Self-Archiving Mandates

The new US OATP Presidential Directive requiring the largest US funding agencies to mandate OA within 12 months of publication is a wonderful step forward for the entire planet.

Here are some crucial implementational details that will maximize the mandates' effectiveness.

(1) Specify that the deposit of each article must be in an institutional repository (so the universities and research institutions can monitor and ensure compliance as well as adopt mandates of their own).

(2) Specify that the deposit must be done immediately upon publication.

(3) Urge (but do not require) authors to make the immediate-deposit immediately-OA.

(4) Urge (but do not require) authors to reserve the right to make their papers immediately-OA (and other re-use rights) in their contracts with their publishers (as in the Harvard-style mandates).

(5) Shorten, or, better, do not mention allowable OA embargoes at all (so as not to encourage publishers to adopt them).

(6) Implement the repositories' automated "email eprint request" Button (for embargoed [non-OA] deposits).

(7) Designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review, research assessment, grant application, or grant renewal.

(8) Implement rich usage and citation metrics in the institutional repositories as incentive for compliance.

If this is all done universally, universal OA will soon be upon us -- and a global transition to affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (instead of today's premature, double-paid Fool's-Gold), plus as much CC-BY as users need and authors wish to provide -- will not be far behind.

Richard Poynder has written yet another excellent, timely, comprehensive overview of current developments in OA: "Open Access: A Tale of Two Tables"

Three comments:

1. RP: "Some would argue that the US has long been the natural leader of the OA movement, a leadership role it could be said to have acquired in 2005 [with] the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) [Green OA mandate]"

I for one would not say the the US has been the leader of the worldwide OA movement (though it is certainly naturally placed to do so): The historic leader to date has been the UK. The world's first Green OA repository software was created in the UK (2000); the world's first Green OA mandate was adopted in the UK (2003); the UK parliamentary Select Committee was the first in the world to recommend that all institutions and funders mandate Green OA (2004); all of the UK's research funding councils (RCUK) have mandated OA (2006-2011) and the UK today has more funder (16) and institutional (25) Green OA mandates than any other country in the world (see ROARMAP).

(The US is second with 4 funder mandates and 19 institutional mandates. Little Finland leads in institutional mandates with 28; it has no funder mandates, but with all Finnish universities mandated, it hardly needs them!)

It is only now, with its flawed BIS/Finch/RCUK Gold-Preferential policy that the UK has lost its worldwide lead: In fact, as shown by the SPARC Europe Table, all other countries are now following the path that the UK pioneered in 2003-2004: the only country not following the UK's historic lead now is the UK itself!

But the good news is that the UK's lead can easily be regained, if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice.

2. RP: "Green does usually mean a delay before OA is provided… usually... an embargo period of anything between 6 months and three or more years — a delay intended to allow the publisher to recoup the costs it incurred in publishing the paper."

This too is one of the unanticipated negative consequences of the new RCUK OA policy. It is not true that Green OA means delayed/embargoed OA. At the moment, over 60% of subscription journals, including almost all the top journals in most fields, endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving by their authors. (See the SHERPA/Romeo registry.)

Fewer than 40% of journals try to impose a Green OA embargo, and even for those, there is a compromise solution that is "Almost-OA":

All papers (100%) need to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, but access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during the embargo period. During the embargo, the repositories have an email-eprint-request Button that allows individual users to request, and authors to provide, with one click each, a single eprint for research use.

This means that an effective Green OA immediate-deposit mandate can immediately provide at least 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA.

But RCUK's flawed policy, by providing an irresistible incentive for subscription publishers to offer UK authors hybrid Gold OA for an extra fee encourages publishers, by the same stroke, to adopt and to lengthen Green OA embargoes beyond RCUK's allowable limit in order to make sure that UK authors must pick the paid Gold option (the UK's "preferred" one) rather than the cost-free Green one.

This too is easily fixed if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice.

Let me also stress that the costs of publication that subscription publishers incur are being paid in full, and fulsomely, by their worldwide journal subscriptions. Hence there is no justification for publisher embargoes on Green OA a as "a delay intended to allow the publisher to recoup the costs it incurred in publishing the paper." Embargoes are in place purely in order to insure publishers' current revenue streams by forcing researchers to pay or double-pay an inflated price for Fool's-Gold OA instead of allowing Green OA to leverage a downsizing and transition from subscriptions to Fair-Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable post-Green-OA price.

3. RP: "the SPARC table could be taken to imply that the Wellcome Trust only supports Green OA"

The Wellcome policy allows either Green or Gold.

But, without announcing it explicitly, and without placing any pressure on authors, Wellcome too prefers Gold (and most of the OA that is generated by its policy is Gold OA). This is no coincidence, for the new UK policy was strongly influenced by, and to a great extent modelled upon, the Wellcome policy.

Wellcome gets the historic credit for having been the first funder in the world to mandate OA. (They did it before NIH.) But the Wellcome policy is deeply flawed and was for several years ineffective because compliance was in no way monitored and there were no consequences for noncompliance.

Now, both NIH and Wellcome monitor compliance: funding may not be provided or renewed if fundees fail to comply. But NIH still only mandates Green, whereas Wellcome, a private charity, has adopted the (simplistic) maxim that "Publication costs are part of research costs (1.5%) and a research funder should be prepared to pay them."

That is Wellcome's rationale for (implicitly) preferring Gold: "We fund the research: we're ready to pay its publication costs too."

The trouble is that most research publication is still subscription based. And institutions still have to pay those subscription costs, so their users can access the research. Wellcome is not offering to pay for that: just for the Gold OA costs of publishing the research Wellcome funds. Subscription journals are happy to take the extra Wellcome money, and duly offer a hybrid Gold choice for any author who wants to pay for it -- but they also continue to collect subscriptions, and institutions continue to have to pay for them. So Wellcome is merely subsidizing a 1.5% double-payment to publishers in exchange for Gold OA.

This absurd subsidy to publishers is fine when offered by a private funder that has nothing to spend its money on other than research (98.5%) and its publication (1.5%).

But this simplistic formula doesn't work for the UK (or any) government, or any public research funder. For unlike private charities, governments are using tax-payer money not only to pay for research (100%), but also to pay for journal subscriptions (100%). Hence if they foolishly elect to pay publishers even more -- 100% for subscriptions plus 1.5% more for Gold OA -- they are throwing taxpayer money away to double-pay publishing costs that they are already paying via subscriptions.

Hence, paradoxically, the very first funder to mandate OA, the Wellcome Trust, is definitely not the model to follow. Yet the UK has now done just that, adding to the Wellcome Trust's generosity to publishers an explicit preferential pressure on UK authors, with perverse consequences for the UK as well as the rest of the world.

(For a clear grasp of the contingencies, complementarity, and time-course of Green and Gold OA, the reader could do no better than to consult Houghton & Swan's "Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest". )

Responses to Martin Hall
on Finch
on
“Neither Green nor Gold”

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Stevan Harnad (February 11th, 2013 at 9.03 pm) Says:

MARTIN HALL: “The “Green” versus “Gold” debate... is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent – excellent – posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard’s Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication.”

STUART SHIEBER: “Do you have a pointer to something saying that I support the Finch approach? If so, I’m happy to answer it directly — in the negative when it comes to both their lack of support for green and poorly designed approach to gold support.” (Feb 3 2013, personal communication.

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Martin Hall (February 12th, 2013 at 11.59 am) Says:

Stevan – here are two quotations from Stuart Shieber’s paper which make the point about the significance of moving to full Open Access to copy-of-record. The Finch Report, however imperfect, was about the transition to this.

“Open-access journals don’t charge for access, but that doesn’t mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers’ proxy, the libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors’ proxy, their research funders). In fact there are now over 8,500 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery, Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals, like those journals, don’t charge authorside article-processing charges (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable, scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher participates in”.

And later:

“So journals compete for authors in a way they don’t for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency. Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at lower price to compete for authors’ article submissions. We actually see evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the market.”

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Stevan Harnad (February 13th, 2013 at 2.41 am -- Your comment is awaiting moderation. ) Says:

PRIORITIES

Martin, I agree with every word you quote from Stuart above, but that’s not what the Finch Report, or the criticism of the Finch Report is about.

Yes, this concerns the transition to Open Access (OA). But the disagreement is about the means, not the end.

The Finch report recommended downgrading cost-free Green OA self-archiving in repositories to just preservation archiving and instead double-paying pre-emptively for Gold OA (publisher’s PDF of record, CC-BY) while worldwide journal subscriptions still need to be paid, and only allowing UK authors to publish in journals that don’t offer Gold if their Green embargo does not exceed 6-12 months.

This not only wastes a great deal of scarce UK research money but it gives publishers the incentive to offer hybrid Gold (continue charging subscriptions but offer Gold for individual articles for an extra Gold OA fee), it restricts free choice of journals, antagonizing authors, and it encourages journals to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the 6-12 limit, thus making Green OA harder to mandate for other countries, none of which have any intention of following the Finch model of paying pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating extra-cost-free Green while subscriptions are still paying for publishing: See: Sparc Europe's "Analysis of funder Open Access policies around the world".

What Finch/RCUK needs to do instead is to (1) upgrade its Green OA mandate, (2) require immediate deposit whether or not OA to the deposit is embargoed, (3) adopt an effective system for monitoring and ensuring compliance, (4) allow free choice of journals, and (5) make Gold OA completely optional.

Stuart Shieber is the architect of Harvard’s Green OA policy. That policy does not constrain researchers' journal choice and it does not offer to fund hybrid Gold. There’s no problem with offering to spend any spare cash you may have on Gold — after you have effectively mandated Green. But not instead.

(By the way, neither the publisher’s PDF nor CC-BY is worth paying extra for today, pre-emptively, while journal subscriptions still need to be paid: Once universally mandated Green OA makes journals cancellable, publishers will cut costs, phase out the obsolete print and online editions, offload all access provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories, and convert to Fair Gold, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the institutional subscription-cancelation savings — instead of the UK double-paying pre-emptively and needlessly for the bloated price of both subscriptions and Fool’s Gold out of overstretched UK research funds today, pre-Green, as Finch/RCUK are proposing to do.)

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ADDENDUM:

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Unilateral UK Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If the UK unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then the UK has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma (see below):

	Unilateral Green (rest of world):	Unilateral Gold (rest of world):
Unilateral Green (UK):	win/win	win/lose
Unilateral Gold (UK):	lose/win	win/win

Written evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access

Stevan Harnad

I. Overview of OA

1.   Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles. (There are about 28,000 such journals, in all fields and languages.)

2.   Most research journals recover their publication costs through institutional subscriptions.

3.   No institution can afford to subscribe to all or most or even many of the 28,000 journals, only to a small fraction of them, a fraction shrinking because of rising journal costs.

4.   As a result, all researchers today, at all institutions, are denied access to articles published in those journals whose subscriptions are unaffordable to their institutions.

5.   As a result, the research that is funded by public tax revenue, and conducted by researchers employed by publicly funded institutions (universities and research institutes) is not accessible to all of its primary intended users – the researchers who can use, apply and build upon it, to the benefit of the public that funded it.

6.   The Internet and the Web have made it possible to remedy this access-denial problem, which had been a legacy of the Gutenberg era of print on paper, and its associated costs.

7.   Researchers can continue to publish their research in subscription journals, but they can self-archive their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their institutional repositories, free for all online, as a supplement, for all users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the journal in which the article was published (and, as an added bonus, free also for the tax-paying public that funded the research).

8.   Author self-archiving is called “Green OA.”

9.   Sixty percent of journals (including most of the top journals in most fields) already endorse Green OA self-archiving by authors, immediately upon publication (no embargo).

10.   The remaining 40% of journals request an embargo or delay on providing OA for 6-12 months or more. (The publisher rationale for the embargo is that it protects journal subscription revenues that Green OA might otherwise make unsustainable.)

11.   There is as yet no evidence at all that immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving reduces subscriptions, even in fields, such as physics, where it has been practiced for over 20 years and has long reached close to 100%.

12.   The second way to provide OA is for the journal rather than the author to make all of its articles freely accessible online immediately upon publication.

13.   OA journal publishing is called “Gold OA.”

14.   About 20% of the world’s 28,000 journals are Gold OA journals, but very few of them are among the top journals in each field.

15.   Most Gold OA journals continue to cover their costs from subscriptions (to the print edition) but the top Gold OA journals have no print edition and instead of charging the user-institution for access, through subscription fees, they charge the author-institution for publishing, through publication fees.

16.   There are also hybrid subscription/Gold journals, who publish non-OA articles and continue to charge institutional subscription fees, but offer authors the option of paying to make their individual article OA if they pay a Gold OA fee.

17.   Paying Gold OA fees is a problem for authors and their institutions because as long as most journals are still subscription journals, institutions have to continue subscribing to whatever journals they can afford that their users need.

18.   Hence paying for Gold OA today increases the financial burden on institutions at a time when subscription costs are already barely affordable.

19.   Paying for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid is not only an extra financial burden, but it is also unnecessary, because Green OA can be provided for free while worldwide subscriptions are still paying the cost of publication.

20.   If and when Green OA becomes universal (i.e., at or near 100%, in all fields, worldwide), and if and when that, in turn, makes subscriptions unsustainable (with institutions cancelling subscriptions because the free Green OA versions are sufficient for their needs), then all journals can convert to Gold and institutions will have the money to pay the Gold OA costs out of their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings.

21.   There is every reason to believe that Gold OA costs after universal Green OA will be much lower than they are today: the print edition and its costs as well as the online edition will be gone, the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories will provide access and archiving, and journals will only need to manage peer review (all peers already review for free) and perhaps provide some copy-editing.

22.   It remains to explain how to achieve universal Green OA, so as (1) to provide universal OA, first and foremost, and then (2) to induce a transition to universal Gold OA at an affordable price if and when Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, and (3) to release the institutional subscription funds in which the potential money to pay for Gold OA is currently locked.

23.   The way to achieve universal Green OA is for institutions (universities and research institutes) and research funders to mandate (require) that all research that they fund, and that they employ researchers to conduct, must not only be published, as now (“publish or perish”), but the peer-reviewed final drafts must also be deposited in the researcher’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication.

24.   Optimally, access to the deposit should be made OA immediately; in any case any OA embargo should be as short as possible.

25.   However, if necessary, an embargo of 6 months or even 12 months or longer can be tolerated in the case of the 40% of articles published in journals that do not yet endorse immediate Green OA.

26.   The repositories make it possible for authors to provide “Almost-OA” to the deposits that are under OA embargo by automatically forwarding reprint requests from would-be users to the author, who can then decide, with one click, whether or not hey wish to email the deposited reprint to the requester.

27.   Researchers have been fulfilling reprint requests from fellow-researchers for over a half century, but in the online era this can be greatly facilitated and accelerated through universally mandated repository deposit.

II. UK OA Policy

28.   In 2004, the UK Parliamentary Select Committee recommended that UK universities and UK funding councils mandate Green OA self-archiving.

29.   With this, the UK became the world leader in OA and OA policy.

30.   Green OA self-archiving has since been mandated by both funding councils and universities in the EU, Canada, and Australia, including the National Institutes of Health, Harvard, and MIT in the US (over 250 Green OA mandates worldwide to date).

31.   Green OA mandates have been growing worldwide, guided by the UK model; to accelerate mandate adoption all that is needed is a few practical upgrades to the UK model (such as upgraded compliance mechanisms and fuller integration of institutional and funder mandates).

32.   But in 2012, instead of building on its 8-year success in worldwide OA leadership, the UK took an abrupt U-turn on OA, with the recommendations of the Finch Committee.

33.   The Finch Committee declared Green OA a failure, and recommended downgrading it to just preservation archiving.

34.   In place of mandating Green OA (which is almost cost-free, while publishing is still being paid for worldwide via institutional subscriptions) the Finch Committee recommended paying even more for publishing, by redirecting scarce UK research funds to paying for Gold OA, over and above what the UK is already paying for subscriptions.

35.   One can only conjecture as to the causes underlying this inexplicable about-face when Green OA mandates are growing worldwide:

36.   The cause may have been subscription-publisher lobbying of BIS against Green OA or Gold-OA-publisher lobbying for Gold OA.

37.   There was perhaps also some pressure from a vocal minority of OA advocates arguing that there is an urgent immediate need for something stronger than the free online access mandated by Green OA (the additional re-use rights conferred by a CC-BY license) for which this minority claimed that it is worth paying Gold OA fees.

38.   The outcome has been significantly to weaken instead of strengthen the RCUK OA policy:

39.   RCUK researchers may still choose between paying for Gold OA or providing cost-free Green OA, but RCUK expresses a preference for Gold and does not permit researchers to choose Green if their chosen journal’s OA embargo exceeds 6-12 months.

40.   This policy has the perverse consequence of giving subscription publishers a strong incentive (1) to add a hybrid Gold option just in order to collect the extra UK revenue, and (2) to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the UK’s allowable 6-12 months, to make sure that UK researchers must choose the paid Gold option rather than the cost-free Green one.

41.   The rest of the world cannot, need not, and will not follow suit with this profligate. perverse, and completely unnecessary UK policy change.

42.   In Europe, the Americas and Asia, low-cost Green OA mandates will continue to grow, while the UK loses its leadership role in worldwide OA, needlessly squandering increasingly scarce research funds, paying publishers even more in order to make UK research output (and UK research output alone -- 6% of worldwide research output) OA, while the rest of the world makes its (94%) research output OA at next to no extra cost.

The Australian economist, John Houghton, has analyzed OA policy in country after country. The House of Lords Select Committee is urged to look at the outcome of those analyses, which is that it is far cheaper to mandate Green OA first, rather than to pay pre-emptively for Gold unilaterally. That not only provides OA, but it paves the way to affordable, sustainable Gold OA:

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold" D-Lib Magazine Volume 19, Number 1/2

Conclusion: Instead of following the Finch Committee’s counterproductive recommendation to require and subsidise Gold OA, RCUK should adopt two important practical upgrades to strengthen the prior RCUK Green OA mandate: (1) integrate institutional and funder Green OA mandates so they can mutually reinforce one another and (2) implement an effective Green OA compliance mechanism, making institutions responsible for monitoring and ensuring compliance with both institutional and funder deposit mandates.

Appendix:

Comments on the Committee's specific topics:

"support for Universities in the form of funds to cover article processing charges, and the response of universities and other HEIs to these efforts"

If there are UK funds to spare to subsidise Gold OA, fine, make them available -- but mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving in all cases (ID/OA) and do not require researchers to choose a Gold OA journal unless they wish to.

"embargo periods for articles published under the green model"

The shorter the better, but always require immediate deposit (ID/OA) in the author’s institutional repository, even for embargoed articles, and implement the “Almost OA” Button during the embargo.

"engagement with publishers, universities, learned societies and other stakeholders in the development of research council open access policies and guidance"

Publishers should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

Universities should mandate Green OA too.

Funder and university mandates should be convergent, requiring deposit in the institutional repository, with the institution monitoring and ensuring compliance.

Deposits or their metadata can then be harvested to any desired central repositories.

Repository deposit should be designated the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment.

Learned Society publishers, like all publishers, should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the Green-OA-induced cancelations.

"challenges and concerns raised by the scientific and publishing communities, and how these have been addressed.

"The UK scientific community has rightly expressed considerable concern about (1) not being allowed to publish in their journals of choice, and about (2) having to pay for Gold OA.

The solution is to mandate Green OA and not to require Gold OA except if the author wishes it.

The UK subscription publishing community is being paid in full for publication, via worldwide subscriptions today.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the Green-OA-induced cancelations.

"international issues"

The rest of the world need not, cannot, and will not follow the Finch Committee’s recommendation to pay pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating Green OA.

It would be best if the UK returned to the direction it set in 2004; otherwise it is simply using UK research funds to provide (Gold) OA for the UK and the world at a much higher cost than necessary, and at the cost of inducing perverse effects in publishers (such as subscription publishers offering hybrid Gold in order to attract double payment for UK’s Gold subsidy, and adopting and increasing OA embargoes in order to ensure that UK researchers must pay extra for Gold OA).

Figure 1. The percentage of Green and Gold OA in the UK (2007-2011, Web of Science). Note that most OA is Green OA. From: Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Green and Gold Open Access percentages and growth, by discipline. In: 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), Montreal, CA, 05 - 08 Sep 2012. 11pp.




Figure 2. The effect of Green OA mandates (comparing nonmandated vs mandated OA provision: 2002-2009). Data from Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012a) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. Presented: Open Access Week 2012

The dons are absolutely right that dictating where they may or may not publish, and coercing them to pay to publish is an assault on academic freedom:

"Open access plans are 'attack on academic freedoms'" (Guardian Observer, & Telegraph, January 26)

But they are absolutely wrong that the fault lies with Open Access (OA), or with mandating OA.

The fault lies entirely with the way the UK government -- RCUK, under the influence of the foolish and ill-informed recommendations of the Finch Committee -- has proposed to mandate OA.

The Finch Committee has recommended weakening instead of strengthening the RCUK's existing, 5-year-old OA mandate -- which had allowed authors to continue publishing wherever they wished, and merely required them to make their final drafts OA within 12 months of publication by self-archiving them free for all online ("Green OA").

Declaring the prior Green OA mandate a failure, the Finch Committee proposed instead to dictate to authors which journals they were permitted to publish in: only in journals that make their own published articles OA ("Gold OA"), with a CC-BY license, immediately upon publication, or in journals that formally endorse their authors providing Green OA within 6-12 months of publication. In addition, some scarce research money was to be diverted from research to pay publishers even more money, over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions, in exchange for Gold OA.

Authors naturally became incensed at the government dictating where they might or might not publish. (Nor did they appreciate money being diverted from dwindling research funds to pay publishers even more.)

Enough complaining. The error is easily corrected:

Let authors publish wherever they wish. Require them to deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon publication.

Sixty percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA. For the 40% that want OA embargoed, make the deposit Closed Access instead of OA during the embargo.

The repository has a Button for redirecting individual users' reprint requests for Closed Access articles to the author, who can authorize the emailing of the reprint to the requester with one click if he wishes. This is not OA, but it is "Almost-OA" and is sufficient to tide over researchers' access needs until embargoes die their inevitable and well-deserved natural deaths.

Meanwhile, 100% of articles are immediately deposited, 60% are immediately OA, 40% are Almost-OA, and authors retain their full right to choose their journals and not pay for Gold OA if they do not wish to.

They are strongly encouraged to make the deposit OA as soon as possible, but this is not a constraint on their freedom of choice of journals.

This is a strengthened version of RCUK's prior Green OA mandate, without the Finch folly (nor the premature and unnecessary CC-BY requirement, which is not needed in most fields, not as urgent as free online access in any field, and only makes it gratuitously harder to mandate OA).

All this upgrade needs in order to make it optimal is:

(1) Funder mandates and institutional mandates should both stipulate convergent institutional deposit (not divergent, competitive deposit: institution-external repositories like EuPMC can harvest from the institutional ones).

(2) Institutions and funders should both stipulate that repository deposit is the only means of submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment.

(3) Institutions should be designated to monitor and ensure that their researchers comply with both institutional and funder deposit mandates.

This optimized Green OA mandate is no more of an assault on academic freedom than the mandate to "Publish-or-Perish" is -- in fact, it is merely a natural extension of P-or-P, for the online age.

This petition already has 60,000 signatures, well over the threshold that promises a reply, but many more signatures will ensure that the reply is affirmative. Please sign!

The updated Canada Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Open Access Mandate has taken one step forward and one step back:

One step forward:

Grant recipients are required to make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through the Publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository (Option #2)

One step back:

as soon as possible and in any event within six 12  months of publication. Under the second option, grant recipients must archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts immediately upon publication in a digital archive…

But there is a simple way to fix and optimize it.

The archiving must always be done by the author, not the publisher (and preferably in the author's institutional repository, never the publisher's website, so the institution can verify timely compliance); and the deposit must be done immediately upon publication in every instance. (The length of the allowable embargo -- though the shorter the better -- is less important than the necessity of immediate, verifiable institutional deposit by the author. PMC Canada and others can then harvest automatically from the author's institutional repositories.)

RECOMMENDED TWEAK TO OPTIMIZE CIHR OA MANDATE:

Grant recipients are required to archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts of their publications in their institutional repository immediately upon publication and must ensure that they are freely accessible within [X] months of publication.

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Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model

How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally

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

Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?

Preamble: If you wish to sample some of the most absurd, incoherent, pseudo-legal gibberish on the subject of "rights" retention, "systematicity" and free will, please have a look at what follows under "Elsevier Article Posting Policies" below. (And bear in mind that an institution only provides a tiny fraction of any journal's content.)

Any author foolish enough to be intimidated by this kind of garbled double-talk deserves everything that's coming to him.

My Advice to Authors: Ignore this embarrassing, self-contradictory nonsense completely and exercise your retained "right" to post your final refereed draft ("AAM") in your institutional repository immediately upon acceptance, whether or not it is mandatory, secure in the knowledge that from a logical contradiction anything and everything (and its opposite) follows! (And be prepared to declare, with hand on heart, that as an adult, every right you exercise with your striate musculature is exercised "voluntarily.")

[By the way, as long as Elsevier states that its authors retain the right to post "voluntarily", Elsevier, too, remains on the Side of the Angels insofar as immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving is concerned. It's just that the Angels are a bit glossolalic...]

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Elsevier Article Posting Policies

Accepted author manuscripts (AAMs)

Definition: An accepted author manuscript (AAM) is the author's version of the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which may include any author-incorporated changes suggested through the processes of submission processing, peer review, and editor-author communications. AAMs do not include other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination.

Policy: Authors retain the right to use the accepted author manuscript for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting provided that these are not for purposes of commercial use or systematic distribution...

Permitted scholarly posting: Voluntary [emphasis added] posting by an author on open websites operated by the author or the author's institution for scholarly purposes, as determined by the author, or (in connection with preprints) on preprint servers...

...Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary [emphasis added] needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution's repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted [emphasis added]. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates [emphasis added] is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisher's policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary [emphasis added] posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

Systematic distribution means: policies or other mechanisms designed to aggregate and openly disseminate, or to substitute for journal-provided services, including:

--- The systematic distribution to others via e-mail lists or list servers (to parties other than known colleagues), whether for a fee or for free...

--- Institutional, funding body or government manuscript posting policies or mandates that aim to aggregate and openly distribute the work by its researchers or funded researchers...

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Update (many thanks to Eloy Rodrigues).
Speech from German ambassador at Berlin 10
announced new German law for Open Access:

“The German government is currently introducing legislation guiding the implementation process of Open Access. It will take into account our constitutionally guaranteed rights, especially freedom of expression, freedom of scientific research and intellectual property rights. Against that background, the envisaged reform of our copyright and intellectual property law will, as a first step, most likely follow along the lines of the 'Green Road'...”

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We have heard it repeatedly claimed, without evidence or argument, that in Germany it would be illegal to mandate that authors self-archive their final drafts of peer-reviewed articles because it would be a "violation of academic freedom."

I have never believed this claim, and do not even think it is coherent.

A Green OA self-archiving mandate leaves authors free to publish whatever they wish and to publish it in whatever journal they wish. It merely requires them to deposit the final, accepted draft in an institutional repository.

(Most Green OA mandates don't even require the deposit to be made OA immediately: they allow it to be left in Closed Access during a publisher embargo period: About 60% of journals do not have OA embargoes; 40% have embargoes of from 6-12 months to several years or more.)

Hence the requirement to deposit is merely an administrative mandate -- like requiring that publications be submitted electronically rather than on paper, for performance evaluation. (Was that a violation of academic freedom in Germany too?)

The "illegal in Germany" claim has been made over and over, in and about Germany. It invariably turns out to be based on the incorrect assumption that it entails putting a constraint on authors' academic freedom. Instead of just repeating the claim, like hearsay, endlessly, I urge advocates and opponents of OA alike to first get it clear in their minds exactly what a Green OA self-archiving mandate mandates, and then to state explicitly how or why it violates authors' academic freedom.

But be careful not to conflate Green OA self-archiving mandates with Gold OA publishing mandates: The latter would require authors to publish in Gold OA journals rather than their journals of choice; or they would forbid authors to publish in journals that embargo Green OA. Such mandates would indeed be constraining authors' academic freedom.

But Gold OA publishing is not what most OA mandates require. They just require Green OA self-archiving. (See ROARMAP -- and you will see that there are already some Green OA mandates in Germany.)

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Hans Pfeiffenberger:

Law people… in Germany… claim that something like the NIH/Wellcome requirements would violate researchers' rights granted by article 5 of our constitution....

...Stevan, you should take note that I and others do not embrace that view about the illegallity. We report what people from German funding agencies, eager to put a mandate in their grant agreements, tell us about the views of their lawyers.

You may call this hearsay, but it is a matter of fact that any attempt to introduce stonger mandates have been turned down by these lawyers, citing the constitution. 

And yes, there have been university professors who have claimed  their freedom to publish being restricted when asked to publish electronically (!). The Heidelberger Appell (don't confuse with Heidelberg Appeal) is actually an ugly mashup of opposition to Google Books, Open Access and general resentment about missing respect for authors' rights "in the Internet". But if you read some of their blogs (!) you will find that it is actually about the perceived loss of their paper-based academic culture.

Unfortunatelly, the Heidelberger Appell was signed by lots of influential people.

Stevan Harnad:

On Constitutions, Hearsay and Mashups. Thanks for your reply, Hans. You wrote:

HP: "You may call this hearsay, but it is a matter of fact that any attempt [by]… German funding agencies… to introduce stonger mandates…in their grant agreements…  have been turned down by these lawyers, citing the constitution."

It's not hearsay that such attempts have indeed been made, and been turned down. What's hearsay is the basis on which the attempts have been turned down.

If it is not unconstitutional for a funder to require that the papers resulting from a grant be provided in electronic format rather than print format, it is not unconstitutional to require that they be provided by depositing them in a repository.

I would be very interested to hear whether any lawyer arguing against a Green OA mandate has provided the constitutional clause according to which requiring deposit would be unconstitutional. (If you ask, you will hear all kinds of responses about copyright, publisher contracts, author choice, embargoes, etc., all irrelevant, but none facing up to the very specific question I am asking. And if requiring deposit is not unconstitutional, then that is precisely what should be mandated [not copyright or contract renegotiation, or constraints on journal choice].)

HP: "And yes, there have been university professors who have claimed  their freedom to publish being restricted when asked to publish electronically (!). The Heidelberger Appell  (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberger_Appell; don't confuse with Heidelberg Appeal) is actually an ugly mashup of opposition to Google Books, Open Access and general resentment about missing respect for authors' rights 'in the Internet'."

Yes, I know the Heidelberger Appell (Reuss's Ruse) well! It is indeed a mashup of journal articles and books -- again based on hearsay. Green OA self-archiving mandates pertain only to journal articles, all of which are written for research usage and impact, not author royalties.

See "Heidelberg Appeal Peeled" (2009).

Hans Pfeiffenberger:

Stevan, if I do understand your question "...whether any lawyer arguing against a Green OA mandate has provided the constitutional clause according to which requiring deposit would be unconstitutional.", then the answer is easy: It is paragraph 3 of article 5.

Roughly translated, it says: Art and science, research and teaching are free.

So, that is not hearsay. The question if this broad assertion can be regarded a foundation for the claims we discuss here could be answered only in court. But I think nobody is eager to put this to a test now. One thing is clear: Freedom of research is very high on the list of rights (right after religious freedom). It is number 5 of the 19 articles on "Grundrechte" (basic rights).

Stevan Harnad:

Is Peer Review Constitutional in Germany? But Hans, does "Art and science, research and teaching are free" in Germany mean: "Your research proposal has been accepted and funded on condition that you actually conduct the research, as proposed, and submit an annual report -- but you are free to take the money and not conduct the research, nor submit an annual report"?

Or do you think every failure to comply with grant fulfillment conditions would need to be tested in constitutional court in Germany as a potential violation of research freedom?

Or, to take it further, does a German researcher's constitutional "freedom of art, science, research and teaching" mean that he can refrain from doing any art, science, research and teaching at all, and continue to come in and collect his salary till his scheduled date of retirement, on the grounds that he is exercising his constitutional rights?

Is it unconstitutional in Germany, till tested, to withhold further research funding from a researcher who has not published any results of prior research?

Is "publish or perish" unconstitutional in Germany, hence peer reviewers may not use that -- or, for that matter, any -- criterion in deciding what German research proposal to fund, or what German research paper to accept for publication?

Is there no competition in research in Germany, because all researchers are free to do or not do whatever they wish?

I am mapping out the absurdity of these questions (which I am sure are never even asked in Germany -- just as it was never asked whether it would have been a violation of researchers' constitutional freedom to submit applications electronically instead of as hard copy) in order to show show how utterly arbitrary it is to claim that there is anything whatsoever about the requirement to deposit published research in the institutional repository that would be a potential violation of German researchers' constitutional freedom, and hence could not be adopted unless it were first tested in constitutional court. This is just nonsense unless German researchers simply have no rules of any kind at all.

In contrast to this, it's a good idea to give oneself examples of simple rules that would obviously be a violation of German researchers' constitutional freedom. And one such rule would be: "You are not free to publish what and where you wish" (apart, of course, from the need to meet the peer-reviewers' acceptance standards, if you wish to publish in a peer-reviewed journal).

The RCUK mandate that would say to a British researcher "You may not publish in a journal unless it either has a Gold OA publishing policy or it has a Green OA embargo of no more than 12 months" would indeed seem to be prima facie unconstitutional in Germany.

A repository-deposit mandate, however, certainly would not -- any more than would an electronic-submission mandate in place of a paper submission mandate (sic).

But Hans, I'm not disputing with you; I know you too find it absurd. I am simply disputing the credulousness of those who are ready to be dissuaded from adopting a Green OA mandate in Germany on the grounds that it would be unconstitutional, or that its constitutionality would first need to be tested in court.

Hans Pfeiffenberger:

Stevan, I am relieved that you understand that I too find it absurd. But there actually has been a case of a guy (Professor!) who almost claimed that he could "refrain from doing any art, science, research and teaching at all, and continue to come in and collect his salary till his scheduled date of retirement, on the grounds that he is exercising his constitutional rights?" If I remember correctly, he won.

So I am actually astounded that nobody has as yet brought a case to court against evaluation criteria which force him/her to publish in journals on a list maintained by a commercial company (TR) at their discretion.

Response of Fred Friend on GOAL to Martin Hall on Finch in UKSG Insights:

Fred Friend:

"I read Martin Hall’s defence of the Finch Group Recommendations very carefully, because one curious feature of this episode in the development of open access in the UK is the way in which previously staunch defenders of open access through repositories who were members of the Finch Group have signed up to a Report which only allocates roles in preservation and data storage to repositories, removing the role of access to published research reports…

"Neither Martin Hall nor the Finch Group as a whole have suggested the very feasible solution of funders requiring authors to retain certain rights for public benefit while still giving a publisher the right to publish….

"If the argument for not supporting repository development is weak, the argument for supporting a preference for gold open access is even weaker. (N.B. what follows should not be read as opposing all open access journal publication, merely the perverse policy to make journals the primary route to open access.)

"The argument put forward in the Finch Report is not only that repositories cannot provide a high-quality sustainable service but also that even if they could, a publisher-led approach is desirable. No evidence is put forward to support this key point in the Finch Report. The case for a transition to gold open access is not evidence-based but based upon a perceived threat to the publishing industry from any policy which gives a substantial role to repositories as an alternative source of supply of research articles. The case for “sustainability” presented in the Finch Report is a case for sustainability of the publishing industry…

"In relation to the cost of gold open access the Finch Report rightly mentions the importance of the extent to which other countries adopt the same policy as the UK, but the optimism on this point in the Report is clearly misplaced and represents a huge gamble not only with taxpayer funds but also with the UK researchers’ relationship with their peers in other countries…

"As a result of reading Martin’s article and re-reading the Finch Report I am no further forward in understanding how the open access advocates on the Finch Group could have signed up to the Report, even though they may have been out-voted by the publisher and society members…"