Saturday, July 19. 2008The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH Is. PART II.[see also PART I and PART 0]SUMMARY: The concept underlying the OAI metadata harvesting protocol is that local, distributed, content-provider sites each provide their own content and global service-provider sites harvest that content and provide global services over it, such as indexing, search, and other added values. (This is not a symmetric process. It does not make sense to think of the individual content-providers as "harvesting" their own content (back) from global service-providers.) The question is accordingly whether OA deposit mandates should be (1) convergent, with both institutional and funder mandates requiring deposit in the author's own OA Institutional Repository (IR), for harvesting by global overlay OA services and collections (such as PubMed Central, PMC) or (2) divergent, requiring authors to deposit all over the map, locally or distally, possibly multiple times, depending on field and funding. It seems obvious that coordinated, convergent IR deposit mandates from both institutions and funders will bring universal OA far more surely and swiftly than needless and counterproductive divergence. In the interests of a swift, seamless, systematic, global transition to universal OA, NIH should accordingly make one tiny change (entailing no loss at all in content or functionality) in its otherwise invaluable, historic, and much-imitated mandate: NIH should mandate IR deposit and harvest to PMC from there. The spirit of the Congressional directive that publicly funded research should be made publicly accessible online, free for all, is fully met once everyone, webwide, can click on the link to an item whose metadata they have found in PMC, and the article instantly appears, just as if they had retrieved it via Google, regardless of whether the item's URL happens to be in an IR or in PMC itself. A possible reason the NIH mandate took the divergent form it did may have been a conflation of access archiving with preservation archiving: But the version that NIH has (rightly) stipulated for OA deposit (each "investigator's... electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication") is not even the draft that is in the real need of preservation; it is just a supplementary copy, provided for access purposes: The definitive version, the one that really stands in need of preservation, is not this author-copy but the publisher's official proprietary version of record. For preservation, the definitive document needs to be deposited in an archival depository (preferably several, for safe-keeping, updating and migration as technology evolves), not an OA collection like PMC. But that essential archival deposit/preservation function has absolutely nothing to do with either the author or with OA. Peter Suber: "At the moment, I see two conflicting APA statements and no evidence that either statement [2002 or 2008] took the other into account. So I'm still waiting for a definitive clarification from the APA. But as I say, if the APA reaffirms the 2002 policy to allow no-fee, no-embargo self-archiving to IRs, then I will applaud it."That will shortly sort itself out. It seems obvious to me that the only coherent resolution is that APA's 2002 Green OA policy takes precedence over the contradictory passages in APA's 2008 PMC addendum. It would be arbitrary bordering on dementia to declare that: I predict that the proposed APA policy will first be:"Our policy is that any APA author may self-archive their own refereed final draft in their own IR for free as long they are not mandated to do so by NIH; but if they are mandated to do so by NIH, then they must pay us $2500 to do it!" And then they will back down from the surcharge altogether. (I do have a bit of a track-record for correctly second-guessing APA policy!)"All we meant was that, as before, any APA author may self-archive their own refereed final draft in their own IR for free, but depositing APA's proprietary published version in PMC will cost $2500." Peter Suber: "However, if the APA retains the "deposit fee" for NIH-funded authors, then I will continue to criticize it. The APA will still be charging for green OA, which is utterly unnecessary."Do continue to criticize it, Peter, but please make sure the criticism is on target: As long as APA authors are free to provide green OA by depositing in their own IRs, APA can definitely not be said to be "charging for green OA" if APA charges authors for depositing in PMC (any more than I can be said to be charging for water if I say "water is free but bring your own container" and you insist on water in a container). The $2500 fee is indeed absurd, but that absurdity (and a many other counterproductive consquences) would be completely remedied by NIH's simply dropping its supererogatory requirement to deposit directly in PMC, and harvesting the metadata from the IRs instead. A central collection like PMC is just that: a collection. It is sufficient for such collections to harvest the metadata (as Google does) and to link to the full-text where it is actually deposited, i.e., the IR of the institution it came from. Peter Suber: "[APA] will still fail to deliver immediate OA, or OA to the published edition, which fee-based [Gold or optional-Gold] OA journals always deliver in exchange for their fees."You mean the publisher's proprietary version? But even the NIH mandate is only requiring deposit of the author's final refereed draft, not the publisher's proprietary version: I also think you may be equating the $2500 fee with a (hybrid) optional-Gold OA fee (from a non-Green publisher such as ACS). But it is not that. APA's is a PMC deposit fee, from a Green publisher. (There is no relevant category for a requirement to deposit in a 3rd-party CR, because it is arbitrary to have to do so, and has nothing to do with OA itself, which APA authors can already provide via Green OA in their own IRs.)The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act,2008). The law states: Moreover, to heap absurdity upon absurdity, we both know, Peter, that (1) not only does it not matter one bit, for OA accessibility to one and all, webwide, whether a document's locus is an IR or a CR, but (2) if and when all of OA's target content is made OA, one way or the other, then the distinction between 1st-party (author-institution), 2nd-party (publisher) and 3rd party (PMC, UKPMC, EuroPMC, Google, or any other CR) archiving becomes irrelevant, the game is over, universal OA has at last arrived, and all these trivial locus and party details as well as this absurd talk of deposit surcharges becomes moot. The problem is with first reaching that universal OA, which is already long, long overdue (after many, many false starts, including a prior one by NIH itself, 3 years ago, which elicited a compliance rate below 4%, less than a third of the global average for spontaneous -- i.e., unmandated -- self-archiving.) And coordinated, convergent IR deposit mandates -- funder mandates complementing institutional mandates -- will get us there far more surely and swiftly than the needless and counterproductive divergence we have imposed on ourselves by not thinking the PMC locus stipulation through in advance (or fixing it as it becomes more and more apparent that it creates unanticipated and unnecessary problems). Peter Suber: "If the APA reaffirms its 2002 green policy, then NIH-funded authors could bypass the deposit fee when self-archiving to their IRs. But they couldn't bypass the fee when self-archiving to PMC, and they are bound by the NIH policy to deposit in PMC (or have their journal do so for them)."Correct, but isn't this reasoning a bit circular, if not fatalistic? Which one is cluttering the path to universal OA (now that we have the invaluable NIH mandate)? APA, which blesses OA self-archiving in the author's own OA IR, for free, or NIH, which (unnecessarily) insists on mandating more than "merely" OA? Would it not be better for NIH to think it through, and then -- patiently, in the interests of a swift, seamless, systematic, global progression to universal OA -- make in its otherwise invaluable, historic, and much-imitated mandate the one tiny change that (with no loss at all in content or functionality) will create the optimal conditions for a full-scale transition to universal OA, rather than only (the NIH/PMC) part of it? Let NIH mandate IR deposit and harvest from there. Peter Suber: "Stevan hopes that policies like the APA's will pressure the NIH to drop this requirement and allow deposits in an IR to suffice. But even if that ought to happen, it won't happen soon and very likely won't happen at all. One reason is simply that the requirement to deposit in PMC was mandated by Congress. The NIH undoubtedly supports the Congressional directive, but it's not an in-house policy decision that the agency is free to reverse at will."Deposits in IRs can be harvested into PMC. The issue here is merely the locus of the point of direct deposit. Does anyone imagine that the spirit of the Congressional directive -- to the effect that publicly funded research should be made publicly accessible online, free for all -- would not be fully met once everyone, webwide, can click on the link to an item whose metadata they have retrieved from PMC, and the article instantly appears, just as if they had retrieved it via Google, but the item's URL happens to be in an IR rather than in PMC! Or are OA self-archiving issues being conflated with preservation archiving issues here (yet again, as so often happens, and inevitably at OA's expense)? If so, the preservation of what: "final, peer-reviewed manuscripts"?
Peter Suber: "But should Congress and the NIH prefer PMCs to IRs? Maybe, maybe not. I see good arguments on both sides."For OA functionality, the locus of deposit makes zero difference. For preservation, OA is beside the point and unnecessary. But for OA content-provision itself -- and not just for NIH-funded content, but for all of OA's target content, across all disciplines, institutions and nations -- locus of deposit matters enormously. There's no functionality without content. And I know of no good argument at all in favor of institution-external direct deposit, insofar as OA content-provision is concerned; only a lot of good arguments against it. Peter Suber: "But they are irrelevant here because (1) the APA deposit fee would still [be] unnecessary"Why is it just APA's absurd $2500 fee for PMC deposit that is singled out as being unnecessary (given that the APA is Green on free OA IR deposit): Is NIH's gratuitous stipulation of PMC deposit not likewise unnecessary (for OA)? (This question is all the more germane given that the global transition to universal OA stands to benefit a lot more from NIH's dropping its gratuitous (and alas much imitated) deposit-locus stipulation than from APA's dropping its absurd bid for a PMC deposit fee.) Peter Suber: "(2) there's no evidence that the APA was motivated, as Stevan is, to protest the preference for PMC --as opposed to (say) mandatory OA."But I never said the APA was motivated to protest the preference for PMC! That really would be absurd. I am certain that APA (and every other non-OA publisher) is none too thrilled about either author self-archiving or mandatory OA, anywhere, in any form! But APA nevertheless did the responsible thing, and bit the bullet on formally endorsing institutional self-archiving. There's no (OA) reason they should have to bite it on institution-external, 3rd-party archiving in PMC too (even though the distinction will eventually be mooted by universal OA) -- though the response of the OA community, if directed, myopically, at APA alone, and not NIH, will no doubt see to it that they will. Frankly, I think APA just saw an opportunity to try to make a buck, and maybe also to put the brakes on an overall process that they saw as threatening to their current revenue streams. Can't blame them for thinking that; it may turn out to be true. But as long as they're Green, they're "gold," as far as OA is concerned (though, to avoid conflicting terminology, let us just say they are "on the side of the angels"). Peter Suber: "(For the record, my position is close to Stevan's: institutional and disciplinary repositories should harvest from one another; that would greatly lower the stakes in the question where an OA mandate should require initial deposit; if we got that far, I'd be happy to see a policy require deposit in IRs.)"I'm afraid I can't quite follow Peter's reasoning here: The issue is whether deposit mandates should be convergent -- requiring all authors to deposit in their own OA IRs, for harvesting by global overlay OA services and collections therefrom -- or divergent, requiring authors to deposit all over the map, possibly multiply, depending on field and funding, possibly necessitating "reverse-harvesting," with each institution's software having to trawl the web, looking to retrieve its own institutional output, alas deposited institution-externally. (That last is not really "harvesting" at all; rather, it involves a functional misunderstanding of the very concept of harvesting: The OAI concept is that there are local content-providers and global service-providers. Content-providers are local and distributed, each providing its own content -- in this case, institutional IRs. Then there are service-providers, who harvest that content [or just the content's metadata and URL] from the distributed, interoperable content-providers, and provide global services on it, such as indexing, search, and other added values. This is not a symmetric process. It does not make sense to think of the content-providers as "harvesting" their own content (back) from the service-providers! Another way to put this is that -- although it was not evident at the time -- OAI-interoperability really meant the end of the need for "central repositories" (CRs) for direct deposit. Now there would just be central collections (services), harvested from distributed local content-providers. No need to deposit distally. And certainly no sense in depositing distally only to "harvest" it back home again! Institutional content-provision begins and ends with the institution's own local IR; the rest is just global, webwide harvesting and service-provision.) Peter Suber: "Stevan does call the deposit fee absurd. So we agree on that as well. But he adds that the NIH preference for PMC over IRs "reduced us to this absurdity". I'm afraid that's absurd too. If the NIH preference for PMC somehow compelled publishers to respond with deposit fees, then we'd see many of them. But in fact we see almost none."(1) Of course APA's $2500 deposit fee is absurd. But -- given that APA is Green on OA, and given the many reasons why convergent IR deposit, mandated by institutions as well as funders, not only makes more sense but is far more likely to scale up, coherently and systematically, to universal OA across disciplines, institutions and nations than divergent willy-nilly deposit of institutional content here, there and everywhere -- I welcome this absurd outcome (the $2500 PMC deposit fee) and hope the reductio ad absurdum it reveals helps pinpoint (and fix) the real source of the absurdity, which is not APA's wistful surcharge, but NIH's needless insistence on direct deposit institution-externally in PMC. (2) I have no idea whether the OA community's hew and cry about the $2500 APA surcharge for PMC deposit will be targeted exclusively at APA (and any other publishers that get the same bright idea), forcing them to withdraw it, while leaving the dysfunctional NIH constraint on locus of deposit in place. (3) I hope, instead, that the OA community will have the insight to target NIH's constraint on deposit locus as well, so as to persuade NIH to optimize its widely-imitated policy in the interests of its broader implications for the prospects of global OA -- one small step for NIH but a giant leap for mankind -- by fixing the one small bug in an otherwise brilliant policy. Peter Suber: "Even if the NIH preference for PMC were a choice the agency could reverse at will, the APA deposit fee is another choice, not necessitated by the NIH policy and not justified by it."Where there's a will, there's a way, and here it's an extremely simple way, a mere implementational detail: Instead of depositing directly in PMC, authors deposit in their IRs and send PMC the URL. If NIH adopted that, the APA's PMC deposit surcharge bid would instantly become moot. If the furor evoked by the APA $2500 surcharge proved to be the factor that managed to inspire NIH to take the rational step that rational argument alone has so far been powerless to inspire, then that will be a second (unintentional) green feather in APA's cap, and another of the ironies and absurdities of our long, somnambulistic trek toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for scientific and scholarly research. A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, July 17. 2008National Research Council (Canada): 49th Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate
With today's Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate announcement from Canada's National Research Council, that makes 49 mandates adopted worldwide, and 12 more proposed. See ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies). (Thanks to Peter Suber and Richard Ackerman for the notice.)
Let us hope that NRC will sensibly require that authors deposit directly in their own Institutional Repositories, from which NRC's planned central repository, NPArC, can then harvest the deposit, rather than needlessly (and counterproductively) requiring -- as NIH currently does -- direct institution-external deposit. The optimal mandate is of course ID/OA (immediate deposit/optional access) rather than delayed or optional deposit. A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH Is. PART I.
In Open Access News, my comrade-at-arms, Peter Suber commented on my essay "In Defense of the American Psychological Association's Green OA Policy," which defended the APA from criticism for levying a $2500 fee on authors for compliance with the NIH mandate to deposit in PubMed Central (PMC). I had said the problem was with NIH's stipulation that the deposit had to be in PMC rather than in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR): Though initially opposed in 1996, APA has since 2002 been solidly among the majority of publishers that are Green on OA self-archiving, meaning they explicitly endorse deposit in the author's own institutional IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no fee (exactly as all publishers ought to be doing). Moreover, APA has now re-confirmed (see below) that it has no intention of back-sliding on that 6-year-old green policy (as Nature Publishing Group did 3 years ago, immediately upon the impending announcement of the NIH policy).
Peter Suber: "Stevan is mixing up unrelated issues. The APA "deposit fee" had nothing to do with the distinction between disciplinary repositories (like PMC) and institutional repositories. If the NIH mandated deposit in IRs instead of PMC, then the APA would demand a $2,500 fee for deposit in IRs, and the fee would be equally noxious and indefensible. Even if the NIH's preference for PMC were as foolish as Stevan says it is (a criticism I do not share), it would not justify the APA fee."Peter seems to be replying with a hypothetical conditional, regarding what the APA would have done. But the APA has already been formally endorsing immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR for six years now. Moreover (see below), the publisher, Gary Vandenbos, has confirmed that APA has not changed that policy, nor are there plans to change it. What needs to be changed is just one small implementational detail of NIH's Public Access Policy: the requirement to deposit directly in PMC. The locus of deposit should be the author's own IR. PMC can harvest the metadata and link to the full-text in the IR. This will cost NIH authors nothing. APA itself has no plans to repeal its commendable 6-year-old Green OA self-archiving policy. (It would certainly have put APA in a very bad light if, having given its authors the green light to self-archive in their own IRs, APA then decided to slap a $2500 traffic ticket on them for going ahead and doing so!) Date: 15 Jul 2008 23:28:40 -0400Date: 16 Jul 2008 2:05:49 AM EDT (CA), Peter Suber: "Stevan points to a 2002 APA policy statement, still online, which allows self-archiving in IRs. But he doesn't point out that the APA's newer policy statement describing the "deposit fee" effectively negates the older green policy, at least for NIH-funded authors. The new policy prohibits NIH-funded authors from depositing their postprints in any OA repository, disciplinary or institutional."The 2002 APA policy statement is not only still online and still in effect, but we have the publisher's word that there is to be no change in that policy. The proposed fee only pertains to deposit in PMC. APA Policy on Posting Articles on the Internet ...Update effective June 1, 2002...Authors of articles published in APA journals may post a copy of the final manuscript... on their Web site or their employer's server after it is accepted for publication... APA does not permit archiving with any other non-APA repositories... Peter Suber: "The title of Stevan's post suggests that he's defending the APA's 2002 self-archiving policy. I join him in that. But the body of his post attempts to defend the 2008 deposit fee as well: "Although it looks bad on the face of it...things are not always as they seem." Not always, but this time."Not this time, and never for a publisher that is Green on OA. Once a publisher is Green on OA, there is nothing more that can or should be demanded of them, by the research community. The ball is now in the research community's court. It is up to research institutions and research funders to design sensible policies that will ensure that the researchers they employ and fund actually provide Green OA for their joint research output. Not all research is funded (and certainly not all by NIH), but (virtually) all researchers have institutions. And all institutions are just a piece of free software, some server-space, and a few hours of sysad set-up and maintenance time away from having an IR, if they do not already have one. The sensible OA mandate, from both institutions and funders (like NIH) is to require deposit in the researcher's own IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication. If there is an embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access during the embargo. The IR's "email eprint request" button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA for all user needs during any embargo. If funders or others want to create institution-external, central collections of already-OA content, based on subject matter, funding source, nationality, or whatever, then they can harvest the metadata and link to the full-text in the IR in which it was deposited. But there is certainly no reason to insist that it be deposited directly in their collections. Google, for example, quietly harvests everything: no need to deposit things directly in Google or Google Scholar. And no charge. Peter Suber: "Both arguments are moot for a while, now that the APA has taken down the new policy statement for "re-examination". (See the 7/16/08 update to my blog post on the policy.)"I don't doubt that well-meaning OA supporters who have not thought it through are now railing at APA instead of resolutely requesting that NIH make the minor modification in its otherwise admirable, timely, and welcome policy that would put an end to this nonsense and let researchers get on with the urgent task of providing OA by depositing their own research in their own OA IRs, free for all, webwide. Epilogue and Homily: The influence of the pro-OA lobby has become gratifyingly strong and swift: A new policy is in the works. In an e-mail from Alan Kazdin, APA president:but it would be useful if the heads of OA advocates worldwide were focused, commensurately strongly, on using their growing influence to promote what will actually generate universal OA, swiftly and surely, rather than dissipating it on the short-sighted distractions -- such as Gold Fever, Preservation Panic, Copyright Compulsion, and, here, Supererogatory Centralism -- which are only delaying rather than facilitating OA: (For the record, and the too literal-minded: Of course a $2500 fee for depositing in PMS is absurd, but what reduced us to this absurdity was needlessly mandating direct deposit in PMS in the first place. Time to remedy the absurdity and let researchers' fingers do the walking so we can all reach 100% OA at long last.) A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, July 15. 2008In Defense of the American Psychological Association's Green OA PolicyAlthough it looks bad on the face of it -- the American Psychological Association (APA) charging the author's institution and/or research grant $2500, not even for Gold OA publishing, but just for depositing the author's refereed final draft in PubMed Central (PMC) on the author's behalf ("proxy self-archiving"), in order to fulfill the NIH mandate -- things are not always as they seem. There is no culprit in this nonsense, but if I had to pinpoint its provenance, it would be the foolish form in which the NIH -- despite relentlessly repeated advice and reasons to the contrary -- insisted on drafting its policy: To cut to the quick, there is no earthly reason NIH should insist on direct deposit in PMC. The mandate should be (and should all along have been) to deposit in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR). PMC can then harvest the metadata and link to the IR-deposited full-text itself from there. Unlike the American Chemical Society journals (which have unswervingly opposed Green OA), the American Psychological Association journals (after initial opposition, and eventually the majority of other journals) -- for reasons they would have found it very hard to justify flouting -- have long given their green light to immediate deposit (no delay, no embargo, and of course no fee) in the author's own IR:
To repeat, a publisher that is Green on immediate OA self-archiving in the author's own IR is squarely on the side of the angels. (If that publisher seeks to profit from NIH's gratuitous insistence on institution-external deposit, by treating PMC as a 3rd-party free-loader or rival publisher, hence legally requiring permission or payment to re-publish, I would say that NIH drew that upon itself. As noted many times, that technicality does not work with an author's own institution.) And it is remediable: Simply revise the NIH mandate to require institutional IR deposit of the accepted final draft, immediately upon acceptance (with a cap on the permissible embargo length, if any). That is the sensible policy -- and nature will take care of the rest, with universal OA just around the corner. A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, July 8. 2008Nature's Offer To "Let Us Archive It For You": Caveat Emptor
NOTE: Since this posting, Peter Suber has informed me [and since then announced] that Nature had informed him that they were willing to do proxy deposit not just in Central Repositories like PubMed Central, but in Institutional Repositories too, immediately upon acceptance (if it can be done in batch -- and it can: see this link).
If that is the case, then I withdraw all but one of my criticisms below, with apologies for having impugned Nature's motives. However, the one remaining criticism stands: Nature would do open access a lot more good by dropping its access embargo than by offering to save Nature authors a few minutes worth of keystrokes. There is still great and widespread confusion among still mostly passive authors about WHO should deposit WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW. Publishers doing proxy deposits in diverse repositories at diverse times is not conducive to grasping the home truth that the most natural, reliable and direct way for all authors to self-archive all their articles, simply, systematically, and convergently, is to deposit their own articles in their own institutional repositories, immediately upon acceptance for publication (and leave any further collecting to automatic batch harvesting). We are talking about a few keystrokes. Any arbitrary scrambling or complexification of this simple home truth is simply compounding confusion and inaction. (Before you ask: There are also provisional DEPOTs for authors whose institution does not yet have its own repository.) Nature has circulated the following Press Release: NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP TO ARCHIVE ON BEHALF OF AUTHORSNo, as of 2003, Nature had given its green light to immediate author self-archiving of the author's final refereed draft, but in January 2005 Nature abruptly withdrew its green light and instead imposed a 6-month embargo on self-archiving in anticipation of NIH's announcement in February 2005 that it would allow an embargo of 6-12 months on its OA self-archiving recommendation. The NIH recommendation became a mandate 3 years later, but Nature continues to impose a 6-month embargo. I would not call that "encouraging self-archiving." I would call that Nature trying to make the best of what it considers a bad but now inescapable bargain. Later in 2008, NPG will begin depositing authors' accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), meeting the requirements for authors funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and a number of other major funders in the US, the UK and Canada who mandate deposition in either PMC or UKPMC. NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in future.In other words, now that there is no choice but to comply with these biomedical funder mandates (all clones of one another, and all pertaining only to biomedical research, all stipulating PubMed Central as the direct locus of the deposit and all allowing an access embargo of 6-12 months), Nature is trying to retain maximal control over the remaining degrees of freedom, by "relieving" authors of the burden of doing the deposit (i.e., taking deposit out of the author's hands), by ensuring that the deposit does not occur before the embargo occurs, and by ensuring that the locus of deposit is PubMed Central rather than the author's Institutional Repository (IR) [this last plaint is mooted if Nature is indeed willing and able to do immediate proxy deposits in authors' IRs too]. The result of this co-opting of self-archiving is: In other words, while appearing to be doing OA a service, this Nature policy is actually doing Nature a service and only giving OA the minimal due that is already inherent in the NIH and kindred mandates.(1) The self-archiving practice is made less likely to generalize beyond non-NIH/biomedical research. "We are announcing our intention early in the process to solicit feedback from the community and to reassure authors that we will be providing this service," said Steven Inchcoombe, Managing Director of NPG. "We invite authors, funding bodies, institutions, archives and repositories to work with us as we move forward."Translation: "We are offering to take over the burden of doing the few extra keystrokes that self-archiving mandates entail in exchange for retaining control over self-archiving and its likelihood of scaling up to universality and immediacy across disciplines and institutions. Let's now hope that the appetite for OA stops there: embargoed, journal-mediated central access to NIH-funded biomedical research in PubMed Central and the like..." As a researcher, my response would be: "Thank you, but I'll still go ahead and do the keystrokes myself, depositing my own final refereed draft in my own institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication. That way I can provide immediate OA to those of my deposits that are published in the 63% of journals that, unlike Nature, are already fully green. And for the rest, my IR's Request a Copy Button will help me provide almost-instant, almost-OA to fulfill the immediate-usage needs of researchers webwide who cannot afford access to (say) Nature's paid version and cannot afford to wait until Nature's embargo expires. Then, at the end of the Nature embargo, my deposits can also be exported to PubMed Central or harvested by any other central collections that may also want to host them -- but they will already be OA in my IR in any case.""Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally" Initially, the service will be open to authors publishing original research articles in Nature, the Nature research titles and the clinical research section of Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine. NPG will then extend the service to society and academic journals in its portfolio that wish to participate.Let's hope that authors and their institutions will be wise enough not to once again leave their research output entirely in the hands of publishers. In the online age, journal publishers render their essential service in managing peer review and certifying its outcome with their journal-name and its track-record, but there is no longer any earthly reason why they should continue to retain exclusive control over the access-provision process, particularly in order to embargo it! For eligible authors who opt-in during the submission process, NPG will deposit the accepted version of the author's manuscript on acceptance, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. There will be no charge to authors or funders for the service.Deposit is only a few keystrokes, and the only place it makes sense to deposit upon acceptance is the author's own institutional repository, which hosts all the institution's research output (not just biomedical research funded by NIH and held and embargoed by Nature) and makes it possible for the author to provide immediate almost-OA during any embargo period (thanks to the Button). "NPG is committed to serving as a partner to the scientific and medical communities," continued Steven Inchcoombe. "We believe this is a valuable service to authors, reducing their workload and making it simple and free to comply with mandates from their institution or funder. We recognise that publishing in an NPG title can be a career high-point for researchers, and want to ensure that our authors enjoy the best possible service from their publisher of choice."Minus the hype, this is an offer to spare you a few keystrokes in exchange for retaining control over access provision to your work, blocking access for 6 months, and reducing the probability and speed with which self-archiving and self-archiving mandates will scale across all disciplines and all institutions worldwide. NPG has been an early mover amongst subscription publishers in encouraging self-archiving. In 2002, the publisher moved from requesting copyright transfer for original research articles to requesting an exclusive license to publish. In 2005, NPG announced a self-archiving policy that encourages authors of research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript to PubMed Central or other appropriate funding body's archive, their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites.After a six-month embargo, rescinding (in 2005) Nature's previous (2003) green light to provide immediate Green OA upon acceptance for publication. In all cases, the manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication...And retaining control over that is the real motivation behind this generous offer, along with the brakes it puts on scaling beyond NIH (and kindred) funded biomedical research, destined for PubMed Central, to all research, from all institutions, across all scientific and scholarly disciplines. [possibly moot] NPG's policies are explained in detail at this web page.And their consequences are explained above. Advice to Nature authors: Accept the offer, but deposit your final refereed draft in your IR immediately upon acceptance anyway, allowing you and your institution to retain control of it, as well as to provide almost-OA to it immediately. Once all researchers do this, all access-embargos will die their well-deserved deaths of natural causes soon thereafter. (Could Nature's announcement be an attempt at damage control after its recent ill-received attack on its competitor, Gold OA publisher PLoS? If so, then some more critical reflection is needed on Nature's part as to why it continues to embargo access to the refereed final draft while its other competitor, Science, is already fully Green. [Science, in turn, might ponder why, unlike Nature, which has abandoned it, Science continues to cling to the obsolescent "Ingelfinger Rule," ruling out the self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint before publication: This self-serving edict is neither a legal matter nor an OA matter, but it too is inimical to research progress, and a distinct anachronism.]) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, June 30. 2008Mandating the Mandatable: Green OA Self-Archiving, Not Gold OA Publishing
Guenther Eysenbach suggests that what should be mandated (by institututions and funders) is not Green OA self-archiving but Gold OA publishing, because it would be more efficient and less costly. I explain below why neither of these is the case now (but that Green OA mandates may indeed pave the way for an eventual transition to Gold OA that will be less costly and more efficient).
Parallel Publishing? (1) There is no parallel publishing with Green OA self-archiving. (2) Publishing (whether Gold OA or non-OA) is publishing. (3) Green OA is access provision (to published articles), not publishing (of already-published articles). (4) A posted, unpublished document is not listed in an academic CV as "published," and a published article that is also posted (or emailed, or photocopied) is not listed as two publications. (5) Users cite the published article, not the access-source; where available, they also list the URL(s) for access purposes. Society pays twice? (1) Who pays twice for what? (2) Tax-payers pay to fund research. (3) Institutions pay to subscribe to the journals in which the research is published. (4) No institution can afford to subscribe to all (refereed) journals; most can afford only a few. (5) So OA is needed so that all users can access all articles. (6) Green OA self-archiving supplements what is currently accessible to subscribers, by making it accessible to all would-be users, webwide. (7) So who is paying for what, twice, with Green OA? (8) Even with Gold OA today, no one would be paying twice. (9) But hybrid "open choice" (optional gold) publishers would be paid twice -- once from institutional subscription money, and once from research grant money. (10) If and when universal Green OA causes universal subscription cancellations, all journals can downsize to Gold OA, paid for by redirecting part of the windfall institutional cancellation savings rather than by redirecting scarce research funds from research. Mandate gold OA and "pay once"? (1) No one is paying twice. (2) Institutions and funders cannot mandate publishers' choice of cost-recovery model. (3) Institutions and funders cannot mandate authors' choice of journals. (4) Until and unless subscriptions are cancelled, Gold OA requires extra funds, usually diverted from research. (5) Green OA can provide immediate 100% OA. (6) It just needs to be mandated by institutions and funders. Pay for Gold OA by "Topping up" research grants? (1) Topping up from what funds? (2) Research is already underfunded and research funds are scarce. (3) Redirecting research funds to pay needlessly for Gold OA publishing today just makes research funds scarcer, needlessly, because providing Green OA costs nothing, and subscriptions are still paying the costs of publishing. Canada's CIHR Mandate without "infrastructure"? (1) What infrastucture? (2) Researchers whose institutions already have an OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR) can deposit there. (3) For researchers that do not yet have an IR there are many back-up central repositories in which they can deposit, such as DEPOT, CogPrints, or Arxiv, all OAI-interoperable. (4) What is lacking is deposits, not repositories to deposit in -- and the mandates will cure that. (5) There is no need for a "Canada PubMed Central" as a locus of direct deposit. (6) Central repositories can harvest from Institutional Repositories, through OAI interoperability. Self-archiving is not free? (1) Not free to whom? (2) And to whom does it cost what? (3) Institutions create repositories (for many reasons: record-keeping, performance assessment, access-provision, visibility). (4) The cost to the institution per paper deposited is a few dollars. (5) The cost to the researcher per paper deposited is a few keystrokes. Can subscription savings pay for repository costs? (1) Institutional repository costs per paper deposited are negligibly small. (2) Central repository costs are up to those who think central repositories are needed, over and above OAI-interoperable institutional repositories. (3) None of this has anything to do with publication costs or Gold OA fees. (4) Today Gold OA fees per paper are not negligibly small, and they divert scarce funds from research. (5) If and when Green OA causes subscriptions to become unsustainable, journals will cut costs by abandoning the paper edition and PDF-generation, offloading access-provision and archiving onto the distributed institutional repository network, downsizing to peer review alone, and converting to the Gold OA cost-recovery model -- paid for, per paper, by institutions' annual windfall savings from having cancelled journal subscriptions. How much does it cost to run a Repository? (1) Per deposited paper, next to nothing. (2) And institutions derive many benefits from their IRs, having nothing to do with journal subscription costs one way or the other. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, June 26. 2008Stanford School of Education Mandates Green OA Self-ArchivingJohn Willinsky has just announced at ELPUB 2008: Stanford School of Education has adopted a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. 46th mandate worldwide, 23rd University mandate, 2nd in US. Sunday, May 18. 2008On Parasitism and Double-Dipping: II (2nd of 2)
Sandy Thatcher [ST], President, American Association of University Publishers (AAUP) wrote in liblicense: ST: "I wish I had as much faith as Stevan [Harnad] that the 'of course' follows from his preceding argument.Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The plain fact is that neither publishers nor universities are faced with this eventuality now. And there is certainly no need or justification for demanding that universities pre-empt it, by "committing" in advance to fund anything whatsoever, at this time.'And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.'"The cynic in me says that it is just as likely that universities will use the "windfall savings" to expand their football stadiums! The academic rule -- and for research universities, it definitely trumps football fields, otherwise we are talking about the forces that trump research itself, and that goes far beyond the scope of this discussion -- is Publish or Perish. Today, in our still non-OA world, publishing is being paid for by the subscriber-university, not by the author-university (though they are largely the same university). Hence, the only thing missing today is OA itself (and perhaps some more football fields) -- not some sort of advance commitment by each university that mandates OA to pay (journal) publishers for anything else at all. Journal publishers are already being paid in full for what they are selling today, and the universities are the buyers. Paying or pledging anything more would simply amount to double-dipping at this time. Self-archiving mandates are providing universities, their researchers and research with exactly what they are missing today: OA. OA (in case it is not already evident by now) is simply the natural online-age extension of Publish or Perish itself: The reason universities already mandate that their researchers must have their research peer-reviewed and published is that unpublished, unvalidated research is no research at all: it leads to no benefits to anyone, neither knowledge fans nor football fans. Unvalidated, unpublished research, sitting in a desk drawer, may as well not have been done at all. No one can access it, use it, apply it, build upon it. And research that may as well not have been done at all may as well not have been funded at all, by either the university or the tax-payer. So we already have Publish or Perish, and in the online age, we have, in addition, "Self-Archive to Flourish," because unnecessary access-barriers are also unnecessary barriers to using, applying and building upon research. Toll-access today is just a bigger desk-drawer. Toll-booths were necessary in the paper era, to pay the essential costs of generating and disseminating hard copies. (That -- plus peer review -- was what "publishing" meant, way back then.) But today, in the online era, the essential costs of making research accessible to any would-be user webwide reduce to just the costs of implementing peer review -- and those costs (and then some) are currently being paid in full by university journal subscriptions, thank you very much! So Ian Russell (Chief Executive, ALPSP) is quite mistaken to call his old alma mater, the University of Southampton, a "parasite" for having been the first university in the world to adopt an "unfunded" Green OA self-archiving mandate (beginning with the mandate of Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science in 2001, now university-wide). What Southampton (and, since then, over twenty other universities and departments, including, Harvard, twice) as well as over twenty research funding agencies (starting with the UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee's mandate recommendation in 2003, and lately including RCUK's, ERC's and NIH's implemented mandates) have done in mandating Green OA for their own research output is not parasitic by any stretch -- while universities continue to pay the costs of publication through subscriptions. Indeed, such mandates could only be "funded" if universities were foolish enough to fund double-dipping by publishers (which Ian rightly disavows), or agreed to lock themselves into paying the current asking price for whatever goods and services publishers bundle into their current product, come what may. So, as I said, things would only begin to be parasitic if universities elected not to pay for the costs of publishing their own research once those publishing costs were no longer being covered by subscriptions (from other universities). For if (research) universities elected to build football fields out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings even after the (hypothetical OA-induced) collapse of subscriptions as the means of covering the (sole remaining essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing (i.e., peer review), then research, researchers, and research universities would simply perish: Publish or Perish. If this extinction is indeed fated to happen, please blame football -- force majeure -- not OA, or university parasitism! But until and unless football really does prevail in the Academy [I'm not claiming it couldn't!], trust that if push ever comes to shove, the Publish or Perish Mandate itself will see to it that the pennies from the universities' windfall subscription cancellation savings that need to be redirected to pay for the true remaining costs -- of getting their own research output refereed and published -- can and will indeed be so redirected. Necessity is the Mother of Invention. But the point is that there is no Necessity -- hence no Parasitism -- now. Just a pressing need for universities to put a long-overdue end to their needless daily, weekly, monthly, yearly research impact loss, which has been accumulating, foolishly, gratuitously, and irretrievably, since at least the 1990's. This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly -- to historians in hindsight. To quote the wag (in a 1999 "Opinion piece... [that did] not necessarily reflect the views of D-Lib Magazine, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, or DARPA" [at the time!]): "I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us..."So the big lesson that still remains to be learned is a lesson for the universities: it is they (not publishers) who needlessly delayed (by well over a decade) adopting the natural PostGutenberg upgrade of their paper-era Publish or Perish Mandates to extend them to the self-archiving of their own peer-reviewed research output, so as to maximize its usage and impact. The only lesson journal publishers need to learn from this is that they are -- and always were -- merely service-providers for the universities, who in turn are the research-providers, and paying (through the teeth) for the publishers' service, until further notice. OA is obviously optimal for research, researchers and their institutions. The publishing tail needs to learn to stop trying to wag the research dog. Adapt to whatever is best for the research-providers and the symbiosis (not parasitism) will continue, felicitously, as it was always destined to do. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, May 17. 2008On Parasitism and Double-Dipping: I (of 2)
The view of Ian Russell (who is Chief Executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers [ALPSP] and also an alumnus of the University of Southampton) on the subject of the University of Southampton's Green Open Access (OA) Self-Archiving Mandate is presented in a series of exchanges on liblicense. Ian criticizes the University of Southampton's mandate as "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By "unfunded," he does not mean that the University of Southampton does not fund its own Institutional Repository (which it of course does -- although it does not cost much); he means that the University of Southampton does not fund the cost of publishing its own research output. But universities do not fund the cost of publishing their own research output: What universities fund is the cost of publishing other universities' research output. And they fund that through subscriptions, which buy in access to the peer-reviewed research output of other universities. That is called the subscription model for publication cost-recovery, and until recently, it was the universal model. Recently, a small but growing minority (c. 10%) of journals have made their contents freely accessible online to all users. These are called Open Access (OA) journals, and publishing in them is called the "golden road" to OA -- the self-archiving of non-OA journal articles being the "green road" to OA (and that, not Gold OA, is what Southampton, Harvard and the other universities are mandating). Moreover, as Peter Suber frequently points out, the majority of this minority of Gold OA journals still recovers costs on the subscription (or subsidy) model too. Fewer than half of them levy publication fees, which are then paid for either by the author's research funder or the author -- or, in the case of special "membership" agreements with BioMed Central journals or consortial agreements with SCOAP3 journals, the author's university. Ian Russell is looking for an advance guarantee from universities that mandate Green OA self-archiving that they will pay Gold OA publishing costs. It is not clear whether he means that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs right now, or that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs if and when subscriptions were ever to collapse. By way of support, Ian cites the Wellcome Trust, which makes such a guarantee to pay, right now. Either way, such a guarantee certainly is not forthcoming from universities now, nor should it be. Wellcome, as a research funder, has mandated self-archiving of the research that it funds and has also offered to pay Gold OA publishing costs out of some of those research funds, under current conditions, at current asking prices (when subscriptions certainly have not collapsed). Universities, however, are not, like Wellcome, research funders. Universities are research fundees and research providers. They also subscribe to journals. As such, they are currently paying for publication costs via journal subscriptions, which have not collapsed. As noted, when universities mandate self-archiving, they are mandating the self-archiving of their own (refereed) research output. When they pay journal subscriptions, they are buying in the refereed research output of other universities. If and when journal subscriptions ever do collapse, what that means is that universities will no longer be paying them, and hence that those annual windfall savings will become available to universities to pay the publication costs of their own refereed research output. And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output. (I say "only a portion of those windfall savings," because "publication" will then [i.e., "post-collapse"] mean only peer review implementation costs, not all of the other products and services that subscriptions are paying for today: producing and distributing the print edition, producing and licensing the online PDF edition, fulfillment, archiving, advertising. The post-collapse costs of publication -- peer review alone -- will be much lower.) In other words, there is nothing for universities to guarantee to pay today, when subscriptions are still sustainable, and still covering all publishing costs, including peer review. And they certainly don't yet have any extra loose change from cancellations to pay the current asking price for Gold OA. So let's wait for the hypothesized subscription collapse -- if and when it comes -- to free up the universities' funds to pay the cost of having their own research output peer-reviewed and certified as such by the journal's title and track record. Until then, those costs are being covered by existing subscriptions, and the only thing missing is not fee-guarantees but open access -- which is exactly what university self-archiving mandates (like that of Ian Russell's alma mater, Southampton) are intended to ensure (but Harvard's mandate is not one to sneeze at either!) [To repeat: What it is that urgently needs to be ensured today is open access -- certainly not publishers' revenues, based on the current cost-recovery model and at current asking prices. Publishing is a service to research, not vice versa.] I close with some quote/comments. (All quotes are from Ian Russell [IR]): IR: "If we can agree that wide-spread archiving will mean that established subscription income will decline, then surely funds have to be unambiguously made available for the only other show in town: author-side payment."Funds have to be made available now? while they are still tied up in paying subscriptions? If you are not talking about double-dipping, Ian, then you need to explain where this double-funding is meant to come from -- and why -- in advance of the decline. (For the decline itself will be what releases the requisite funds, if and when it happens.) And is it "decline" we were talking about, or collapse? (I.e., the subscription model becoming no longer sustainable to cover the true cost of publishing in the OA era.) For if we are only talking about demand declining here, rather than (as I had thought) about its becoming unsustainable, then the natural response would seem to be publisher cost-cutting, by downsizing to the essentials that are still in demand, rather than guaranteed props for sustaining all the products and services that are currently co-bundled into the published journal subscription, at current prices. Demand-decline is a signal that some products and services are becoming superfluous in the OA era, rather than a signal that they must continue to be provided and paid for at all costs. IR: "We can't have it both ways and say that subscriptions will still pay the bills AND that cancellations (and hence cost savings) are inevitable."But we can say that if and when subscriptions are cancelled, universities will have the windfall savings out of which to pay the bills in the new way. (And the cost-cutting and downsizing are just as likely as the cancellations; indeed, they are the flip side of the very same coin.) If you don't mind my saying so, Ian, you do seem to be more inclined to herald only the bleak side of this prophecy (subscription collapse) rather than its bright side (windfall savings out of which to pay for peer review). And you seem all too ready to see daily research usage and impact continue to be lost as a consequence, unless universities somehow ante up extra funds today to cover everything being supplied at today's asking prices, regardless of demand (while you continue to disavow advocating double-dipping)... That sounds like a hedge against whatever might turn out to be the real needs of research and researchers in the OA era. IR: "As regards "double-dipping", it is important not to conflate the issues for an individual journal or research institution with those of the system as a whole."Agreed. But am I doing the conflating, Ian, or are you? An individual university's Green OA self-archiving mandate (like Southampton's, or Harvard's) has nothing to do with either any individual journal (whether subscription or Gold OA) or the system as a whole. If and when all universities mandate self-archiving (as I hope they all soon will), that in turn may or may not eventually make subscriptions unsustainable. If it does, then it will also (eo ipso and pari passu) have released the funds to pay for publication on the Gold OA model, subscriptions having become unsustainable -- but not before. There is still plenty of room for some PostGutenberg downsizing, cost-cutting and adaptation before that. What we will have before any of that hypothetical adaptation, however, is OA itself (which is already long, long overdue), in the form of universal (because mandated) Green OA. IR: "I don't believe that the PLoS journals could be accused of double-dipping..."Certainly not. But what do Gold OA journals have to do with university Green OA self-archiving mandates? IR: "...nor journals that reduce their subscription prices in line with the number of articles published under an author-side payment system."Ian, I regret that not only would I never recommend buying-in to such a hedged price lock-in system, but I do not for a moment believe that any journal is sincerely putting it into practice. It is just a notion. McDonald's could make the same offer, that if their clients' employers agree to buy into Gold Open Access burgers, free for all, they'll reduce the burger selling price for their remaining direct clients proportionately. No, if there's going to be a conversion from institutional subscriptions to institutional publication fees, let those fees be shaped by cost-cutting pressure from the PostGutenberg Green OA economies: That pressure will arise from the university mandates to self-archive their own published research, and to provide their own institutional repositories to take over the load and cost of distribution, access-provision and archiving in the OA era -- rather than publishers continuing to co-bundle those goods and services into their current product at their current asking price. IR: "Why should PLoS lose out because Southampton University (for example) refuses to cover author-side payment fees?"With respect, I cannot see at all how a Gold OA journal like PLoS is losing out because Southampton is mandating Green OA self-archiving for its own research output! Those researchers who can afford to publish in PLoS journals today, and wish to, can and will. (Moreover, as far as I know, PLoS is a supporter of self-archiving mandates -- and not just those by funders who offer to pay for today's Gold OA publication fees. And after the "Fall," PLoS too will be able to downsize to the reduced cost of just providing the service of peer review and no more.) IR: "I am asking institutions not to mandate deposit of research that has been peer-reviewed by a journal, yes, because it is parasitic on the journals system (irrespective of business model) and I do not see how they can claim the right to do so."And the obvious reply is that it will only be parasitic if and when subscriptions collapse, should institutions then still refuse to pay for publication. (But then of course the parasite will perish, because it will not be able to publish, unless it is ready to use some of its windfall subscription savings to pay for it.) Until then, institutions have every right to mandate providing open access to their own peer-reviewed research output, whose peer-review costs are all being fully covered by subscriptions today. Nothing in the least bit parasitic about that. IR: "As I have said repeatedly in this exchange so long as the system is paying for the certification elements of scholarly exchange I have no problem."Well, the system is indeed still paying for it, Ian, so I have no choice but to conclude that you have no problem! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, May 16. 2008Berkeley's Bold Initiative"It's one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It's another to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it. That's what's happening at the University of California Berkeley..." (SPARC News May 2008)It's one thing to support open-access publishing. It's another to provide open access. What research worldwide needs urgently today is not the money to pay OA journals but OA itself. (Most of the potential money to pay OA journals is currently tied up in paying for non-OA journal subscriptions.) I hope that apart from just providing authors with money to pay OA publishing fees, Berkeley will also join the ranks of Southampton and Harvard (and 42 other research universities, departments and funders) in mandating that their authors provide OA itself. "In January, the university launched the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by the University Librarian and the Vice Chancellor for Research to cover publication charges for open-access journals.Relevant Past Postings: Berkeley Press's Advice to Universities on Institutional Repositories Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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