Saturday, April 7. 2007Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) adopts Green OA self-archiving mandate![]() "After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories. This needs to be done at the latest one year after the publication date, to increase visibility and impact. More information on the conditions can be found in their general agreement for researchers." ![]() (1) "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" ![]() (3) "EPrints 'Request eprint' button"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, April 5. 2007Alma Swan on Open Access in American Scientist (the journal)![]() ![]() Sunday, April 1. 2007Green Grows the RCUK![]() ![]() ![]() See Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) Friday, March 30. 2007Mobilising Scholarly Society Membership Support for FRPAA and EC A1On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Andrew A. Adams wrote: You are right that scholarly society members need to be specially mobilised by OA advocates now, to get them aware and on-side. I think David Prosser and Fred Friend in the UK and Heather Joseph and Peter Suber in the US are in the best position to guide a systematic campaign to mobilise support for EC A1 and FRPAA from the society memberships. Many of the societies have signed the EU or US petitions (although obviously the most important membership targets are those whose officers have not signed)."On the subject of Scholarly Society Publishers, you agree that it is likely that the heads of scholarly societies will be lining up alongside the commercial publishers in lobbying against OA mandates in the US. Since most scholarly societies are semi-democratic bodies, we need to try to mobilise OA advocates to use those democratic avenues to transform the Scholarly Societies into lobbyists for instead of lobbyists against, OA. Of course, as always, this requires the time of OA advocates. The specific goal would be to inform members about the great likelihood that their own officers will be actively lobbying against Green OA mandates (FRPAA and EC A1), and hence the need to make the will of the grassroots membership known, heard and felt. The core issue is that Scholarly Society officers are taking exactly the same stance as commercial publishers (either opposing OA altogether, or opposing the OA Green Mandates that are designed to reach OA), but they are doing so in the name of protecting the society's publishing revenue streams for the sake of the society's "good works" (which consist of funding meetings, scholarships and lobbying) -- and they are doing so in the name of their memberships, without consultation, disclosure, or answerability. The memberships have to be very clearly informed of this, and of the fact that renouncing OA in favour of protecting their society's publishing revenue streams in order to ensure that they can continue to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying would amount to the individual members themselves agreeing to subsidise meetings, scholarships and lobbying with their own lost daily research impact and income, lost because would-be users of their work are being denied access to their work because their institutions cannot afford subscription access to it (the supplementary access that the Green OA Mandates are specifically meant to provide).Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor The findings on the way self-archiving doubles research usage and impact in all fields should be made very clearly known to the membership, so they fully understand and appreciate the central causal contingency that is actually at issue in all of this: The solution is very simple: Scholarly society meetings, scholarships and lobbying should sustain themselves in other ways in the OA era, rather than by reducing members' research impact. Reducing research access is the exact opposite of the purpose of a scholarly society. Raising the registration fee for meetings, and adjusting membership fees to the level agreed upon for the funding of scholarships and lobbying makes the system far more open and answerable to the real needs of the membership.Bibliography of Findings on the Open Access Impact Advantage (I am certain that members will be appalled once the publishing books are opened and they see how small a proportion of their society's publishing profits is actually being used for these good works: The books will show that those scholarly societies that have any sizeable publishing profits to speak of tend to use them, like all other publishers, to increase their publishing division's size, staff and perquisites, not to fund "good works." The American Chemical Society is the prime example of this. Publishing has become a state-within-a-state in the profitable societies, and that is why they sound so much like commercial publishers, differing only in the fact that they can add a specious note of self-righteousness to their resistance to OA, citing their "good works." The remedy, of course, is to remind the membership of the actual mandate of scholarly societies, which is to promote the scholarship, not to profit from limiting it.) Moreover, a long period of peaceful coexistence between subscription revenues and Green OA self-archiving mandates is still ahead of us, because it takes time for the mandates to take effect, with OA growing anarchically across all journals, not individually, journal by journal. Even in fields that have had 100% Green OA for years now -- notably the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, which have both attested to this publicly -- Green OA self-archiving has not yet produced any detectable decline in subscription revenues. Stevan HarnadBerners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 27. 2007Australian Productivity Commission Report: Trojan Horse-Play![]() What a word salad is the Australian government Productivity Commission report on Public Support for Science and Innovation. All that jabber, a lot of it incoherent, but what it amounts to is a total confusion about Green and Gold, OA self-archiving and OA publishing, institutional repositories and central repositories, embargoes, and what needs to be mandated and how (and why). A perfect entry-way for the Trojan Horse of paying the asking price for pre-emptive Gold OA instead of just mandating Green OA. (Doesn't even seem to realize that combining payment with embargoes is adding insult to injury!) A mess. They should take it back and try (seriously this time) to think it through, clearly, and reduce it to the few sentences it merits. And those sentences are already known: Mandate Green OA self-archiving of all published articles in Institutional Repositories (deposit required immediately upon publication, even if provisionally in Closed Access). Fund Gold OA only if you really have the spare change; otherwise, wait until it's needed: If/when institutional subscriptions are unsustainably cancelled, use (part of) the institutional savings to pay for the Gold OA publication charges for institutional research output. Not before!That's all that's needed. The rest is all confusion and folly. Sunday, March 25. 2007The European Commission has already mandated Green OA!![]() If I have not misunderstand, N. Miradon has drawn to our attention here an existing EU/EC policy under which it would be possible to implement an ID/OA mandate for EU research funding with no further legislative or consultative changes required at all! (See comments further below: It looks to me as if pointing this out to the EC would be the shortest and easiest route to the adoption of the EC A1 recommendation -- since strongly supported by the Brussels Open Access Petition -- to implement Green OA self-archiving, for, in effect, it is already mandated! The only thing that still needs to be specified is trivial and noncontroversial: the locus and mode of submission and storage of the already mandated publication. Currently it needs to be sent in by email; the only change needed is to require it to be deposited in a Closed Access URL in an Institutional Repository! More about this below.) A few suggestions are added below concerning the all-important locus of deposit of the published research documents. It is very important (in order to generate a coherent, systematic, universally scaleable solution) that the default locus of deposit should be specified as the researcher's own (OAI-compliant) Institutional Repository (IR). Other loci are possible if the researcher's institution does not yet have an IR: there are numerous possible Central Repositories (CRs), national and international, and the EU could perhaps also provide one of its own; but the preferred locus should be the researcher's own IR. The EU policy will also help encourage research institutions to create their own IRs if they have not done so already, and to fill them also with their non-EU-funded research output. That will complement the funded research and make all European peer-reviewed research output OA, maximising its usage and impact: Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) "Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999) "Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003) "France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories" (started Oct 2006) Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? A few comments and suggestions on N. Miradon's text: On Sat, 24 Mar 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:I would add here that depositing them in an interoperable OAI-compliant repository would be optimal, preferably the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR).
The web page or portal can be harvested from the EU researchers' IRs, or it can consist of a list of the projects, or the papers resulting from the projects, together with a link to their URL in the IR in which they are deposited.
The OAI protocol is the standard for making the IRs interoperable. There may need to be some further tag for specifically selecting EU funded publications.
This existing EU/EC policy is already a godsend, as it already provides the basis for the EU to adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate (ID/OA) (also called the "dual deposit/release strategy") without any further need of legislation or consultation: As the EU already requires (i.e., mandates) both (1) the electronic copy of the publication, and (2) the right to make it OA (if and when the copyright agreement with the publisher allows it), the only thing left to stipulate is how "send[ing] to the commission an electronic copy" should be done, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the form of depositing it in the researcher's own IR (preferably, or in a OAI-compliant CR otherwise), in immediate Open Access if possible, otherwise in Closed Access -- and merely sending the commission the URL for the (Closed Access) deposit! The EU can harvest the document if it wishes, or link it in a portal. The only change involved here is a specification of the mode of submission for what has already been mandated by the EC. "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" "Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)" Dual Deposit/Release Strategy A National Open Access Policy (The NIH had a similar opportunity to do this in 2004, but failed to take notice.) "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy(Oct 2004)" And through links to the researcher's own IR.
![]() "Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication... but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author..." Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, March 19. 2007What Students Can Do To Support OA![]() Dear Brian: Sunday, March 18. 2007Forging An OA Alliance With R&D Industries and Mobilizing University MandatesMany thanks for M. Miradon's remarkable analysis and valuable advice in his commentary on Richard Poynder's rousing article about the struggle for Open Access to European Research. (M. Miradon, I do not know who you are, but I infer you are a present or formal EC official with a great deal of experience with EU politics and a certain sympathy for OA. The OA movement is indeed indebted to you for your insights and insider information.) The "OA movement" is really just a loose federation of mostly academics. It is not skilled or experienced in the area of political lobbying, alas. Some sectors (SPARC US and Europe, perhaps) might be in a position to become more sophisticated in lobbying, but the individual OA activists, being employed academics -- researchers first and activists only second -- are not. The lobbying wings of industries are paid professionals. We have none of those. There is a hope, though, namely, a strategic alliance (perhaps mediated by EURAB) between the academic-researcher OA activists and the vast R&D industry that applies the fruits of research. The R&D industries are far bigger than the publishing industry. They need to be explicitly mobilized to our side (because they too have a strong interest in open access to research, not for themselves directly [which they can easily afford to pay] but for all researchers worldwide [who cannot]: It is researcher-to-researcher access and collaborative/cumulative research progress that supplies R&D industries with the research findings for their R&D applications. But let me make a parallel point: OA is (fortunately) not doomed to wait for legislation, and for lobbying and convincing legislators, in order to prevail. Let us not forget for a minute that if researchers themselves had any sense, we would already have 100% OA, for we would simply self-archive spontaneously. We are too sluggish, busy and confused. Fine, so we need mandates from our research funders and institutions (who are merely busy and confused). Part of their confusion is that they cannot mandate (Green) OA because of something or other having to do with the publishing industry. (It is as vague as that!) So the problem falls into the laps of legislators, who must mandate the researchers' funders and institutions to mandate the researchers to move their fingers. But legislators have not only laps, but bottoms, which they must protect -- from the many lobbying interests to which they are vulnerable. So lobbying becomes the name of the game, for the legislative route. But there is a parallel route, and it has already been engaged in the UK (first) and to an extent also in Europe and Australia: This is the research funding councils (RCUK, ERC, ARC), who can take a cue from the inclinations and interests of the research community, and proceed with a Green OA mandate even if the legislators are deadlocked. And they have begun. And so have individual universities and research institutions. See ROARMAP. And in that sector OA activists can be effective (and have been) without having to learn to navigate the corridors of legislative power. So, in my view, the Brussels meeting was a way to display the will of the research community: the EC petition did that, and now it has given birth to a US petition too. Petitions, of course, will not generate mandates either. But they will help the OA movement "lobby" funders and universities directly, to mandate. Indeed, funders, universities, research institutions, academies and societies, and R&D industries are signing the petitions, officially, as organisations. There remains but a small step to point out that these organisations need not petition the legislators to mandate them to mandate: They can mandate directly themselves! That is the next step: There was already a logical gap in 2002, between researchers (34,000) signing the PLoS petition to publishers, demanding OA, yet not moving their fingers to deposit their own papers. There is now a second logical gap in research funders and institutions signing the EU and US petitions to legislators to mandate Green OA globally, while they do not go ahead individually and mandate OA locally, for their own funding body or their own university! The gap between fingers signing petitions, fingers adopting mandates and fingers depositing papers will be bridged now. It has become too glaringly obvious to be ignored, with all these somber OA declarations, initiatives and manifestos, signed, but no practical action taken! We will keep pursuing the indirect legislative route for global mandates, yes, but we will also publicise and accelerate the direct research-community route of divide and conquer: Local mandates are fully within our own hands, especially at the university level. See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) (also known as the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum PS The request to present the petition to the commissioner in public at the Brussels meeting was denied, but it was nevertheless presented (in private), the presentation was photographed (by Leslie Chan) and the photos were presented at the last session of the meeting, publicly, in Alma Swan's stirring Powerpoint series. Thursday, March 15. 2007Don't Count Your (Golden) Chickens Before Your (Green) Eggs Are Laid![]() ![]()
I would dearly love to adhere to my dictum "Hypotheses non Fingo," but with hypotheses being finged willy-nilly by others -- at the cost of neglecting or even discouraging tried-and-tested practical (and a-theoretical) action (i.e., Green OA mandates) -- I am left with little choice but to resort to counter-hypothesizing: On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Michael Kurtz [MK] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: MK: "(A) THE CURRENT SITUATION. The quantity of scientific research has been increasing exponentially for several generations. This increase, roughly an order of magnitude during my lifetime (~4% per year, essentially the same as the growth in the global economy), has been mediated and enabled by the existing system for scientific communication, namely toll access journals and libraries."Correct. And another thing has happened in the past generation or so: The birth of the Net and Web, making it possible to supplement toll-access with author-provided free online access (Green OA). That development has next to nothing to do with the growth in the number of articles, nor with the price of journals. It has to do with the possibility of supplementing toll access with free online access. MK: "(B) THE CURRENT COSTS. Direct costs for journals are remarkably small, about 1% of the total research and development budget (1). This compares with other costs involved such as (2) unpaid refereeing and editing 1% and the non-acquisition costs of a library, 2%. Possible changes to the direct cost of journals, up or down, are likely to be smaller than the error in estimating the yearly inflation adjustments."Correct, but irrelevant to the question of providing free online access for would-be users who cannot afford toll access. Yes, if the money currently being spent on user-institution access-tolls were instead redirected to pay for author-institution publication charges, no more or less money would be spent, and online access would be free (Gold OA). But that is happening far too slowly, and does not depend only on the researcher community. Supplementing toll access with free online access (Green OA) is entirely in the hands of the research community. Providing supplementary online access for free can be accelerated to 100% within a year or two through the adoption of research funder and university Green OA self-archiving mandates. That too is in the hands of the research community. Until it is done, research usage and impact continues to be lost, needlessly, daily. MK: "(C) THE POSSIBLE BENEFIT OF OPEN ACCESS. The purpose of OA is to increase the amount and quality of research. The growth rate of research is currently ~4%; if OA is a massive success, it could perhaps increase this growth rate by 10%, which would be a yearly increment of 0.4% of total research. It may be expected that the greatest effect of OA would be in cross-disciplinary research, such as Nanotechnology."(The quantitative estimates are still rather speculative. [Here are some more.] But let us agree that providing OA will indeed increase research productivity and progress.) MK: "(D) THE RISK OF OPEN ACCESS. By substantially changing the economics of journal publishing OA risks the catastrophic financial collapse of some publishers. This is especially true for the mandated 100% green OA path."If and when mandated 100% Green OA does cause subscriptions to be cancelled to unsustainable levels, the resultant user-institution subscription savings can be redirected to pay instead for author-institution publication charges (Gold OA). Green OA mandates, by research institutions and funders are possible (indeed actual), and can grow institution by institution and funder by funder. If Gold OA (with its attendant redirection of subscription funds) can be mandated at all, it certainly cannot be done institution by institution and funder by funder (with 24,000 journals, 10,000 institutions, and hundreds of public funders worldwide). Redirection, if it is to occur at all, has to be driven by Green OA mandates. Pre-emptive redirection of funds (by an institution or a funder) toward Gold OA, without being preceded by 100% Green OA, is a waste of money, effort and time, today. (After 100% Green OA it is fine, as long as there is no double-paying, through redirection of research money instead of subscription money.) MK: "(E) CURRENT GREEN MODELS. There are basically two types of Green repository: centralized, such as arXiv, and distributed, as the institutional repositories. Only arXiv has much of a track record. After more than 15 years arXiv only has more than half the refereed articles in the two subfields of High Energy Physics and Astrophysics; only HEP has more than 90%. It does not appear that there is any subfield of science where the existing institutional repositories contain more than half of the refereed literature."It is completely irrelevant where the free online articles are located. (The IRs and CRs are all OAI-interoperable.) What matters is that 100% of articles should be free online. Spontaneous central archiving has not reached 100% in 15 years (where it is being done at all). The natural and optimal place for institutions to mandate the deposit of their own article output is in their own IRs. That covers all of research output space. Mandated IRs fill within two years. Research funder mandates should reinforce the institutional mandates. If CRs are desired, they can harvest from the IRs. MK: "(F) CURRENT GOLD MODELS. Page charges have existed for decades as a method of financing journals; while their use has been in decline for some time several venerable titles use them, in whole or in part, and there are several new, page charge funded, OA journals. Direct subsidies, by scholarly organizations and funding agencies, have long been used to support scientific publishing. Nearly all technical reports series are funded in this manner."Publication charges are currently being fully covered by subscriptions, but access is not open to all would-be users, hence research usage and impact (productivity and progress) are being needlessly lost. There is no realistic way (nor is there a will) to redirect the subscription money currently being spent by 10,000 user-institutions worldwide for various subsets of 24,000 journals toward instead paying author-institution Gold OA publication charges. Hence the only money that can be redirected to pay for Gold OA today (by institutions or funders) is money that is currently being spent on research or other expenses, thereby effectively double-paying for publication (and at a time when subscription costs are already inflated). Hence if the goal is 100% OA, the way to reach it is through institutions and funders mandating Green OA. After that, redirect toward Gold OA to your heart's content. But to do so before that, or instead of that, is pure folly. P.S. The journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem are not the same problem. Green OA mandates will solve the research accessibility problem for sure. They may or may not cause unsustainable cancellations, but either way they will ease, though not solve, the journal affordability problem (by making the decision about which journal subscriptions to purchase from a limited serials budget into less of a life-or-death question, given that 100% Green OA is there as a safety net for accessing whatever an institutions cannot afford). Green OA, if it causes cancellations, will also cause cost-cutting and downsizing (the IRs can take over the access-provision and archiving load, leaving the journals with peer-review management as their only service), making (post-Green) Gold OA more affordable than it would be today (pre-Green). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, March 14. 2007US and EU Both Have Petitions for OA Mandates
The US Alliance for Tax-Payer Access and other sponsors have just launched a US counterpart to the highly successful and still-growing EU Petition calling for Open Access to be mandated by research funders and institutions.
The EU Petition already has over 23,000 signatories, including over 1000 organisations (universities, research funders, academies of sciences, scholarly societies, research and development industries, publishers). If you are officially signing for an organisation, please don't just sign the petition! Do locally what you are petitioning for: Adopt an OA self-archiving mandate at your institution, as the Rector of the University of Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier has just done (see below) and register your mandate in ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies). Liege's is the latest of 9 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, and 11 research funder mandates already adopted worldwide, plus 5 funder mandates and 1 multi-institution mandate proposed. Not only has Universite de Liege adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate, but it has adopted the ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate recommended by EURAB and specifically designed to immunise the policy from all the permissions problems (imagined and real) and embargoes that have been delaying adoption of Green OA mandates or have led to the adoption of sub-optimal mandates (that allowed deposit to be delayed or not done at all, depending on publisher policy). Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)The key to the ID/OA mandate's success and power is that it separates the mandatory component (deposit of the final peer-reviewed draft immediately upon acceptance for publication -- no delays, no exceptions) from the access-setting component. (Immediate setting of access to the deposit as Open Access is strongly recommended, but not mandatory: provisionally setting access as Closed Access is an allowable option where judged necessary.) It is to be hoped now that the ULg policy will first spread to the other francophone universities of Belgium, then to the rest of Belgium, Europe, and worldwide. University OA self-archiving mandates are an essential complement to the researcher funder OA self-archiving mandates. University mandates cover unfunded as well as funded research, and provide the all-important locus for the deposit (whether mandated by the funder or the university): the researcher's own university's Institutional Repository.Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:35:15 -0400 Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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