Self-Archiving Mandates

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SUMMARY: What is needed for Canadian biomedical research output isn't yet another (this time Canadian) PubMed Central: What is needed is that all Canadian (and US and UK) biomedical research output (as well as all the output of all the other scientific and scholarly disciplines, worldwide) should be made Open Access (OA) for all users, webwide. And the way to accomplish that is for the institutions and funders of the researchers to mandate that they deposit each article, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into each author's own OA Institutional Repository (IR). That is the solution that will systematically scale up to cover all research, from all institutions, across all fields, across all countries -- not the creation, willy-nilly, of central repositories like PubMed Central to deposit it into directly. PubMed Central should instead be a central OAI harvester, harvesting the biomedical research output of all the (distributed, local) IRs.
   Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) should think twice, and then lead, clear-headedly, instead of following, blindly, in this.

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A Canadian PubMed Central is not what is needed for Canadian biomedical research article output (any more than a US or UK PubMed Central is what is needed for US and UK biomedical research output). What is needed is that Canadian (and American and British) biomedical research output (and all the output of all the other scientific and scholarly disciplines, worldwide) should be made Open Access for all users, webwide. And the way to do that is for the institutions and funders of the researchers who produce that research to mandate that they make their research articles Open Access for all users, webwide, by depositing each article, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in each author's own Open Access Institutional Repository (IR). That is the solution that will systematically scale up to cover all of research, from all institutions, across all fields, across all countries. Not the creation, willy-nilly, of central repositories like PubMed Central to deposit research into directly.

Then PubMed Central (and its counterparts in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere) can harvest the biomedical content of their own country's IRs (if they wish: but then why just their own countries? why not, google-scholar-style, all biomedical research articles, from all the world's IRs?).

There are two worldwide movements afoot in the area of Open Access ("Green") self-archiving: (1) an Institutional Repository (IR) movement, to create and fill each research institution's own IRs, and (2) a Central Repository movement, to create and fill multiple, national, discipline-based central repositories along the lines of PubMed Central (with vague affinities to the multiple-mirrored central Physics Repository, Arxiv). The two movements -- distributed institutional self-archiving and central disciplinary self-archiving -- are not coordinating their agendas, indeed they are hardly taking cognizance of one another. If they did, they would realize that their two agendas are incoherent, if not at odds:

Researchers' own institutions (universities and research institutes) are the primary providers of all research output. Those researchers, their own institutions, and their funders, are the ones with the joint stake in maximizing the visibility, uptake, usage and impact of their joint research output. That is what the IRs are created for. The IRs are interoperable with one another, because they are all compliant with the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol. That means that their contents -- which it would make no sense to search individually, IR by IR -- can be harvested centrally, by search engines and meta-archives that cover part or all of the distributed IRs' contents (i.e., the world's refereed research journal article output).

That is what PubMed Central should be, and should be doing: A central OAI harvester, harvesting the biomedical research output of all IRs (or of all IRs in their own country -- though, again, that exercise has doubtful search value for users worldwide, who would no more want to have access to the biomedical output of only one country than to that of only one institution). (National central harvesting might have other uses, however, such as in inventorying and evaluating one country's own research output, and perhaps in comparing national productivity and impact -- although even that is best done via metadata, gathered by global harvesters, rather than national ones.)

The incoherent, competing agendas of (1) institutional vs. (2) central self-archiving are slowing down the progress and diffusing the focus of the world OA movement because they are further confusing researchers -- who are already greatly under-informed and confused about OA -- about where and why to deposit their articles. Only 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously today. That is why the OA movement has turned to self-archiving mandates, requiring researchers to self-archive. But the OA mandate movement is needlessly split and diffuse because some mandators are mandating central deposit (mostly in the national PubMed Centrals), other mandators are mandating local deposit in the researcher's institutional IR, and still other mandators are mandating deposit, indifferently, in either one or the other.

That is not a coherent or systematic way to ensure that the mandate is clear, complete, and covers all research output, funded and unfunded, in all fields, from all institutions, across all countries. The coherent, systematic way to achieve that is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate deposit in the researcher's own IR, and to relegate central archiving to harvesting from those distributed institutional IRs.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) should sit and reflect on this for just a few moments, and then take a rational decision, setting a clear-headed example for the rest of the world, rather than reflexively following the unthinking trends that are still keeping OA progress so diffuse and slow. CIHR can thereby help to fast-forward us all to the optimal and inevitable, where we should already long have been by now.

"Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.
   ABSTRACT: A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC] examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals. Their relative merits were considered, addressing not only technical concerns but also how e-print provision (by authors) can be achieved -- an essential factor for an effective e-print delivery service (for users). A "harvesting" model is recommended, where the metadata of articles deposited in distributed archives are harvested, stored and enhanced by a national service. This model has major advantages over the alternatives of a national centralized service or a completely decentralized one. Options for the implementation of a service based on the harvesting model are presented.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Prof. Andrew Colman of the University of Leicester inquires about (1) whether to deposit the publisher's PDF or the author's final refereed draft, and (2) whether a central archive would be more visible and accessible than an Institutional Repository (IR) like the Leicester Research Archive. The reply is quite straightforward:
   The default version to deposit is the author's final refereed draft, as it is the one with the fewest publisher restrictions and it fulfills all the usage needs of all (otherwise access-denied) users; the publisher's PDF should only be deposited if the publisher agrees.
   The locus of the deposit should definitely be the author's own IR. In the OAI-interoperable era, the distributed IR metatada are harvested by central harvesters. Creating and depositing in separate central archives for each discipline and combination of disciplines is not the coherent and systematic way to ensure that all institutional research output is made OA.
    The Leicester Research Archive's policy -- deposit the author's postprint, except if the publisher explicitly allows the proprietary PDF to be deposited, and deposit in the author's own IR, rather than central repositories -- is hence correct, but if the IR does not wish to remain near-empty, as now (only 320 deposits in its first year), deposit needs to be mandated, not just invited. I strongly recommend adopting the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate.

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Prof A.M. Colman (Psychology, U. Leicester):

"The University of Leicester has finally set up an open-access archive."

The Leicester Research Archive was actually set up a year ago, in June 2006, but since then it has only 320 deposits. That is less than one deposit per day, and, I am sure, far less than Leicester's annual research output, even if those deposits were all just 2006-7 output (which is unlikely).

The answers to the questions you raise may help remedy this shortfall, for Leicester, and other Institutional Repositories in the same condition.

Prof Colman:

"But when I submitted my journal articles to it, the librarians told me that none of them was eligible, because of publisher's restrictions, and that I should archive the manuscripts instead.

"That's of limited use, and I won't do it. Two of my colleagues in psychology had the same experience. Apparently either psychology journals don't allow self-archiving or our library is being excessively cautious.

"I have self-archived my own articles on my personal web page, none the less, but they're unlikely to attract many readers at such an obscure location. In fact, even minor university repositories are probably not the answer. What we need is a global archive like the physics one.

"Or do you have a suggestion as to how we might solve this problem?"

Professor Andrew M. Colman, School of Psychology, University of Leicester

There are three important points to be made here:

(1) U. Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well.

(2) Apart from that, Leicester's deposit policy itself is exactly right (and for very good reasons): Deposit your final, accepted, peer-reviewed draft as the default option (except if you have your publisher's blessing to deposit the publisher's PDF).

(3) Leicester's OAI-compliant institutional repository is only "minor" in one respect: It only has 320 deposits. Once deposit is mandated, however, and hence 100% of Leicester's current research output is being systematically deposited, it will be a major archive, and all of its contents will be picked up by all of the relevant harvesters and search engines, especially OAIster, ROAR, and Google (Scholar). (See also the comment, at the end of this message, from Dr. Norbert Lossau, Technical and Scientific Coordinator of the European DRIVER Project, about the BASE search engine.)

In our new era of distributed, OAI-interoperable Institutional Repositories (IRs), all archives (IRs) are equal and there is no need for, nor any added added benefit whatsoever from depositing in a central archive like the physics Arxiv (which is now merely one of the web's many distributed, interoperable OAI archives, all being harvested by central harvesters). Central harvesting and search is the key, not central depositing and archiving.

On the contrary, having to found and maintain a different central archive for every field and every combination of fields would not only be arbitrary and wasteful in the era of central harvesting and search, but it would also be an impediment rather than a help in getting all the distributed universities (and research institutions) to get all their researchers to fill all their own IRs, in all disciplines, by mandating and managing it, locally. (University Research Institute output covers all of research space, in all disciplines, and all combinations of disciplines.)

The right strategy in your situation is hence to deposit your refereed final drafts in the Leicester IR (except where the publisher endorses depositing their PDF) and if you wish, you can also deposit the PDF on your website, as you already do. The IR will list that as an alternative location for your paper.

The purpose of an Open Access (OA) IR is to provide free access to an institution's and individual's research output for those would-be users web-wide who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's PDF version.

It would be totally wrong-headed and counterproductive to deprive one's potential users of access altogether if one's publisher does not happen to endorse self-archiving the PDF! Far fewer publisher object to self-archiving the refereed postprint in place of their proprietary PDF.

To find out which journals are Green on immediate self-archiving of the postprint (62%) see Eprints Romeo.

To find out which subset of those specifically endorse self-archiving the publisher's PDF, see SHERPA Romeo.

If you want to self-archive the publisher's PDF too, over the publisher's objections, that's up to you: you can do it on your own website, as a supplement. No visibility or access is lost that way, and the difference is a difference that makes no difference (to the access-denied would-be user):

I strongly urge you to deposit your postprints in Leicester's IR, as the IR manager has requested. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. (For earlier publications, for which you no longer have the digital final draft, scan/OCR the published text and reformat it, or reformat the publisher's PDF, if you have it.)

I also strongly urge U. Leicester to mandate deposit.

Dr. Norbert Lossau:

"...at a time when we are building trans-national networks of repositories there will be no "minor" archive.

"DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) is the leading European repository infrastructure project, connecting in phase one at least 50 repositories from 5 countries (BE, FR, GE, NL, UK). DRIVER partners in the UK are the University of Nottingham and UKOLN at the University of Bath. DRIVER has set out a roadmap to connect ultimately all digital repositories in Europe. Already now we have established contact to representatives from each country in Europe and have liaised with major academic and funding organisations like the European University Association.

"As addition to the search engines given by Stevan you may also want to check BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), a key partner of DRIVER."

Dr. Norbert Lossau, Director, Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

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Pertinent Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Threads:

Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)
"Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
"France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories" (started Oct 2006)
"Self-Archive the Refereed Draft: Not the Publisher's PDF!" (Feb 2005)
"Self-archiving: Author's files versus publisher's pdf" (Apr 2005)
"What Provosts Need to Mandate" (began Dec 2003)
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Hélio Kuramoto of IBICT has helped to formulate a Proposed Law (introduced by Rodrigo Rollemberg, Member of Brazil's House of Representatives) that would require all Brazil's public institutions of higher education and research units to create OA institutional repositories and self-archive all their technical-scientific output therein.

There is also a petition in support of this Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. I urge all in favor of OA in Brazil (and worldwide) to sign the petition here.

Below is an English translation of the petition. Bravo to HK and RR for this timely and welcome step, setting an inspiring example for all. (Brazil's Auriverde -- Gold and Green -- flag is especially apposite for OA!)

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To: The Brazilian Scientific Community

On May 23 of 2007, Rodrigo Rollemberg, Member of Brazil's House of Representatives, introduced Proposed Law nº 1120/2007 concerning the dissemination of Brazil's technical-scientific output.

This is a pioneering initiative for this country and indeed for all of Latin America. Brazil can become the first Latin American country to establish a legal mandate for the deposit and distribution of Brazil's technical-scientific output. This Proposed Law represents a decisive and courageous step toward providing open access to Brazilian scientific research. If approved, the Law will contribute to eliminating access barriers to scientific information worldwide. In addition to being beneficial to the national economy, the Law will allow greater transparency in Brazil's investment in its scientific research, generating quantitative metrics to guide the planning and support of science and technology.

The first article proposes that all Brazil's public institutions of higher education, as well as all research units, should be required to establish institutional repositories in which all the technical-scientific output of their academic and researcher staff must be deposited. The intention is to ensure that this content will be made openly accessible on the Web.

The article proposes creating a High Level Committee co-ordinated by IBICT to design and direct whatever actions need to be taken to provide open access to scientific research. This Committee will have the mandate to discuss and formulate a National Policy of Open Access to Scientific Research Output.

It is incumbent on all members of the scientific community to promote open access in Brazil by fighting for the approval of Law nº 1120/2007 by the National Congress.

We hereby invite all those who support the Proposed Law to sign this petition here.

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Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Chris Armbruster wrote in the SPARC Open Access Forum:

"...the publishers' lobbyists on this occasion were successful - they had their position written into the Bundesrat opinion, almost to the letter.

"This Bundesrat opinion is bad news for OA... How come that toll access publishers had it all their way? ...how good are OA activists in addressing the concerns of policy makers and parliaments?

"There principally are two routes to OA - a) via the self-regulation of universities, libraries, science organisations and learned societies, or b) via political regulation. decision-makers... providing 'conclusive evidence' that allows them to decide for you (and against the other side). Is the OA movement ready for this kind of adversarial politics?"

Probably not.

And although an OA Lobby is a good idea, the research community (researchers, their universities and their funders) can do it all amongst themselves already, even without a Lobby. There is a simple way, if we can only get the research community to listen, and understand, and act: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate removes the publishers and the publishing lobby from the decision loop completely. Government intervention is not needed either.

All I can do is keep repeating this message, amidst all the hubbub and indirection, hoping that it will be understood that all else becomes moot if the research community itself (universities and funders) just mandate ID/OA: Absolutely nothing else matters. Nothing can stop the worldwide research community from doing it. And it will work. And it will bring 100% OA very soon. Everything else just means years more of the confusion and delay we have now. To reach for either less or more is to get next to nothing. ID/OA is completely within our reach; all we need do is grasp it, now.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Some librarians still applaud access embargoes, for reasons of which they will not be proud, in due course. Other librarians are doing magnificent, front-line work in the Open Access Movement. But the ones who will really have reason to be ashamed (once we reach the optimal, inevitable, and long overdue outcome at long last) are not librarians but researchers themselves: They are the only ones who can provide OA and they are also OA's primary beneficiaries. That it proved to require Green OA mandates from their employers and funders in order to induce researchers to act in their own interests -- by doing the few keystrokes that were the only thing that ever stood between them and 100% OA -- is a puzzle that historians will have to work out after it's all over. For now, however, the latest Green OA self-archiving mandates from Russia and Turkey are yet another step in the right direction.

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On Thu, 3 May 2007, Rick Anderson (RA), Director of Resource Acquisition,
University of Nevada-Reno Libraries, wrote in liblicense, regarding the newly announced Russian and Turkish Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates:

RA: "Bravo in particular to the Russian institution, whose policy allows for a reasonable embargo period."

(1) It is odd (and rather sad) to see a librarian applauding an embargo on researchers' access to research findings.

(2) The Russian ROARMAP entry says this:

All researchers of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences are mandated by a director's decree to immediately deposit their papers/articles in the institutional Open Archive.

The accompanying link adds: "...mandate researchers of CEMI RAS to deposit all their completed research (in a working paper form), including the full text, in institutional OA (repository) not later than 6 months after their completion."

There is some linguistic ambiguity there, which I wrote to ask Professor Parinov to clarify (see his replies below). My guess was that CEMI is anxious to have the pre-refereeing preprints deposited too, and so what the director meant here was that if an economist writes a paper, it needs to be deposited within 6 months of its completion.

Reply from Prof. Parinov: "The CEMI OA self-archiving mandate policy means exactly this. Any completed research has to be deposited for public access within 6 months of completion, even if it still has the status of a pre-refereeng preprint at that time."

Hence this is not a reference to embargoing access to the final, refereed draft (the postprint).

I also asked Prof. Parinov to clarify:

(a) whether the statement meant that the clock starts at the moment of the completion of the preprint [Prof. Parinov's reply: "Exactly"],

(b) whether the postprint must be deposited immediately on acceptance [Prof. Parinov: "Yes]", and

(c) whether, if access to the postprint is not immediately set to "Open Access," then the "Fair Use Button" (allowing for semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUESTS) will be implemented to cover any research usage needs during any Closed Access embargo period. [Prof. Parinov: "Yes. We have in our "to-do" plan an implementation of such an "eprint request" button]."

(Economics has an established preprint self-archiving practice analogous to that in physics. In no field is it possible, or advisable, to force authors to make their unrefereed drafts public if they do not wish to. Hence my guess is that the 6-month window is intended more to ensure that completed papers are submitted for publication, rather than sat upon. In other words, it is just a manifestation of "publish or perish.")

RA: "The policy of the Turkish institution is presented much more sketchily in ROARMAP":

Require... researchers to deposit a copy of all their Masters and Ph.D. theses, published and refereed articles in the Institutional Repository of Middle East Technical University, if there are no legal objections...

"So there may be also be sufficient flexibility in the Turkish model to allow for commercial publishing prior to the OA deposit, but it's not at all clear."

Again, the Turkish statement could be made clearer, specifying that the deposit should be immediately upon acceptance of the refereed final draft (postprint) and that "legal objections", if any, pertain only to the date of access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access), not to the date of the deposit itself, which should be done immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Again, the Fair Use Button can tide over research usage needs during any embargo period.)

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?"

Let me close with a personal observation: I have criticised (some) librarians for being part of the problem rather than the solution insofar as OA is concerned. I think that is still very true, but perhaps misleading, because it is equally true that some librarians are not only part of the solution, but leaders of the worldwide OA movement toward the optimal and inevitable solution. (Prominent examples are Hélène Bosc of Euroscience, Eloy Rodriques of Minho, Derek Law of Glasgow; there are many, many others too.)

And history will make it clear that the real problem that delayed OA for well over a decade beyond the time when it was already fully within reach was not those in the library community who favored embargoing OA (or ignoring OA altogether); nor was it "legal objections." The historic cause of the unnecessary and conterproductive delay was the vast majority (85%) of the research community itself -- the very one ones who are both the providers and the beneficiaries of OA. Their causal role can best be described as inertial inaction. That is why mandates by their institutions and their funders became necessary at all.

Applauding access embargoes strikes me as a paradigmatic example of the regressive role of some parts of the library community. But researchers sitting on their hands until the keystrokes were mandated trumps that several times over:

"...why did the Give-Away authors not flock to the new medium, and the free, open, global access to their work that it would provide? This is what next year's millennium is poised to chide us for. There are some excuses, but at bottom it will be seen to be the sluggishness of human nature and its superstitious cleavage to old habits." (D-lib Magazine 1999)

(I shall abstain from the inevitable ensuing round of speculation and counterspeculation about the destruction of journal publishing if immediate OA self-archiving is mandated: It is in order to moot and thereby bypass all of that idle conjecturing -- and equally idle "legal objections" -- that the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access compromise mandate plus the Fair Use Button were designed.)

"The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model"

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Middle East Technical University of Turkey have adopted Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates and registered them in ROARMAP

Bravo to these institutions. Worldwide, that now makes:

11 institutional mandates
3 departmental mandates
12 funder mandates
5 proposed funder mandates
1 proposed multi-institutional mandate

(and some of the proposed mandates are big ones!)

If your institution has an Institutional Repository, please register it in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), which will then track its growth and contents.

And if your institution has adopted or is proposing to adopt an OA Self-Archiving Mandate, please register it in ROARMAP, for others to see and emulate.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: This is a reply to Matt Hodgkinson's posting in his journalology blog:
(1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates, by making publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot. It is not a substitute for OA but an accelerator toward OA.
(2) There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) . The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited.
(3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep perseverating with Gold OA and costs while usage and impact continue to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can already put an immediate end to that loss, once and for all, right now.
(4) CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields.
(5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs.
(6) I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), especially mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs.
(7) I have no wish to vye for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art.
(8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it.

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Bill Hooker has already corrected the two main misunderstandings in Matt Hodgkinson's posting:

(1) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate is a compromise deliberately designed to end deadlocks that have been delaying the adoption of self-archiving mandates for several years now, by making the issue of publisher copyright policies or embargoes moot if they are holding up the adoption of a full Green OA mandate. Green OA is still Green OA (immediate, direct, full access) but an ID/OA compromise mandate now is infinitely preferable to no self-archiving mandate at all. And together with the "Fair-Use" Button, ID/OA provides almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period. (And, yes, I do add the speculation that ID/OA, once universally adopted, will very soon lead to the welcome death of embargoes, and hence to 100% Green OA; but nothing hangs on this speculation: It is an ID/OA mandate that should be adopted if there is deadlock or delay in agreeing on the adoption of a Green OA mandate.)

(2) All articles deposited in OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (IRs) will be harvested and indexed by OAIster, Google Scholar, and many other harvesters and search engines. There is no discovery problem with articles that have been deposited. The discovery problem is with the articles that have not been deposited (i.e., 85% of the annual peer-reviewed journal literature) and the solution is to mandate Green OA -- or, failing that, to mandate ID/OA. Hence 100% Green OA will indeed have delivered OA's goal, irrespective of whether and when it goes on to lead to Gold OA.

A few other points:

(3) I don't criticise those who say Gold OA will lower publication costs. (I think it will too, eventually.) I criticise those who keep fussing about Gold OA and costs while daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact continues to be lost and Green OA mandates (or ID/OA) can put an end to it. My objection to Gold fever is a matter of immediate priorities. It is not only putting the Golden cart before the Green horse (or counting the Golden chickens before the Green eggs are laid), but it is leaving us year in and year out at a near-standstill, whereas self-archiving mandates have been demonstrated to fast-forward universities toward 100% OA for their output within two years. (See Arthur Sale's splendid studies.)

(4) I criticise the CERN Gold OA initiative for much the same reason: CERN could have done so much more. CERN has a successful Green OA mandate (not even the ID/OA compromise) and CERN could have done a far greater service for other disciplines and for the growth of OA if it had put its weight and energy behind promoting its own own Green OA policy as a model worldwide, instead of diverting attention and energy to the needless and premature endgame of Gold OA within its own subfields. (Saving subscription costs is utterly irrelevant once you have 100% Green OA: Journal subscriptions then become optional luxury items instead of basic necessities, as now.)

(5) Paying for Gold OA in a hybrid-Gold journal like Springer's Open Choice is indeed double-payment while subscriptions are still paying all publication costs, and hence doubly foolish. (Rationalizing that it can be corrected by "adjustments" in the subscription price is not only credulous in the extreme, but it blithely countenances locking in current asking-prices in a way that makes the "Big Deal" look like chump change.) Paying for Gold OA in a pure-Gold journal (like the BMC and PLoS journals) -- when one can simply publish in any journal and self-archive to provide OA -- is merely foolish (except for those with a lot of spare change). (At this time: not if and when 100% Green OA causes unsustainable institutional subscription cancellations, thereby releasing the funds to pay for institutional Gold OA publishing costs. (But -- speculation again -- it is likely that journals will have to cut costs and downsize in converting to Gold OA, so the asking price for Gold OA will not be what it is now.)

(6) I do not criticise depositing in Central Repositories (CRs) per se (though I do think it is foolish): I criticise depositing in CRs instead of depositing in Institutional Repositories (IRs), and I especially criticise mandating deposit in CRs instead of in IRs. Institutions are the primary research providers. IRs tile all of OA output space. Institutions and their researchers have a shared interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own research output. Institutions can mandate, monitor (and even monetarize) self-archiving in their own IRs (and funders can reinforce those mandates); CRs cannot. And CRs can harvest from IRs if they wish. Mandating self-archiving in researchers' own IRs is the systematic and scaleable -- hence optimal -- solution for generating 100% OA, not a panoply of arbitrary CRs criss-crossing research space.

(7) I have no interest in vying for priority for the term "open access". I used "free online access" for years without feeling any pressing need for a more formal term of art. I don't doubt that the descriptor "open access" can be googled before the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative decided (quite consciously, after surveying several alternatives) to adopt OA for the movement to which it subsequently gave rise. Before the BOAI, there was no OA movement, just a lot of notions in the air, among them: free online access, self-archiving, and journals funded by means other than the subscription model.

(8) Yes I (and no doubt others too, independently) mooted the notion of journals funded by means other than the subscription model (later to become Gold OA) in 1997 and even earlier (1994); but I never for a microsecond thought Gold OA would come before Green OA. And it hasn't; nor will it, at the current rate. Green OA, in contrast, can be accelerated to reach 100% within two years, if we just go ahead and mandate it, instead of continuing to fuss about Gold OA!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Some university libraries and administrations think OA is all about journal affordability, digital preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI). Some OA publishers think OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.). Some copyright reformers think OA is all about reforming copyright law. And some traditional publishers lobby against Green OA mandates (and sometimes also against Gold OA) as a threat to their industry.
      There exists no recognized theme associated with Green OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group that is invited to represent Green OA at OA events. Richard Poynder, Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted the idea of a Green OA lobby. Creating such a lobby would be an excellent and timely idea and an appropriate reflection of the European and American petitions demonstrating the growing worldwide support for mandating Green OA..

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Four basic kinds of OA-related events keep being arranged periodically by various official organisations (librarians, universities, publishers, funders, government committees):

(1) Librarians and universities who think OA is all about journal affordability, preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI);

(2) OA Publishers for whom OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.);

(3) Copyright reformers who think OA is all about reforming copyright law.

(X) Anti-OA publishers whose interest is in lobbying against Green OA mandates (and sometimes also Gold OA) as a threat to their industry.

There is no recognized topic of (Green) OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group recognized or invited to any of these OA events.

So only two recourses are left to Green OA advocates: One is to do as we are doing, which is to keep on raising our voices on behalf of Green OA in writings and petitions and at the meetings we happen to be invited to.

The other possibility is the one Richard Poynder and Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted, which is a Green OA lobby.

Creating such an official Green OA lobby would be very timely and important (but it would have to be carefully protected against dilution by well-meaning but blinkered proponents of (1), (2) and (3), which would defeat both its focus and its purpose).

One good thing, though: The fact (sub specie aeternitatis) is that (1) - (X), are, respectively, (1) irrelevant, (2) premature, (3) premature, and (X) obsolete, and it is indeed Green OA and Green OA mandates that will win the day and usher in 100% OA, sooner or later.

Let us work to make it sooner, rather than later.

Open Access (OA) means free online access to the articles in the c. 24,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals published annually across all disciplines, countries and languages.

The purpose of OA is to maximise research usage and impact, and thereby maximise research productivity and progress, by making all research findings accessible to all their potential users webwide, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published.

There are two roads to 100% OA:

(1) The "Golden" Road to OA is to convert all journals from recovering their publishing costs, as they do now, out of user-institution subscription charges, per journal, to recovering their publishing costs instead out of author-institution publication charges, per article. (Gold OA is also called "BOAI-2" -- the second of the two roads to OA proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which first adopted the term "Open Access" in 2002 for the new movement it launched.)

(2) The "Green" Road to OA is to continue publishing in the existing subscription-based journals -- but with all authors making their own individual articles OA by self-archiving a supplementary copy of their peer-reviewed, final draft (the "postprint") in their own institution's OA Institutional Repository (IR). (Green OA is also called "BOAI-1" -- the first of the two roads to OA proposed by the BOAI)

Gold OA and Green OA are clearly complementary, but there is considerable disagreement over which one should be given priority. The current level of OA worldwide is about 25%, of which about 10% is Gold and 15% is Green. This is because about 10% of journals are Gold (though mostly not the top journals), and because only about 15% of authors self-archive spontaneously.

So what is needed is either to increase the proportion of Gold OA journals (and their uptake) to 100%, or to increase the promotion of Green OA self-archiving by authors to 100% (or both).

The critical difference in the probability of increasing OA to 100% via Gold versus Green is that Gold OA depends on two further factors: (i) converting journals to Gold and (ii) finding the money to pay authors' Gold OA publication fees (particularly while most journals are subscription-based, and hence most potential publication funds are still tied up in subscriptions).

Publishers are reluctant to convert to Gold, and authors are reluctant to pay for Gold OA charges at this time.

The situation with Green OA is very different, because it does not depend on converting publishers, and it is virtually cost-free. Most institutions already have Institutional Repositories (IRs). The only problem is that they are largely empty because, as noted, only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously -- even though a series of recent studies have demonstrated OA's dramatic benefits for all fields of scientific and scholarly research (doubled usage and citations).

There are, however, the two fundamental advantages of Green OA over Gold OA that were just noted: Gold OA requires (i) converting publishers to Gold OA publishing and it also requires (ii) finding the funds for authors to pay for it. Green OA merely requires authors' own institutions and funders to mandate that they self-archive their own postprints. And Green OA mandates have been repeatedly demonstrated to work.

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.

Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Moreover, if and when mandated 100% OA from Green self-archiving should ever go on to cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, thereby forcing journals to convert to Gold OA publishing, the cancellations themselves will release the institutional subscription funds that can then be used to pay for institutional authors' Gold OA publication charges.

So the pragmatics of the status quo and the goal would seem to indicate that mandating Green OA (by research funders and institutions) should be given priority, rather than focussing on trying to (i) convert journals to Gold OA and trying to (ii) find the funds to pay for it. Journal publishing is in the hands of publishers, but Green OA self-archiving is in the hands of authors and their institutions and funders.

Green OA self-archiving mandates are beginning to be adopted by funders and institutions, but not nearly quickly enough, even though they could easily be extended to 100% adoption worldwide. There are two reasons for the delay: (1) lobbying against Green OA mandates by the publishing industry and (2) distraction from mandating Green OA arising from the parallel efforts to promote Gold OA.

The pragmatics are clear, however: The research community (researchers, their employers and their funders) have no leverage over the publishing industry and its policies, only over their own employees, fundees and policies. OA is overwhelmingly in the best interests of the research community (as well as students, the vast R&D industry, the developing world, and the tax-paying public worldwide), and the research community itself is in a position to mandate 100% OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving. One cannot mandate Gold OA.

The only leverage that publishers have against Green OA mandates is (1) copyright, which they can try to invoke in order to embargo the provision of OA by their authors and (2) their claim that 100% Green OA would make subscriptions unsustainable.

As we have seen, (2) is not a valid deterrent to the research community, because if subscriptions did become unsustainable, this would merely mean a conversion to Gold OA publishing, which would be welcome.

As to (1) -- the use of copyright and embargoes by publishers to try to prevent Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates -- there is a very simple compromise that provides 100% almost-OA immediately (a vast immediate benefit to research usage, impact, productivity and progress) and that will also usher in 100% Green OA very soon thereafter: The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate plus the "Fair Use" Button in Institutional Repositories.

Instead of trying to mandate both immediate deposit and immediate OA, funders and universities need merely mandate immediate deposit (of the postprint, immediately upon acceptance for publication). Sixty-two percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving, so access to at least 62% of these deposits can immediately be set to OA. For the remaining 38% of journals that have access embargoes, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access": The metadata (author, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are all openly accessible immediately, webwide, but the full-text of the article (postprint) is not.

Instead, for the 38% of deposited postprints that are published in an embargoed access journal (embargoes range from 6 months to 3 years or more!), the would-be user, who has reached the link to the deposited article, based on its visible metadata, reaches a "Fair Use" Button, provided by the software of each Institutional Repository: The user need merely cut-paste his email address in a box and click on the button. This automatically emails an immediate EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST to the article's author; the email conveys the request and provides a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automatic emailing of a single copy of the deposited postprint to the eprint-requester.

The difference between this compromise "almost-OA" and the current status quo is already the difference between night and day for all those would-be users worldwide who cannot afford access to the subscription version. It systematises and automatises email access to the author and the postprint, and it provides the required document almost immediately.

And it will very rapidly lead to 100% Green OA, as the universal benefits of OA became palpable to the entire research community.

So the research community's optimal strategy is to give priority to the adoption of Green OA mandates by universities and funders. An immediate-deposit, immediate-OA mandate is obviously optimal. But if that cannot be agreed upon immediately, adopting an ID/OA mandate is infinitely preferable to any further delay in adopting a mandate at all. To keep holding out instead for the successful adoption of a stronger Green OA mandate or to wait for a universal transition to Gold OA is merely to continue prolonging the loss in research access, usage and impact, needlessly and avoidably, to the detriment of research productivity and progress.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Alexander Borbély, University of Zurich, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

I was astonished to read that depositing the final version of the manuscript is prohibited [for Blackwell's European Journal of Neuroscience]... Making available only the version originally submitted is not very useful if major modifications based on the referees' recommendation are made:

Blackwell Publishing PDF version of the Article

You may use the PDF in the following ways:

you may share print or electronic copies of the Article with colleagues;

you may use all or part of the Article and abstract, without revision or modification, in personal compilations or other publications of your own work;

you may use the Article within your employer's institution or company for educational or research purposes, including use in course packs.

Please note that you are not permitted to post the Blackwell Publishing PDF version of the Article online.

Self-Archiving of Author Manuscripts:

Submitted version: You may post the original manuscript of the Article, as submitted for publication in the Journal, on your own personal website, on your employer's website/repository and on free public servers in your subject area....

Accepted version: Twelve months after publication you may post the original manuscript of the Article, as originally submitted for publication in the Journal, and updated to include any amendments made after peer review, on your own personal website, on your employer's website/repository and on free public servers in your subject area..."

Are you familiar with these instructions and what is your opinion?

I am very familiar with these instructions. Blackwell's is a 12-month embargo publisher.

The solution is extremely simple: always deposit the postprint (i.e., the refereed, revised, accepted final draft) immediately upon acceptance for publication (definitely not 12 months later!) and set the access as "Closed Access" instead of "Open Access," if you wish, which means the metadata (author, title, journal, abstract) are openly accessible to anyone on the web immediately, but the full-text is not. In addition, as I wrote before, make sure to implement the "Fair Use" Button (in your university's repository, ZORA): EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST.

All searches will lead to the Closed Access Deposit, and that in turn has the Button, which will provide for all usage needs during the 1-year embargo, semi-automatically, almost immediately, via almost-OA.

Embargoes will all die (I promise!) a very quick death once all institutions mandate immediate deposit like this; but embargoes will win the day if institutions foolishly make the mandated deposit date contingent on the publisher embargo's say-so.

Several other points:

(1) Unlike Blackwell's journals, most journals (62%) already endorse immediate OA deposit.

(2) There is no reason whatsoever to hold out for the publisher's PDF: The author's postprint is just fine for all research purposes! The PDF is completely irrelevant, one way or the other.

(3) Although it must always be left as an individual judgment for the author to make in the case of each individual paper, it is also good scholarly practice, wherever possible, to also deposit, even earlier, the pre-refereeing preprint (especially if submitting to an embargo publisher): The repository will tag the preprint clearly as an unrefereed draft, with a prominent link to the refereed postprint (and from there to the "Fair Use" button); this will also allow search engines to pick up the full-text for full-text indexing in the case of a Closed Access deposit, leading to many more discoveries of both the preprint and the postprint.

I do not for one microsecond believe that any publisher's statement that "a corrected version of the preprint (i.e., the postprint) cannot be made OA immediately" has any legal validity; nor do I think such nonsense could ever be enforced, had it had any legal validity. But instead of wasting still more time to wait for people to at last realize this, and to set access to their immediately deposited postprints as OA immediately, the immediate-deposit/optional-access policy (plus the "Fair Use" button) are the best interim compromise solution.

Then nature can take its course. And meanwhile researcher access needs are taken care of, almost-immediately, through almost-OA, during any putative embargo period.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

EDINA, SHERPA and JISC have just announced DEPOT, which looks as if it will be a superb central service for the UK, and a model for all countries worldwide that wish to provide Open Access to their research output.

DEPOT is many things, but chiefly a mediator for UK Institutional Repositories (IRs):

(a) If your institution already has an IR, Depot will redirect your deposit there, while also registering it and tracking it centrally, to make sure the deposit is picked up by the major search engines.

(b) If your institution does not yet have an IR, you can deposit directly in Depot and Depot will provide access to your deposit until your institution has an IR, at which point it will transfer your deposit to your IR.

I have mostly only congratulations for the designers and implementers of Depot. It is the optimal synthesis: It reinforces the author's own IR as the canonical locus for OA content. It monitors and integrates all of the UK's IRs. And it provides a provisional locus for any researcher whose institution does not yet have an IR (or for researchers who are not affiliated with an institution).

I would, however, like to recommend three small but very important changes in the following:

(1) Currently, Depot states that only postprints can be deposited.

(The postprint is either the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication, or the published PDF itself.)

(2) Currently, Depot does not state when deposit should be done.

(3) Currently, Depot states that the deposit depends on the policy of the publisher.

(The depositor is referred to the Romeo directory of publisher policies on author self-archiving to ascertain whether and when he can deposit.)

These are the corresponding three small but crucial changes I would strongly urge:

(1') Do not restrict deposit to postprints: Include preprints too.

(Preprints are pre-peer-review versions of articles that are to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.)

(2') Make it clear that the deposit of the postprint should be done as soon as the article is accepted for publication.

(The preprint should be deposited even earlier, to be followed by the postprint as soon as it exists.) And most important of all:

(3') Make it clear that the deposit itself, and its timing, does not depend in any way on publisher policy: only the OA-access-setting date might.

The postprints of any articles for which the publisher has not yet endorsed immediate self-archiving can still be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, but the deposit can be provisionally set as Closed Access, instead of Open Access, if the author wishes, with only the metadata accessible to all.

Depot's FAQ is not quite clear on the relation between Depot and the many IRs. Presumably if the author's institution has an IR, Depot will redirect the deposit there. (In that case, excluding preprints is not a good idea, not only because they are crucial precursors of postprints, but because all IRs will welcome both preprints and postprints. It would be a very bad idea to try to draw a formal line between the two. Let peer review itself do that, and then the journal's name, both prominent metadata tags in EPrints as well as other IRs.)

Moreover, as it is stated that Depot itself will be based on the EPrints IR software, this means that Depot will have (i) the option for Closed Access deposit as well as (ii) the "Fair Use" Button -- REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT. With those features, almost-OA can be provided almost-immediately and semi-automatically for any Closed Access deposit:

Any would-be user webwide, led by the metadata to a deposit that turns out to be in Closed Access, can just copy/paste his email address into a box that is provided by the software, and then press the REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT button. This immediately sends the author an automated email eprint request, containing a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automated emailing of one copy of his eprint to the requester.

There is a vast difference between deferring deposit until the publisher endorses OA deposit, and doing an immediate CA deposit, deferring only the OA-setting. Depot should definitely facilitate the latter practice.

(Some clarification is also needed of the mechanism of transfer from Depot to the author's IR.)

But overall, the Depot service is near-perfect, and once optimised with these two small changes, it is worthy of not only admiration but emulation worldwide.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum