Self-Archiving Mandates

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SUMMARY: (1) It would be a great strategic error if the EC allows the publishing industry lobby to draw it back into further talks and studies, instead of implementing the OA self-archiving mandate (EC A1) proposed in January 2006, and since implemented by the ERC and reinforced by EURAB.
      (2) The other aim of both the publishing lobby and the Gold OA publishing lobby is to focus the EC on the issue of "funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system" instead of on the issue of providing access.
      (3) The research publishing industry is not the industrial dimension of research: the R&D industry is. R&D's revenues are orders of magnitude bigger than those of the publishing industry, and it shares in the current, actual loss of research access and impact that OA is meant to cure -- a cure the publishing industry lobby is (successfully) endeavouring to prevent:
      (4) The substance of the recommendation of the EC petition and its 22,000+ signatories (so far), including 1000+ official organisation signatories -- universities, research institutes, scientific academies, R&D industries, etc. -- is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) should be mandated. The voices raised for OA were not about funding Gold OA, and certainly not about diverting scarce research funds from research to paying publishers for Gold OA.
      (5) The research community rightly resists OA Mandates being coupled in any way with the redirection of scarce research funds, away from research and toward the payment of Gold OA publishing fees. There is no need at all to couple the EC OA mandate with the diversion of any funds from research to pay Gold OA fees today. There is no reason for the mandate to make any reference to Gold OA fees at all. The mandate should be a Green OA self-archiving mandate. That is all.

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The EC proposes to "contribute to the debate among stakeholders and policy makers by encouraging experiments with new models that may improve access to and dissemination of scientific information [and by] funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system"

The five suggestions I shall make below about the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access are controversial, but I am quite confident that the points are valid. My confidence comes from having been involved in this for a very, very long time, having heard everything already many, many times over and having given it all a very great amount of thought (more thought than it deserved, because most of the misunderstandings are so transparent and elementary!).

(1) It would be a great strategic error on the part of the EC to allow itself to be drawn back into further talks and studies, instead of implementing the OA self-archiving mandate (EC A1) that was proposed in January 2006, and that has since been implemented by the ERC and reinforced by EURAB.

The talks and studies have already taken place, for years now, many times over. The EC is basically stepping back to the point where the UK Parliamentary Select Committee was in 2003: It too conducted an extensive inquiry, with all interested parties, and made the same recommendation as EC A1: Mandate OA self-archiving.

And the response was the same: publishing industry lobbying, the usual ominous warnings that mandating OA self-archiving will destroy journals and will destroy a multi-billion dollar industry, the usual conflation of Green OA and Gold OA (author OA self-archiving, Green, and journal OA publishing, Gold) and the usual attempt to delay, derail, filibuster in any way possible.

And the publishing lobby was successful in the UK -- for a while. It successfully got the ear of Lord Sainsbury, the UK Industry minister (just as it did the EC Commissioner!), But in the end, reason prevailed, and now we have 5 out of the 8 UK Research Councils plus the Wellcome Trust mandating Green OA self-archiving after all, and more mandates planned.

The publishing lobby will always say we need more studies and consultations. They have to, because they have absolutely no empirical evidence to support their Doomsday Scenario: There is not even evidence that self-archiving -- even where it has reached 100% for years now -- causes cancellations at all, let alone destroys journals. In the complete absence of negative evidence, and with all actual evidence positive -- for the benefits of OA to research, researchers, and the R&D industry -- the only thing the publishing lobby can do is to raise the volume on its dire but evidence-free predictions: and keep asking for more studies, for more evidence!

But what the EC should be asking itself is: What studies? and evidence of what? Surely the only way to test whether there is any truth at all to the hypothesis that mandating OA self-archiving will generate cancellations is to mandate OA self-archiving and see whether it generates cancellations! The EC does not fund all, most, or much of the contents of any individual journal. Hence it is enormously improbable that an EC self-archiving mandate will have any significant effect on any journal's subscriptions. But the only way to see whether it does, is to go ahead and adopt the mandate. Its effects can be reviewed and reconsidered after 1, 2, 3 years.

Instead doing nothing under the guise of "debate among stakeholders and policy makers [and] encouraging experiments with new models" is of no use at all.

(2) The other aim of both the publishing lobby and the Gold OA publishing lobby is to focus the EC on the issue of "funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system" instead of on the issue of providing access.

The EC meeting was dominated, appallingly, by discussion of journal revenues and economics (to no effect whatsoever, as all that was said has already been said, countless times before, for nearly a decade now). There was next to no discussion of the daily, weekly, monthly cumulative loss of research access and impact that is continuing as we continue to talk about the same things over and over.

Recall that publishers' warnings about future loss of revenue are hypothetical, whereas researchers' loss of current access and impact is actual, and cumulative, and also means loss of revenue, from lost R&D industrial applications: losses on the public investment in research. The cure for that loss of access and impact, and of R&D industrial revenue, is to mandate OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with the the economics of funding Gold OA journals.

The focus on funding journals is a red herring. What the EC needs to do is to mandate OA self-archiving. That is Green OA. It does not require funding anything: just mandating self-archiving.

Publishers are publishers, whether they are non-OA publishers lobbying against OA and self-archiving, or Gold OA publishers lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates. How and why did the EC manage to get diverted from the problem of research access (for which the solution is to mandate Green OA) to the problem of journal economics?

(3) The research publishing industry is not the industrial dimension of research: The R&D industry is. And the R&D industry and its revenues are orders of magnitude bigger than those of the publishing industry. And the R&D industry shares in the current, actual loss of research access and impact that OA is meant to cure -- and that the publishing industry lobby is (successfully) endeavouring to prevent.

Why is the EC inviting and listening so intently to the views of the publishing industry regarding access to research, instead of listening to the views of the R&D industry (along with the views of the research community itself)? As I have said many times before, this is worse than the tail wagging the dog: It is the flea on the tail of the dog, wagging the dog.

(4) The substance of the recommendation of the EC petition and its 24,000+ signatories (so far), including 1000+ official organisation signatories -- universities, research institutes, scientific academies, R&D industries, etc. -- is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) should be mandated. The voices raised for OA were not about funding Gold OA, and certainly not about diverting scarce research funds from research to paying publishers for Gold OA.

Gold OA cannot be mandated. There seems to be some profound confusion about that, even among the proponents of the EC Recommendation: The only ones who can be mandated to do anything by a funder are the fundees: the researchers funded to do the research.

There seems to be an incoherent idea afoot that, somehow, it is publishers who are to be mandated to do something. Publishers know very well that they cannot be mandated to do anything, but they are quite happy to draw out the consultations and "studies" on topics like embargoes and PDFs in order to give the impression that that is what this is all about.

What this is about is mandating OA by mandating that authors self-archive their own final drafts of journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The embargo question is only about the date at which those deposits should be made Open Access. (Till then, the deposits can be made Closed Access, but their metadata are still visible webwide, and individual eprints can be requested by users via email.)

But the all-important thing now is not the allowable length of this embargo, but mandating the deposit. The EC has allowed itself to be distracted from what this is all about, in order to focus instead on embargoes and on funding Gold OA! That can go on forever; meanwhile, daily, weekly cumulative loss of EU research access and impact continues, and with it loss in EU research productivity, progress, R&D applications, and R&D revenue.

Mandate Green OA self-archiving and then return to the endless consultations on embargo lengths and Gold OA funding! But don't allow Green mandates and OA to be filibustered still longer with these studies and consultation that lead nowhere but to more studies and consultations, as EU research access and impact keep hemorrhaging needlessly.

Last point:

(5) One genuine (and valid) point of resistance on the part of the research community (rather than the publishing community) against OA Mandates concerns their being coupled in any way with the redirection of scarce research funds, away from research and toward the payment of Gold OA publishing fees. There is no need at all to couple the EC OA mandate with the diversion of any funds from research to pay Gold OA fees. There is no reason for the mandate to make any reference to Gold OA fees at all. The mandate should be a Green OA self-archiving mandate. That is all.

(In this respect, the Wellcome Trust mandate is a bad model to follow. The Wellcome Trust is a private charity and can do whatever it chooses with its funds. But diverting public research funds to pay needlessly for Gold OA publishing charges when it is not at all necessary -- because subscriptions are still paying for publication and Green self-archiving can be mandated to provide OA -- is an arbitrary and ill-thought-out step that can only generate research community resistance.)

The need for and benefits of OA are a certainty, as is the ability of Green OA self-archiving mandates to make all funded research OA. In contrast, all hypotheses about the way this will or should affect the future of research publication are mere speculation.

The publishing industry has been freely speculating -- with zero evidence -- that mandating Green OA will destroy journals and peer review. The way to counter such speculations is not to be frightened by them into inaction, simply because they are fierce speculations. The way to counter them is with plausible counterspeculations. So here is one: If and when mandated Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable -- because all articles are OA and subscriptions are cancelled -- all the subscribing institutions will have vast windfall savings from their cancelled subscriptions: Those same institutional windfall savings will then be available for redirection to pay for institutional Gold OA fees for publishing their outgoing articles, without diverting a penny from research.

That will be the time to make the transition to Gold OA publishing, not now, when most journals are not OA, when subscriptions are paying for all publishing costs, when scarce research funds would need to be diverted to pay for any Gold OA publishing costs, and when what is urgently needed is not funds to pay for Gold OA: what is urgently needed is OA. And it is already attainable, via Green. All that needs to be done is to mandate it.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Open Access (OA) to research maximizes research usage, impact, applications, productivity and progress in the online era. Hence OA is optimal for researchers, for their institutions and funders, for the vast research industry, and for the tax-paying public that funds the research and for whose benefit the research is conducted. OA is accordingly inevitable.

The way to hasten and ensure this optimal and inevitable (and already overdue) outcome is for researchers' funders and institutions to mandate that researchers self-archive their published research articles in their OA institutional repositories, free for all users. (Without a mandate, about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously; with a mandate, over 90% comply.)

Self-archiving mandates are accordingly being adopted by a growing number of funders and institutions worldwide, and are being proposed by still more of them -- notably the European Commission for European research and the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) for most of US research.

The publishing industry lobby has been attempting to derail or delay the optimal and inevitable, prophesying, with no evidence whatsoever, that self-archiving mandates will destroy journals and a viable industry.

But in reality this doomsday prophecy is completely false, and in any case the publishing industry is merely the flea on the tail of the dog: The tax-paying public, the research community -- and the vast research and development industry that applies the fruits of research for the general public and for the national and international economy -- are the dog.

The flea has so far successfully wagged the dog, and is lately resorting to "pit-bull" tactics to try to continue doing so. But fortunately, the flea is fated to fail to forestall the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the research applications industry, and the tax-paying public. OA self-archiving mandates are now imminent, as the sleepy dog is at last waking and coming to its senses about what is in its own best (and hence the public) interest in the online age.

The flea can and will, of course, successfully adapt to the new online reality; what it cannot hope to do is to continue to defer the optimal and inevitable indefinitely.

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

Giles, J. (2007) PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access. Nature 5 January 2007.

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).

Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).

Harnad, S. (2005) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research.

Harnad, Stevan (2005) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research Investment. In Steele, Prof Colin, Eds. Proceedings National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney, Australia.

Houghton, J., Steele, C. & Sheehan, P. (2006) Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits. A report to the Department of Education, Science and Training.

Houghton, J. & Sheehan, P. (2006) The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings. Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University

Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).

Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February.

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.

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.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The "DC Principles" Coalition is once again recycling old arguments that have already been repeatedly refuted:

(1) "Mandating self-archiving will destroy journals": There exists no evidence to date -- even in the subfields where self-archiving has been at or near 100% for years -- that author self-archiving ("Green OA") even causes cancellations; but if/when it ever does, publishing will adapt, quite naturally, first cutting costs, and then, if subscriptions become unustainable, converting to OA publishing ("Gold OA"). In other words, this doomsday scenario is a counterfactual myth, designed to stave off the obvious, demonstrated and reachable benefits of the online era for research and researchers through crude alarmist speculation, based on neither objective evidence nor rigorous reasoning.
(2) "Mandating self-archiving will force a conversion to OA publishing which will force money to be redirected from scarce research funds": No research funds need be redirected if OA publishing comes only after those self-same subscription cancellations that were hypothesized to force the conversion, for then institutions will pay for their researchers' OA publishing costs by redirecting part of their windfall subscription-cancellation savings, rather than redirecting them from scarce research funds, as they would have to do if they had to pay OA publishing charges now, when the money is still tied up in subscriptions, and subscriptions are still paying the costs of publication.
(3) "Mandating self-archiving will destroy peer review": Peers review for free. Publishers just manage the peer-review process and certify its outcome with their journal's name and reputation. That is the service that OA publishing charges will pay for, redirected from institutional subscription savings, if/when cancellation pressure ever forces a conversion to OA publishing; until and unless that happens, self-archiving mandates will simply do what they are intended to do: provide 100% OA.
(4) "Mandating self-archiving will destroy Learned Societies' other 'good works'": The research community was never consulted, and never agreed to subsidise Learned Societies' other 'good works' from researchers' own lost access and impact. Those 'good works' (publicity, meetings, scholarships, mentoring, etc.), will need to find other forms of support if/when Learned Society publishing revenue surpluses no longer cover them (at the expense of research access and impact).
(5) "Mandating self-archiving means government control of publication": Nonsense: Self-archiving means researchers' ensuring that their own research findings are accessible (online) to all their would-be users, in their own Institutional Repositories, rather than just to those users whose institution happens to be able to afford a subscription to the journal in which they happen to be published, as was the case before the online era made OA possible.
(6) "Mandated self-archiving is unnecessary because publishers already provide a lot of free access of their own accord": Self-archiving mandates are to ensure OA for all those articles to which publishers do not provide free access of their own accord.

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On Tue, 20 Feb 2007, Martin Frank, Executive Director, American Physiological Society, wrote:

DC Principles: The following press release was posted to the DC Principles website.
"Nonprofit Publishers Oppose Government Mandates for Scientific Publishing"
Washington, DC (February 20, 2007) A coalition of 75 nonprofit publishers opposes any legislation that would abruptly end a publishing system that has nurtured independent scientific inquiry for generations.

And the evidence that mandating self-archiving -- as 5 of 8 UK research councils, the Wellcome Trust, Australian Research Council, NHMRC, CERN and a growing number of universities worldwide have already done, and EC, ERC, EURAB, CIHR and FRPAA are proposing to do -- "would abruptly end the publishing system"?

Or is this just the same doomsday prophecy we have heard (and heard refuted) over and over, simply being repeated louder and louder?

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

DC Principles: One such measure, the Federal Research Public Access Act introduced in the 109th Congress would have required all federally funded research to be deposited in an accessible database within six months of acceptance in a scientific journal. Some open access advocates are pressing for the introduction of a similar measure in the 110th Congress.

A measure that, as noted above, is already being adopted worldwide, because of its vast benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the vast research and development industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research (see recent petition).

Are evidence-free doomsday prophecies from one service industry supposed to be grounds for denying these benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the vast research and development industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research?

Or is this just the flea on the tail of the dog, endeavouring to wag the dog?

DC Principles: In essence, such legislation would impose government-mandated access policies and government-controlled repositories for federally funded research published in scientific journals, according to members of the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition.

The self-archiving mandates require publicly funded research to be made publicly accessible to all users. The rhetoric of "government control" is shrill nonsense, in line with the data-free doomsday prophecies.

Is this the program of disinformation that the "DC Principles" Coalition have been counselled to disseminate by the esteemed public relations consultants of their STM confreres?

DC Principles: "We as independent publishers must determine when it is appropriate to make content freely available, and we believe strongly it should not be determined by government mandate" [said Martin Frank of the American Physiological Society and coordinator of the coalition]

The public funds it, researchers and their institutions conduct, write and peer-review it, all for free, but "publishers must determine when it is appropriate to make it freely available"? In exchange for having been given it free to sell, for having peer-reviewed it for free, and for having paid dearly for subscriptions in order to access it?

That's an awfully big price the public and the research community and research progress, and research applications are all expected to pay in exchange for the 3rd-party management of their free peer review service.

How much longer does the DC Principles Coalition imagine that the research community, the tax-paying public, and the vast research applications industry will keep giving this arbitrary assertion of right-of-determination, amplified by empty prophecies of doom, the undue credence it has enjoyed to date?

DC Principles: The Coalition also reaffirmed its ongoing practice of making millions of scientific journal articles available free of charge, without an additional financial burden on the scientific community or on funding agencies. More than 1.6 million free articles are already available to the public free of charge on HighWire Press.

Commendable. Now what about all the rest of the articles that their authors, funders and institutions likewise want to make freely available, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates?

DC Principles: "The scholarly publishing system is a delicate balance between the need to sustain journals financially and the goal of disseminating scientific knowledge as widely as possible. Publishers have voluntarily made more journal articles available free worldwide than at any time in history -- without government intervention," noted Kathleen Case of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Commendable. Now what about all the rest of the articles that their authors, funders and institutions likewise want to make freely available, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates?

DC Principles: The Coalition expressed concern that a mandate timetable for free access to all federally funded research would harm journals, scientists, and ultimately the public.

The doomsday prophecy again, repeated ever more shrilly to compensate for the complete absence of evidence in its support.

DC Principles: Subscriptions to journals with a high percentage of federally funded research would decline rapidly.

If and when the demand for a product declines, it is time to cut costs. If and when publishing downsizes to just the management of the peer review service, the institutional savings from the (hypothesized) subscription-declines will be more than enough to pay for peer review, per article published, on the open-access publishing model.

DC Principles: Subscription revenues support the quality control system known as peer review and also support the educational work of scientific societies that publish journals.

Subscription revenues will continue to flow as long as there is enough demand for the product. Once the only product needed is the peer review management service, the institutional savings will be enough to pay for its costs several times over.

At no time has the research community, its institutions or its funders, or the tax-paying public that funds its funders, been asked, nor has it ever agreed, to subsidise "the educational work of scientific societies" with its own lost research access and impact.

DC Principles: Undermining subscriptions would shift the cost of publication from the publisher who receives subscription revenue to the researcher who receives grants. Such a shift will: Divert scarce dollars from research. Publishers now pay the cost of publication out of subscription revenue; if the authors have to pay, the funds will come from their research grants.

No. Publication costs are currently being paid out of subscription revenues. On the hypothesis that institutions cancel those subscriptions, it is those same subscription revenue savings that can continue to pay for (what is left of) publication costs, per paper published. Not a penny of research grants need ever be redirected. The subscription savings will be redirected.

DC Principles: Nonprofit journals without subscription revenue have to rely on grants, which further diverts funding from research.

Journals that are subsidised today can continue to be subsidised tomorrow. Journals that are subscription-based today, if/when their subscriptions are cancelled, can be paid for (what is left of) their costs, per article, from the author's institutional subscription savings.

More than enough money is in the system. No doomsday scenario. Just downsizing and redirection of windfall savings.

DC Principles: Result in only well-funded scientists being able to publish their work.

Utter nonsense. See arithmetic above.

DC Principles: Reduce the ability of journals to fund peer review. Most journals spend 40% or more of their revenue on quality control through the peer review system; without subscription income and with limitations on author fees, peer review would suffer.

When there is no more demand for anything but peer review, institutions will have saved 100%, of which they need merely redirect 40% to pay for the peer review of their own publications. (Please do the arithmetic.)

DC Principles: Harm those scientific societies that rely on income from journals to fund the professional development of scientists. Revenues from scholarly publications fund research, fellowships to junior scientists, continuing education, and mentoring programs to increase the number of women and under-represented groups in science, among many other activities.

At no time has the research community, its institutions or its funders, or the tax-paying public that funds its funders, been asked, nor has it ever agreed, to subsidise "the professional development of scientists, research, fellowships to junior scientists, continuing education, and mentoring programs" with its own lost research access and impact.

DC Principles: Members of the DC Principles Coalition have long supported responsible free access to science and have made:
-- selected important studies immediately available online, in their entirety and at no charge
-- studies available at no cost to patients who request them
-- all abstracts immediately available online at no charge
-- full text of the journal available at no charge to everyone worldwide within months of publication, depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements
-- all journal content available free to scientists working in many low-income nations
-- articles available free of charge online through reference linking between journals
-- content available for indexing by major search engines so that readers worldwide can easily locate information

Commendable. Now what about all the rest of the articles that their authors, funders and institutions likewise want to make freely available, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates?

DC Principles: "By establishing government repositories for federally funded research, taxpayers would be paying for systems that duplicate the online archives already maintained by independent publishers," Case noted.

With the slight difference that the contents of the OA archives will be freely accessible to all, as per the proposed and adopted self-archiving mandates.

DC Principles: "The implications of the U.S. government becoming the world's largest publisher of scientific articles have not been addressed," she added.

Self-archiving mandates are for providing access to published articles, not for publishing them. In an online world, publishing means certifying papers as having met a journal's peer-review quality standards. That means the peer review service. That's all.

The implied "government monopoly" subtext is again just empty rhetoric, designed to inflame, not to inform honestly.

DC Principles: According to Frank, "As not-for-profit publishers, we believe that a free society allows for the co-existence of many publishing models, and we will continue to work closely with our publishing colleagues to set high standards for the scholarly publishing enterprise."

Amen.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Here is another brilliant incentive that all OA supporters are urged to put on their websites for yet another push to display the strength of the support for the petition in favour of the EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal, now fast approaching 1000 institutional and 20,000 individual signatories: (substituting : "<" for "{" and ">" for "}" )

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Please sign the {a href="http://www.ec-petition.eu/"}EC
Open Access Petition{/a}
in support of the European Commission's proposed
{a
href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/198-guid.html"}Open
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This banner (designed by Les Carr and Chris Gutteridge of University of Southampton's EPrints team) will scroll to show the highlights of the institutional signatories, a remarkable list.

The petition will continue to receive signatures indefinitely, but to sign in time to help the Brussels EU conference to display the will of the European and Worldwide Research community to the EC Science Commissioner, please sign within the next two days (research-related organisations especially -- universities, research institutes, academies of science and arts, learned societies, research funding agencies -- are encouraged to make a show of strength.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Please pardon me a moment of Pannonian pride:

It is mete and fitting that the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Professor E. Sylvester Vizi, has today signed the Petition in support of the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate, on behalf of the Academy.

The Open Access Movement began in Budapest in December 2001 as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), launched by the Hungarian philanthropist, George Soros and the Open Society Institute (OSI).

OA has since become a global movement and is now accelerating rapidly toward the critical step that will usher in Open Access to all research output worldwide, starting in Europe with the EC Self-Archiving Mandate, but inevitably to be followed in the US with the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate, and elsewhere in the world by kindred policies.

I cannot resist adding (though it includes an element of conjecture) that Pannonia even had a hand in formulating the optimal version of the European OA Self-Archiving mandate, in the form of the European Research Advisory Board's (EURAB) policy proposal.

On the EURAB committee that formulated that excellent policy was the Vice President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Professor Norbert Kroo.

The President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has now closed the circle, in signing the EC OA petition on behalf of the Academy.

Many thanks also to Professor Csaba Pleh, Deputy General Secretary of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who also played a critical mediating role, as did Barbara Kirsop, of EPT.

Más volt eddig, másképp lesz most!

Hernád István (Stevan Harnad)
External Member, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

To help the OA petition grow even faster and bigger, please run the following html banner (or equivalent) on your website (substituting : "<" for "{" and ">" for "}" )

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bgcolor="green"}
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Commission's proposed
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Mandate{/font}{/a}{/center}
{/td} {/tr} {/table}
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Many thanks,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Tempting as it is to keep chattering about pit-bulls and commercial venality we should perhaps refocus on something far, far more important and substantive that is going on at the moment. This is where today's real historic Open Access (OA) developments are transpiring:

The petition in support of the European Commission's Proposal to mandate OA self-archiving has already amassed 13,000 signatures in 13 days and is still growing. It is being signed not only by individual grassroots researchers but by universities, learned societies, scientific academies:

Rectors/principals of research organisations (51)
Heads of university/research institution departments or schools (44)
International societies or research-based organisations (38)
National societies or research-based organisations (35)
Research-based or research-centred charities/foundations (21)
National or international research funding bodies (8)
National academies (3)
Rectors' Conferences/University associations (2)
Government departments (2)

The petition is also being signed by institutional libraries, research organisations and publishers:

Institutional libraries (144)
R&D-based companies (66)
Publishers (30)
International or national library organisations (26)
National ICT organisations (11)
Museums (research-based) (2)

Please consult the petition's current updates as these figures are changing by the minute. (And if you or your organisation support the OA mandate proposals, please sign too.)

In addition to this petition in support of proposed mandates (of which the EC's is one, but of course the United States has a huge proposed mandate pending too: the FRPAA), the number of actually adopted mandates is growing steadily too (and will no doubt be accelerated by the growth of the EC petition):

ROARMAP now lists 58 registered OA policies, 27 mandates (21 adopted, 6 proposed)

11 institutional and departmental mandates:

AUSTRALIA inst-mandate Queensland U. Technol

AUSTRALIA inst-mandate U. Tasmania

EUROPE inst-mandate Eur Org Nuc Res (CERN)

INDIA inst-mandate Nat Inst Tech Rourkela

INDIA inst-mandate Bharathidasan U

PORTUGAL inst-mandate U. Minho

SWITZERLAND inst-mandate U. Zurich

AUSTRALIA dept-mandate U. Tasmania Sch Comp

FRANCE dept-mandate Lab Psych Neurosci Cog

UNITED KINGDOM dept-mandate U Southampton Dept ECS

UNITED KINGDOM dept-mandate Brunel U Sch Info Sys Comp Maths

10 funder mandates:

AUSTRALIA funder-mandate Australian Res Cncl (ARC)

AUSTRALIA funder-mandate National Health and Medical Res Cncl (NHMRC)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Arthritis Res Foundation

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Biotech Bio Sci Res Cncl (BBSRC)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Chief Sci Off (Scottish Exec Health)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Economic and Social Res Cncl (ESRC)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Medical Res Cncl (MRC)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate National Environmental Res Cncl (NERC)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Particle Phys & Astron Res Cncl (PPARC)

UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Wellcome Trust

6 funder mandate proposals:

CANADA proposed funder-mandate Can Insts Health Res (CIHR)

EUROPE proposed funder-mandate European Res Advisory Board (EURAB)

EUROPE proposed funder-mandate European Res Cncl (ERC)

EUROPE proposed funder-mandate European Commission

UNITED STATES proposed funder-mandate Fed Res Pub Access Act (FRPAA)

UNITED STATES proposed funder-mandate Nat Insts Health (NIH)

And the FRPAA proposal already has the support of many of the US universities' presidents and provosts

So let us accelerate OA's now-unstoppable progress toward the optimal and inevitable. The sterile debates of the past are behind us.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum