflict is not particularly with commercial publishers alone, if we are talking about the same conflict, because noncommercial (learned society) publishers have been as vocal in their attempts to oppose or minimize OA as commercial publishers have been. But the real obstacle is not publishers (of either kind) at all: The obstacle is and always has been the inertia of the research community itself. (And the remedy for that inertia will be to extend the publish-or-perish mandate to: publish-and-provide-OA.)Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. CA: "for business models in scientific publishing that are based on the pursuit and enforcement of exclusive intellectual property rights will not persist because technological and economic conditions disfavour them strongly."In "scientific publishing"? Does that include books, and textbooks? For if it's again just journal articles, then we are back to the one and the same special case (and it's not just science, but peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles too.). CA: "The compatibility of open science and the knowledge-based economy may be enhanced if the dissemination of research articles is severed from their certification."It is severed if it is the certified research that is disseminated, but if it is uncertified research, then it is hanging by a skyhook. CA: "As the marginal cost of digital dissemination plummets, there is a case for the public funding of the electronic dissemination of research articles. Public funding could ensure effectively that dissemination is free to authors and readers - while reaping savings of several orders of magnitude as first copy costs in the WWW Galaxy fall to 1/10th or less of the cost in the Gutenberg Galaxy."I couldn't quite follow: Certified (peer-reviewed) articles can be made available free on the web by their authors. Yes. But "first copy costs" are a print-run issue, and hence they are publisher matters, not author matters. CA: "This is, however, not true for the certification of knowledge, especially by peer review, which is likely to become more costly if it is to be of any service to readers and authors."Why more costly? The peers review for free. The journals implement the peer review, and the cost of that is covered out of subscription revenue from selling the paper edition and the publisher's online edition. "Non-exclusivity" merely requires that authors be able to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts accessible free online for those who cannot afford the publisher's version. And if ever the institutional subscription demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition should fall to unsustainable levels, the cost of peer review can be covered out of the very same institutional windfall savings on subscription cancellations. And those costs are likely to be a lot lower than what is being spent on subscriptions now, because the hypothesis is that demand for the paper and publisher's online edition vanishes (and with it the associated costs). CA: "On the assumption that the decoupling of certification and dissemination is desirable and likely, research articles should be disseminated with a nonexclusive copyright license. This does not require any changes in law, but merely a different contractual arrangement whereby certifiers (e.g. publishers, learned societies, institutional repositories and whatever new organisations might emerge) will not be able to claim an exclusive copyright."Indeed. But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, because the demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition have not only not vanished, but they are paying the costs of peer review too. Whereas what is missing is OA! So what is needed now is not decoupling of certification and dissemination, but the self-archiving of the authors' peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints"). Nor should this self-archiving wait for the successful renegotiation of rights by authors. The postprints should immediately be deposited in their authors' Institutional Repositories (IRs) in any event. CA: "Presently publishers collect monopoly rents because authors transfer the copyright of their papers to the publisher. If copyright for the article is no longer transferred exclusively, but licensed non-exclusively, then a competitive and efficient market for knowledge services will emerge."Sixty-nine percent of journals have already given their green light to immediate author self-archiving. For the remaining 31%, the immediate-deposit/delayed-access mandate (plus the semi-automatic email-eprint-request button) is the solution. Copyright retention and nonexclusive licensing are a good idea where the author is willing and able to negotiate them, but they are not a prerequisite for providing free access today, and on no account should either self-archiving or self-archiving mandates wait for or be thought of or portrayed as being any way conditional upon the successful author negotiation of rights. CA: "Economic modelling of the potential impact of the open access dissemination of research results is under way. In a first estimate it is valued at roughly $2bn for the UK, $3bn for Germany, $6bn for Japan and $16bn for the USA -- assuming a social return to R&D at 50% and a 5% increase in access and efficiency (Houghton and Sheehan 2006). This lends salience to the anticipation of the emergence and growth of a new knowledge industry around the certification of knowledge and the provision of services to readers and authors. This new industry will sit atop the open access dissemination of research articles and further contribute to growth and innovation."I would say that the implications of those (and other) estimates of the economic benefits of OA are not implications for the publishing industry but for the research community and the public that funds them: They do not imply that publishing reform is the immediate priority today, but that providing OA is. And this can be done, and will be done, by self-archiving -- and by mandating self-archiving. 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 (April 2003).Stevan Harnad Friday, October 27. 2006Paragraph-Based Quotation in Place of PDF/Page-Based
In the online age, page/line-based quotation is obsolete (for current and forward-going text). Pages are and have always been arbitrary entities. A document's natural landmarks are sections, paragraphs and sentences. That is how quotations and passages should be cited, not by page numbers (though page numbers can be added in parens as a courtesy and curiosity, for continuity, for the time being, while pages -- and PDF -- scroll inexorably toward their natural demise).
It goes without saying that all quotations, citations and references should be hyperlinked. I am sure that XML documents will be tagged for section number, paragraph number and sentence number, so that it will be natural not only to pinpoint the passage to which one wishes to refer but to hyperlink directly to it (especially for quote/commenting). This answers, in passing, one faint concern about the self-archiving of authors' final refereed drafts instead of the published PDF: "How will I specify the location of passages I wish to single out or quote?" The answer is paragraph numbers (or, if you want to be even more precise, section numbers, paragraph numbers and sentence spans). They have the virtue of not only being autonomous and ascertainable from the document itself, but they are independent of arbitrary pagination and PDF. (They will also be useful for digitometric analyses.) (I proposed this rather trivial and obvious online solution in Psycoloquy in the early 90's -- though I'm sure I wasn't the first -- and APA at last began recommending it in 2001 or so.) Harnad, S. (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, October 26. 2006October 2006: OA Self-Archiving Mandate Month
If (with Peter Suber, in today's Open Access News), we count October's full mandates adopted (BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, PPARC), expanded (Wellcome Trust), and proposed (Canada's CIHR, US's HHMI) -- plus Austria's FWF's and UK's CCLRC's "semi-mandates" -- that would make ten in one month (even more than Peter's eight, which missed PPARC and CCLRC!). (There might even be an 11th expanded October mandate from Australia's University of Tasmania, just registered by Arthur Sale in ROARMAP.)
The adoption of two big proposed mandates is still being breathlessly awaited: FRPAA in the US and the European Commission's Recommendation (A1), but there's no need for other institutions, funders or nations to wait to adopt, register and announce their own! Why is Southampton's G-Factor (web impact metric) so high?![]() Why is U. Southampton's rank so remarkably high (second only to Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, and out-ranking the likes of Yale, Columbia and Brown in the US)? Long practising what it has been preaching -- about maximising research impact through Open Access Self-Archiving -- is a likely factor. (This is largely a competitive advantage: Southampton invites other universities to come and level the playing field -- by likewise self-archiving their own research output!) ![]() ![]() How OA is related to OS and FS
OA, OS, FS & CC share commonalities but also have some differences: there are genuine convergences and genuine divergences. Forcing them all into a single procrustean mold does them all a disservice. I agree that they should not do one another harm, and they do not and will not. But it would also do a kind of harm to conflate things that are logically and practically distinct. And it doesn't work, in concrete terms, no matter how much abstract discourse it may generate:
Here is the heart of the matter. Let me try to convey it purely by analogy first: I am personally in favour of open-code pharmacology ("OP"): The formula for potential cures should not be kept secret, or prevented from being used to sell or even give away the medicine. It does not follow from this, however, that if a commercial pharmaceutical company develops a non-OP cure for AIDS today that I will refuse to use it or promote it! Nor will I try to suppress or refuse to cooperate with non-OP research or non-OP researchers, while there are still diseases and patients, needing to be cured now. To take this allegory further: OA is like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): All those doctors have already dedicated themselves to providing their services for free, but it does not follow from that that they should only use, or only collaborate with OP drugs and OP suppliers. They should use whatever they can get, and favor OP whenever they can do so, but not at the expense of the immediate needs of their patients. That's how it is with OA and OS/FS/CC: I am personally 100% in favour of OA, FS, and CC for my own output (though I think I shall write little software in this lifetime!) and for the output of others of a like mind on OA/FS/CC. But I would be against imposing OS/FS/CC (or OP) by fiat, for fear of losing potential creativity and productivity. (This is a point on which otherwise like-minded people can and do disagree.) And the immediate situation for OA is this: 100% OA is within reach now. It needs OAI-compliant OA Institutional Repository (IR) software. I would personally prefer if all OA IR software (indeed all software) were GPL, but I would not mandate it, nor would I refuse the immediate help of non-GPL software in reaching 100% OA, any more than an MSF doctor would refuse the immediate help of a non-OP drug for treating AIDS, now. (Maximizing research impact is not as pressing a problem as saving people from AIDS; so this analogy, like all analogies, has its limitations. But it's not a bad idea to ask ourselves quite explicitly whether we take research so lightly that we agree with the above reasoning for AIDS, but not for research.) Wednesday, October 25. 2006PPARC: 13th Self-Archiving Mandate, 6th from a funder, 7th from UK![]() Saturday, October 21. 2006Arthur Sale: On the Effectiveness and Time-Course of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates![]() ABSTRACT: The behavior of researchers when self–archiving in an institutional repository has not been previously analyzed. This paper uses available information for three repositories analyzing when researchers (as authors) deposit their research articles. The three repositories have variants of a mandatory deposit policy. It is shown that it takes several years for a mandatory policy to be institutionalized and routinized, but that once it has been the deposit of articles takes place in a remarkably short time after publication, or in some cases even before. Authors overwhelmingly deposit well before six months after publication date. The OA mantra of ‘deposit now, set open access when feasible’ is shown to be not only reasonable, but fitting what researchers actually do. ![]() See also: Sale, Arthur (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday 11(4) April.
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