Friday, April 17. 2009Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley![]() Click here to see the video of his CalTech talk. It was very clear and articulate (and often funny, too!). I would add one strategic suggestion on how to make the message and priorities crystal clear to the 10,000 minus 76 institutions and funders worldwide that have not yet mandated OA: Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving First ![]() ![]() The talk was of course addressed to a librarian audience rather than a researcher audience, and libraries are most interested in serials budget and pricing problems. But I think it is still a strategic mistake to focus on journal economics, and on new "compacts" for university funding of OA journal publication fees, instead of stressing the all-important priority: To date, there exist 76 OA self-archiving mandates (40 of them adopted before the Harvard Mandate, 35 since), out of at least 10,000 universities and research funders worldwide.After over 20 long years of experience with this it is crystal clear to me that focusing instead on journal business models simply takes and keeps everyone's eyes off the ball. If one can just manage to get mandates to propagate across universities worldwide, all the rest will take care of itself, quite naturally, of its own accord. The Harvard mandate (now that it has been upgraded to include an immediate-deposit requirement even if the author opts-out of rights-retention, hence OA) is just wonderful: Thus revised, Harvard's is now the optimal mandate model for global adoption. My suggestion to Stuart and to all others who are promoting OA is hence to promote the mandate very directly and exclusively, presenting the evidence of all of its advantages for research access and impact, and to talk about potential future business models for journals only if and when the (inevitable) question gets raised, rather than letting the urgent and immediate and solvable research accessibility problem get subsumed, yet again, by the journal affordability problem. Once mandates become universal, even if the journal affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which universal mandates will have solved, completely! (Once everyone has online access to everything, it matters incomparably less how much journal subscriptions cost, and how many of them a university can afford to subscribe to.) Apart from this basic strategic suggestion about priorities and focus, I have just two small comments, one on "branding" and one on what "reasonable" gold OA publishing charges would/will be: 1. Branding: What authors really care about in choosing a journal -- and what it is that they really mean by "imprimatur" or "brand" -- is the journal's known track-record for article and author quality. It is not a mysterious property of the "brand-name" but an empirical running average that the journal must earn, and sustain. It basically refers to the journal's ongoing quality standards for peer review (what portion and proportion of the overall quality distribution curve they accept for publication). I think Stuart knows all this. It was latent in the very interesting data he presented in the video by way of reply to the familiar "vanity-press/plummeting-standards" argument -- though, again, the talk put the accent on pricing issues, whereas the real point is that authors try to publish in the journals that have the track-record for the highest quality-standards, and quality standards mean selectivity, based on quality alone: any lowering of peer-review standards so as to accept more articles will simply lower the journal's quality, and hence its attractiveness to authors seeking the highest-quality journals. As Stuart notes in the video, there are both subscription and OA journals at all quality levels (and, one might add, there are articles and authors at all quality levels). But the urgent issue now is access -- and especially access to the higher quality journals. (There are are about 4000 OA journals, out of a total of perhaps 25,000 refereed journals in all, and there are OA journals among the top journals too. However, it is also a fact that the proportion of OA journals among the top journals is far lower today than their proportion among journals as a whole. This simply re-emphasizes that what is urgent today is to make all articles in all journals openly accessible -- by mandating self-archiving -- rather than to find ways of paying for publication in OA journals.) 2. "Reasonable" gold OA publishing charges: Stuart also speaks in the video about what would be "reasonable" charges for publishing in OA journals. But surely this depends on what the true costs will turn out to be: Today, subscription journals publish both online and print editions and (as Stuart notes) they charge whatever they can get. But now let us focus just on what universal self-archiving mandates will bring, entirely independent of journal price: With OA self-archiving mandated universally, all articles will be accessible to all users online for free. This, in and of itself, solves the research access/impact problem, completely, and with certainty. Its other side-effects are only a matter for speculation, but here are the possibilities: 2a. Nothing else changes: Universities continue to subscribe to the print and/or online edition of whatever journals they can afford, and journal costs (and prices, and price increases) continue as before, unchanged.So what? The access problem is completely solved. Everyone has online access to everything they need. So university subscriptions are now decided on the basis of other considerations (demand for the print edition, demand for the luxury PDF edition, preservation, prestige, habit, charity, superstition). These are all worthy supply/demand issues, but there would certainly be nothing left that could be described with the urgency of the "serials crisis," because that crisis derived all of its urgency from the need to provide access, and the universal OA mandates will already have taken care of that need, completely. 2b. More likely, the availability of the authors' OA versions will eventually reduce the demand for the publisher's print and online versions, and subscription cancellations will grow. The publishers' first response will probably be to try to raise prices, but if that just further increases cancellations, supply/demand implies that they will instead have to try to cut costs by doing away with inessential products and services. The ways are many. Cancel the online edition: If print subscriptions still cover costs sustainably, fine, it stops there. If cancellations continue to grow, then journals will have to cancel the print edition too. But then there is nothing left to sell via subscription. So journals must then convert to gold OA publishing, which means charging for their only remaining service: managing peer review.It is that eventual price -- the price for managing peer review alone -- that is really at issue here. That, and that alone, is the "reasonable" (indeed essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing, once all access-provision and archiving has been offloaded onto the distributed network of (mandated) institutional repositories. Not a single gold OA publisher today is operating on -- or even knows -- that irreducible, essential cost, because none of them have downsized yet to doing peer-review alone (because they have not yet had to do so, out of necessity, because universal Green OA is not yet there, exerting the pressure to do so, while at the same time providing the distributed infrastructure on which to offload all access-provision and archiving, and their associated costs). For this reason, it does not make sense to speak of (let alone subsidize) this "reasonable" price today, when the necessary precondition for downsizing to it (namely, universal OA mandates) has not yet been provided: In other words, today's asking-prices are necessarily inflated, and will remain so, until universal OA itself forces the requisite downsizing. So this, it seems to me, is yet another reason for not putting the accent on a pre-emptive "compact" to cover "reasonable" gold OA publication fees today, in the absence of universal OA mandates. I hasten to add that Harvard, having already mandated OA, is of course entitled and welcome to do whatever it likes with its spare cash! But this should be separated completely from the really urgent message, which still needs to be communicated to the remaining 10,000 not-yet-mandating universities of the world, which is first to mandate OA, as Harvard did, before making plans on how to spend their spare cash. Otherwise they are just subsidizing an arbitrary gold OA publishing fee, for a minority of the journals (and an even smaller minority of the top journals) without first doing their essential part toward solving the research access problem. (Lest it's not self-evident, however, let me reaffirm that all this carping and unsolicited advice on my part in no way diminishes my great admiration and appreciation for the enormous contribution Stuart Shieber has made, and continues to make, in having gotten a mandate adopted at Harvard, and now promoting mandate adoption globally!) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, April 9. 2009Russia's 2nd & 3rd Green OA Mandate, Planet's 75th & 76th
Two more Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates from the Russian Academy of Sciences (KAM and VSSC), as reported in eifl.net by Iryna Kuchma. (The other two eIFL mandates -- CEMI and TSTU (Ukraine) -- had already been announced.)
Pozdravlenia!
Wednesday, April 8. 2009World's 73rd and 74th OA Mandates: Ukraine and Belgium![]() ![]() (The Académie 'Louvain' is actually three universities, so this might be three mandates rather than one, and although Fabrizio Tinti alerted Peter Suber to the mandate on March 31 2009, the mandate was apparently adopted a year earlier (July 7, 2008).) Tuesday, March 31. 2009The "Great Conversation" Begins At Home: U. Michigan's Open Access Week![]() Molly Kleinman has blogged Lessons from Open Access Week Some Responses: Question: Surely there was some discussion of Michigan congressman John Conyer's Bill HR 801 attempting to overturn the NIH OA mandate? Comment 1: Whether one accepts the definition of the two kinds of Open Access ("gratis" and "libre") or one prefers to deny free access the honorific of "open," the fact is that we do not even have free online access (whatever we choose to call it), and that asking nonproviding authors to do more, and asking institutions and funders to mandate that they do more is even more difficult than just getting them to provide the free online access, which only 72 institutions and funders -- out of perhaps 10,000 worldwide -- are so far doing. (Without even that, it's all just a name-game.) (Whether there is really any burning need for "re-use rights" for the verbatim texts of peer-reviewed research journal articles (as opposed to research data, or Disney cartoons) is perhaps also worth giving some more thought.) Comment 2: For how students can help OA, see: "The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access." Comment 3: Before getting too caught up in the theory of the "Great Conversation," it might be a good idea to make sure free access (at the very least) is provided to its target content -- by mandating OA (for example, at University of Michigan!) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, March 28. 2009On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA, Again![]() Following hard on the heels of University of California's Gilded New Deal with Springer -- UC subscribes to the Springer fleet of journals for an undisclosed fee, but, as part of the Deal, UC authors get to publish their articles as Gold OA for free in those same Springer journals -- now Universities UK (UUK) and the Research Information Network (RIN) are jointly dispensing advice on the payment of Gold OA fees (which is fine) but without first giving the most important piece of advice: A university should on no account spend a single penny on Gold OA fees until and unless it has first adopted a Green OA mandate to deposit all of its own refereed journal article output in its own institutional repository. ![]() ![]() (Peter Suber is expressing the very same hope, but in his characteristically gentler and less curmudgeonly way.) On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 4:30 AM, David Prosser, Director of SPARC-Europe, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:Stevan HarnadAs all of the UK research councils, as well as some of the major UK funding charities, have green mandates in place I don’t see how this can possibly be described as ‘pre-emptive gold fever’.I'm so glad you said that, David! Here is the very specific reply that should fully elucidate this question, which cuts to the very heart of what is at issue: American Scientist Open Access Forum Spain's 3rd and 4th Green OA Mandates, Planet's 71st and 72nd![]() ¡Viva España! Friday, March 27. 2009Richard Poynder Interviews Helene Bosc: OA's French Connection![]() For the full Poynder/Bosc interview, click here. Peter Suber, writes: "This is another richly textured interview, unearthing details about the early history of OA, OA in France, OA in Europe, and the career of one of Europe's first and most influential OA activists.... It's difficult to excerpt, but here's a little to whet your appetite..."Here are some excerpts from Peter's excerpts: Former INRA librarian, [convenor for the EuroScience Working Group on Science Publishing,] and passionate champion of Open Access (OA) in France, Hélène Bosc began advocating for OA in 1995, before the term even existed... Thursday, March 19. 2009MIT Adopts World's 70th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate
![]() Full list of institutions Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (US* institutional-mandate) http://web.mit.edu/ Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives [growth data] http://dspace.mit.edu/ Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy Passed by Unanimous of the Faculty, March 18, 2009 The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason. To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost's Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty. The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty. The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible. Monday, March 16. 2009Harvard's 3rd Green OA Mandate, Planet's 69th: John F. Kennedy School of Government![]() And yet another well-deserved round of congratulations to Stuart Shieber, Faculty Director of the OSC and the architect of this remarkable (and seemingly unending) series of Green OA mandates from Harvard! (Harvard Medical School looks like it will be next!) One can only echo what is stated at the end of the press release, which is that although this is the world's 69th Green OA self-archiving mandate, "none are... as far-reaching as the one put forth at Harvard"! (Nor, I might add, is there now any better model for emulation worldwide.) -- S.H.
Friday, March 13. 2009Planet's 1st Library Faculty Green OA Mandate: 7th US Mandate, 68th Worldwide![]() The OSU mandate is even the optimal ID/OA (DDR) mandate, as Peter notes below. To the Library Faculty at Oregon State University, who have now put their own work where their heart (and hard work) is, kudos! -- SH Comment [from Peter Suber]. Kudos to the OSU Library Faculty Association (LFA) for this strong policy. I applaud the mandatory language, the dual deposit-release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access), and the clarity in making waivers apply only to OA, not to deposits. I like the way the LFA will help faculty deposit their articles as well as obtain better terms from publishers. You can classify this as a "faculty vote" policy, as opposed to an administrative policy, and as a departmental rather than university-wide policy. Now that the library faculty have taken the lead, it's time for other departments and divisions of OSU, already operating under a policy to encourage self-archiving, to strengthen their policy as well. Posted in OA News by Peter Suber at 3/13/2009 05:13:00 PM
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