Self-Archiving Mandates

"UK Government invests £10 million to help universities move to open access"

At first, UK researchers will applaud: "More money for us [sort of]! Hurrah!"

Then they will think: "But that money could have been spent on funding more research, of which there is already too little to go round -- and it's probably being taken from the same pot..."

And then they will realize that:

- they are being pushed toward journals they don't necessarily want to publish in,

- forced to pay for an OA that they could have had with just a few gratis Green keystrokes,

- forced to reach into their grants (or pockets!) when the 10M pounds run out,

(since the UK, although it produces only 6% of the articles published annually worldwide, produces a lot more than what £10M will pay for at (say) £1K per paper for Gold OA publishing fees: do the arithmetic, even assuming that the world publishes only a million refereed research journal papers per year, and then see how far £10M takes you for the UK's 60K papers at £1K for Gold OA fees per paper: a six-fold shortfall)

- and that not only is the UK gaining no more OA to the other 94% of research from the rest of the world, to which UK researchers need OA,

- but that the UK's shift from mandating cost-free Green OA self-archiving to paying publishers extra for pricey Gold OA to UK research alone

is actually making it harder for the rest of the world to mandate and provide the reciprocal cost-free Green OA that everyone needs...

The BIS's largesse would just be another case of (mostly) wasted public funds (a bigger problem, which is not our main concern here) if it weren't coupled with the completely gratuitous and self-injurious undermining of a virtually cost-free means of achieving the same local end -- and also achieving far more, globally, in an affordable, scaleable and sustainable way.

But all of this would be fixed, if one 9-word clause were expunged from the new RCUK OA policy: the one forcing researchers to choose Gold over Green. For then this BIS largesse would just be a hand-out to pay for Gold OA (voluntarily) for 10K UK research papers: 1/6th of the UK's annual research output.

---

Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer

Harnad, S (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cat’s grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September Issue

Harnad, S (2012) There's no justifying RCUK's support for [hybrid] gold open access. Guardian HE Network.

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012 [in press: not yet available]

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

Harnad, S (2102) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

[Still a lot of implementation details to shore up, but this simple tweak will fix the new RCUK mandates's fatal flaw.]

---

3. Research Council Expectations of Researchers

The Research Councils expect authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free.

Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

1. must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access (see section 4).

2. must include details of the funding that supported the research, and a statement on how the underlying research materials – such as data, samples or models – can be accessed.

4. Compliance of Journals

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access. The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

1. The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

2. Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. In this option no ‘Article Processing Charge’ will be payable to the publisher. Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.

Mark Thorley, RCUK Research Outputs Network (RON):

"I am very aware of the criticisms of the policy made by Stevan Harnad and others. However, the ‘corrections’ he proposes would dilute our policy so that it was no longer able to deliver the level of open access which the Research Councils require. We not only want research papers to be ‘free to read’ but also to be ‘free to exploit’ – not only for text and data mining to advance scholarship as we detail in this blog-post, but also to drive innovation in the scholarly communications market itself. And, we are very clear that those who read research papers come from a much wider base than the research community that Harnad considers will be satisfied through the use of repositories and green OA. Therefore, there are no plans to revise the RCUK policy, just to satisfy the interests of one particular sector of the OA community."

Mark Thorley's response is very disappointing:

MT: "the ‘corrections’ [Harnad] proposes would dilute our policy so that it was no longer able to deliver the level of open access which the Research Councils require."

The proposed corrections very explicitly include a correction to "the level of open access the Research Councils require."

To reply that this "level" is incorrigible and nonnegotiable is tantamount to saying our minds are made up, don't trouble us with further information.

The points requiring correction are very specifically those concerning the "level of open access" (Gratis or Libre; immediate or embargoed) that is actually needed by UK researchers today, and at what price, both in terms of price paid, out of scarce research funds, and, far more important, in terms of Green OA lost, in the UK as well as in the rest of the world (to whose research, RCUK needs to remind itself, UK researchers require open access too).

These matters are not resolved by asserting that Finch/RCUK has already made up its mind a-priori about the level of OA required.

MT: "We not only want research papers to be ‘free to read’ but also to be ‘free to exploit’ – not only for text and data mining to advance scholarship… but also to drive innovation in the scholarly communications market itself."

All OA advocates are in favour of text-minability, innovation/exploitation potential, and as much CC-BY as each author needs and wants for their research output, over and above free online access to all research output. But the benefits from those further re-use rights over and above free online access certainly do not come from providing re-use rights for some small fraction of research output. And they are certainly not worth having at the expense (in both senses) of free online access to all worldwide research output (of which the UK only produces 6%).

Yet it is precisely for the token UK 6% today that Finch/RCUK are insisting, needlessly and counterproductively, upon restricting UK researchers' journal choice today, and redirecting scarce UK research funds to pay publishers even more, at the expense of the local UK tax-payer.

Even more important, this costly and superfluous pre-emptive re-use right for the UK fraction of worldwide research output is also purchased at the expense of global Green OA (94%), which is needed far more urgently by UK users than "exploitation rights" for UK's 6% output:

For the RCUK/Finch policy provides a huge incentive to subscription publishers worldwide to offer paid hybrid Gold while at the same time increasing their Green embargoes to make cost-free Green an impermissible option for UK authors. This not only deprives UK authors of the cost-free Green option, but it deprives the rest of the world as well, thereby depriving UK users of open access to the rest of the world's research output; by making it much harder for the rest of the world to mandate Green OA.

(I don't doubt that some of the members of the Finch committee may even have thought of this as a good thing: a way to force the rest of the world to follow the UK model, whether or not they can afford it, or wish to. But is this not something that may require some further serious thought?)

MT: "And, we are very clear that those who read research papers come from a much wider base than the research community that Harnad considers will be satisfied through the use of repositories and green OA. Therefore, there are no plans to revise the RCUK policy, just to satisfy the interests of one particular sector of the OA community."

It seems to me Mark has it exactly backwards. The "wider base," in all scientific and scholarly research fields, worldwide, wants and needs free online access, now, and urgently, to all research, in all fields (not just UK research output). It is only in a few particular subfields that there is an immediate and urgent need for further re-use rights (and even there, not just for UK's 6% fraction of the world's total research output).

How urgent is CC-BY and text-mining of the UK's 6% of world research output, compared to free online access to all of the world's research output?

And what are these urgent text-mining and other Libre OA functions? All authors need and want their work to be accessible to all its intended users, but how many authors need, want or even know about Libre OA, or CC-BY?

(Researchers are not only the producers of scholarly and scientific research, but they -- not industry -- are also its primary consumers, in the production of further research. Research applications are certainly crucial, but they only constitute a tiny fraction of the annual uptake of research -- and many research domains have no industrial applications at all. OA was conceived as the remedy for access-denial, and the "wide base" that is the victim of access-denial is researchers themselves, hence scholarly/scientific research progress, not the R&D industry.)

And, Mark, can you elaborate rather specifically on the urgent "innovation/exploitation market potential" that will resonate with all or most researchers as a rationale for constraining their journal choice, diminishing their research funds, and possibly having to find other funds in order to publish at all, today, when they do not even have free online access to the research output of the 94% of the world not bound by the RCUK policy?

Stevan Harnad

Many thanks to Peter Suber for providing further information about the open access (OA) policy recommendations of the Finch Committee and of Research Councils UK (RCUK), and the close relationship between them, based on an interview with Mark Thorley, convenor of the RCUK Research Outputs Network (RON).

Peter makes no value judgments in conveying this information, so it is unclear what he agrees or disagrees with.

I will be much more explicit: I think this is a terrible policy, ill-informed and short-sighted, which will have extremely bad effects, both in the UK and globally -- if Finch/RCUK are inflexible about taking critical feedback into account and are unwilling to revise the policy in response.

I will summarize the essence of the extra information Peter has provided. It confirms my worst worries:

(1) Finch and RCUK are in agreement; there are no nontrivial differences between the two.

(2) Finch/RCUK are prepared to require UK authors to publish only in a journal that offers either Gold OA (Gratis or Libre, hybrid or "pure") or Green OA within a maximal 6-month embargo; otherwise, the author may not publish in the journal.

? (3) If the journal offers both paid Gratis hybrid Gold and 6-month Green, the author may choose either option. [N.B. It is not entirely clear whether this interpretation is correct.]

(4) If the journal offers both paid Libre hybrid Gold and 6-month Green, the author must choose paid Libre hybrid Gold (or not publish in that journal).

(5) If the journal offers both paid Gratis hybrid Gold and Green with a longer embargo than 6 months, the author must choose paid Gratis hybrid Gold (or not publish in that journal).

(6) Finch/RCUK are aware that this policy may provide an incentive for journals that currently offer a 6-month Green option to increase their Green embargo to an unallowable length and offer Gratis hybrid Gold instead, knowing that RCUK authors must take that option if they wish to publish in the journal at all.

(7) In other words, Finch/RCUK have decided, a priori, that Libre hybrid Gold OA for the UK's research output is worth paying extra for pre-emptively, out of scarce research funds, over and above the UK's full continuing load of subscriptions to the rest of the world's research output, come what may, and that Gratis hybrid Gold OA is worth requiring UK authors to choose and to pay extra for, even if it induces journals to impose an impermissible embargo length on Green OA.

(8) In addition, it is not clear that even UK researchers will be given enough of a top-sliced subsidy from generic UK research funds ("block grants") to allow them to pay for all the Gold OA they need without having to reach into their research funds or their pockets in order to comply with Finch/RCUK.

(9) All these a priori value judgments have been made by Finch/RCUK without taking into account researchers' views on (i) placing constraints on their journal choice, (ii) their need or desire for Libre OA, and (iii) the diversion of already scarce funds from supporting research to paying publishers extra for Gold OA (Libre or Gratis).

(10) Nor have Finch/RCUK taken into account the consequences this policy may have for the rest of the world, which may not be able to afford -- and may not wish -- to pay extra for Gold OA (Libre or Gratis, hybrid or "pure"), over and above subscriptions, and may now see embargoes on cost-free Green OA lengthened by publishers in order to gain the extra hybrid Gold revenue subsidy that the UK promises.

This would be an extremely bad outcome.

I will continue to do my best to try to persuade Finch/RCUK to revise this terrible policy and I hope others who understand its implications will do so too.

If the RCUK policy is not changed, I predict that UK researchers will not comply, and many years of confusion and indecision will ensue, during which the UK will lose (a) a lot of potential (Green) OA, (b) a lot of money, and (c) its historic worldwide leadership role in OA.

I am not so pessimistic about the rest of the world. There is a much more realistic and effective option, and that is to strengthen and extend Green OA mandates. Even if the unfortunate Finch/RCUK policy has the perverse effect of inducing publishers to increase the lengths of their Green OA embargoes, the ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate coupled with the automated "email-eprint-request" Button is immune to embargoes and was designed specifically with this contingency in mind.

The UK only publishes 6% of the world's research output. The other 94% can still mandate ID/OA and move forward toward universal Green OA while the UK learns from sad experience what a short-sighted, ill-informed, profligate -- and, if no one listens to the critical feedback, pig-headed -- decision the UK has made in 2012, eight short years after the historic UK Parliamentary Select Committee recommendation that has until now made the UK the vanguard of the global OA movement:

I will now quote/comment Peter's account of his discussion with RCUK's Mark Thorley, but those who do not wish to enter into the details now have the gist of what is so wrong with Finch/RCUK's proposed policy:

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Peter Suber wrote:

On July 25, 2012, I had a long, helpful phone conversation with Mark Thorley, convenor of the RCUK Research Outputs Network (RON), the group responsible for developing and implementing the RCUK Open Access policy...

On the role of green, Mark said that the RCUK had the same preference for gold as the Finch Group. The reason is that they want libre OA under CC-BY licenses, for example to support text-mining and to enable immediate OA without any publisher imposed embargo.

How urgent is text-mining of the UK's 6% of world research output and CC-BY, compared to free online access to all of the world's research output?

And what are these urgent text-mining and other Libre OA functions? All authors need and want their work to be accessible to all its intended users, but how many authors need, want or even know about Libre OA, or CC-BY?

(Make no mistake about it: All OA advocates are in favour of text-minability and as much CC-BY as each author needs and wants for their research output, over and above free online access to all research output -- but certainly not text-minability and CC-BY for some research output, at the expense (in both senses) of free online access to all research output. Yet it is precisely for the latter that Finch/RCUK are insisting upon restrictions and pre-emptive payment -- for UK research output, both at the local UK tax-payer's expense, and at the expense of global Green OA.)

...the Finch Group may expect that the primary role for repositories will be for theses, grey literature, and data. But the Finch Group would definitely accept green OA for research articles when a journal offered no gold option.

In other words, having ruled out Green OA as an option for UK authors if a journal has the sense to offer Gratis hybrid Gold and to crank its Green embargo up to infinity, Finch/RCUK are not forbidding whatever residual Green might still be able to slip through a barrier as restrictive as the one it has erected...

According to Mark, the RCUK and Finch Group share this position: When publicly-funded researchers publish in a journal with a suitable gold option (where suitability is about its willingness to use a certain open license), then those authors should pursue that gold option.

I take this to mean that if the journal offers paid Libre hybrid Gold, the author must choose that, even if the journal also offers 6-month Green (but it may be even more restrictive than that, if it applies to paid Gratis hybrid Gold as well).

If the journal offers no suitable gold option but does offer a suitable green option (where suitability is about the maximum length of the embargo period), then grantees should pursue the green option instead.

In other words: If a journal has the option to offer paid hybrid Gold and crank up Green embargoes to unallowable limits, but is instead foolish enough to offer only 6-month Green, then Finch/RCUK do not forbid the author to choose 6-month green...

Don't count on many publishers turning down the more attractive option.

If a given journal offers no suitable gold or green option, then those researchers must look for another journal, one which complies with the RCUK policy.

By way of contrast: ID/OA mandates not only (i) moot publisher embargoes but (ii) make it unnecessary to dictate authors' journal choice.

When a journal offers both suitable green and suitable gold options, the PI may choose the option he or she thinks most appropriate.

This is ambiguous, because it is unclear what is meant by "suitable gold options". I take it to mean:

(3) If the journal offers both paid Gratis hybrid Gold and 6-month Green, the author may choose either option.

though I am not sure of even that interpretation.

If a journal with a suitable gold OA option levies an Article Processing Charge (APC), then RCUK is willing to pay the APC. The RCUK will provide block grants to universities for paying APCs, which they will manage through the establishment of publication funds, and universities will decide how to spend the money to best deliver the RCUK policy.

And what happens to journal choice (and publication) when the year's "block grants" have run out?

Mark concedes that managing a publication fund and establishing rules on what papers will be funded, will be a big challenge for many institutions, and obtaining faculty APC funding could be a major change of working for many authors.

It may do a good deal more than that. Let us not forget that the only thing Green OA mandates require of authors is keystrokes. Finch/RCUK is now (1) constraining journal choice, (2) redirecting scarce research funds, and perhaps eventually (3) leaving authors without the money to publish at all (if they comply).

Great confusion and non-compliance are likely. (And I have to admit that I find this policy so ruinously wrong-headed that I cannot even wish it to succeed even on its own terms: If the policy is not fixed in response to informed advance feedback, then author confusion and non-compliance may be the only way to bring the policy-makers to their senses that they have made a huge mistake.)

However, he added that journals offering a suitable gold OA option would probably not want to offer a compliant green option as well. Hence, as more journals start offering gold options to make themselves eligible for RCUK funding, many that permit green OA today may stop permitting green, or might only provide a green option with an embargo period to be too long to be compliant with the RCUK policy. Hence, authors turned down for APC funding may not have a green option to exercise at a given journal, even if those authors and their universities wanted to exercise it.

This is the very core of Finch/RCUK's folly, and its perverse consequences are here shrugged off matter-of-factly as if they were just some minor contingency.:

The RCUK/Finch policy provides a huge incentive to subscription publishers to offer paid hybrid Gold while at the same time increasing their Green embargoes to make cost-free Green an impermissible option for UK authors. This not only deprives the UK author of the cost-free Green option, but the rest of the world as well.

(I don't doubt that some of the members of the Finch committee may even have thought of this as a good thing: a way to induce the rest of the world to follow the UK model, whether or not they can afford it, or wish to.)

I mentioned the rights-retention OA policies at funders like the Wellcome Trust and the NIH, and at universities like Harvard and MIT....he added that "this might well be something we would consider in the future..."

The rights-retention policies have an opt-out clause: Finch/RCUK do not.

Moreover, the success of rights retention policies alone is not known. At Harvard, they are coupled with a variant of ID/OA, with no opt-out on deposit. ID/OA of course moots all retention opt-out or embargo problems.

If there are differences between the RCUK policy and the Finch recommendations, they are minor. The RCUK will go forward with its current policy, and has no plans to revise it to conform more closely to the Finch report.

But let's hope that RCUK may still revise it in response to critical feedback like what I've tried to provide above.

I close with my specific recommendation on how to revise the RCUK policy:

Revising RCUK. Let's hope that RCUK will have the sense and integrity to recognize its mistake, once the unintended negative consequences are pointed out, and will promptly correct it. The current RCUK policy can still be made workable with two simple patches, to prevent publisher-imposed embargoes on Green OA from being used to force authors to pay for hybrid Gold OA:

RCUK should:

(1) Drop the implication that if a journal offers both Green and Gold, then RCUK fundees must pick Gold

and

(2) Urge but do not require that the Green option must be within the allowable embargo interval.

(The deposit of the refereed final draft would still have to be done immediately upon publication, but the repository’s “email-eprint-request” Button could be used to tide over user needs by providing “Almost-OA” during the embargo.)

That way RCUK fundees (i) must all deposit immediately (no exceptions), (ii) must make the deposit Green OA immediately or as soon as possible and (not or) (iii) may pay for Gold OA (if the money is available and the author wishes):

Green OA:
(a) Immediate repository deposit of (at least) the final draft is required
(b) Making access to deposit Gratis OA immediately is urged
(c) Maximal Gratis OA embargo of 6 months (12 months for AHRC & ESRC) is allowed
(d) Libre OA license adoption wherever possible, and desired by author, is recommended

OR
Gold OA:
(e) Immediate repository deposit of (at least) version of record is required
(f) Making access to deposit OA immediately is required
(g) Adoption of Libre OA License (if desired by author) is urged

This ensures that publishers (1) cannot use embargoes to force authors to pay for hybrid Gold and that authors (2) retain their freedom to choose whether or not to pay for Gold, (3) whether or not to adopt a Libre license (where it is possible) and (4) which journal to publish in.

Stevan Harnad

How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised

Stevan Harnad
UQaM & U Southampton

Keynote: Digital Research 2012
St Catherine's College, Oxford
11 September 2012: 9:00am-10:30am
(Video will be online shortly afterward)

OVERVIEW
The Web is destined to become humankind's Cognitive Commons, where digital knowledge is jointly created and freely shared. The UK has been a leader in the global movement toward Open Access (OA) to research but very recently its leadership has been derailed by the joint influence of the publishing industry lobby from without and well-intentioned but premature and counterproductive over-reaching from within the OA movement itself.

The result has been the extremely counter-productive Finch Committee Recommendation followed by a new draft of the RCUK OA policy, downgrading the role of cost-free OA self-archiving of research publications ("Green OA") in favour of paying subscription publishers extra money, over and above subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, in exchange for making single articles OA ("hybrid Gold OA").

The motivation is to reform publication and to gain certain re-use rights, but the likely effect will be researcher resistance, very little OA, a waste of scarce research funds and the loss of the UK's global leadership in the OA movement.

There is still time to fix the RCUK policy. I will try to describe how and why.

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

Carr, L., Swan, A., and Harnad, S (2011) Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution. In: Simons, Maarten, Decuypere, Mathias, Vlieghe, Joris & Masschelein, Jan (eds.) Curating the European University Universitaire Pers Leuven 193-199.

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Ed. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2012) Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton

Harnad, S. (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer Issue

Harnad, S. (2012) How to Repair the New RCUK OA Policy. Open Access Archivenglism. July 27 2012

Poynder, R. (2012) OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy. Open and Shut July 26 2012

       David A. Arnold wrote: "Stevan - you are wrong about RCUK madating green OA. It does not. The new RCUK policy only requires green OA if the journal does not offer gold OA. Since the vast majority of journals now offer a gold route, the green option is essentially redundant. Here is the wording:"

       The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access. The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

       1. The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

       2. Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period.

---

Here is my response to David. But as you will see, although I am doing my level best to disagree with him, in the end, it turns out he was basically right:

David, I think you are wrong that "the vast majority of journals offer a gold route".

I also think that you are misconstruing the RCUK "mixed" approach (and the semantics of "inclusive disjunction," i.e., "either A or B or both").

I think RCUK fundees can comply with the RCUK mandate by depositing a peer-reviewed draft in their OA institutional repository -- either the publishers version, by paying for Gold OA, or the author's final draft (possibly after an allowable embargo interval), i.e., Green OA.

My understanding is that the constraint on journal policy is intended to be on the journal (i.e., that the journal must either offer Gold OA or endorse Green OA within the allowable embargo interval) not on the author.

The idea is that journals should know in advance that an RCUK-funded author is under a prior contractual obligation, as a condition of funding, to publish only in a journal that either offers Gold OA or (allowably embargoed) Green OA.

I don't think the mandate is that if a journal offers both Gold and Green, then the author is obliged to pay for Gold instead of providing Green cost-free. (If it were, that would be extremely foolish and wasteful.)

However, I do think that there is a bug in the RCUK mandate that should on no account be imitated by other funders (and that should be corrected by RCUK):

(1) It is a big mistake to insist that an RCUK author must pay for Gold if his journal of choice is a hybrid Gold journal that offers Gold but does not endorse Green within the allowable embargo interval:

PATCH: Better to allow embargoed deposit and reliance on the repository's automated "email-eprint-request" Button to provide "Almost OA" during the embargo via one click from the user to request an individual copy for research purposes, and one click from the author to comply.

(2) Much more important than (1) is the distinct possibility that RCUK's mixed either/or policy provides an incentive to publishers -- even the publishers of the 60% of journals that already endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA today -- to change their policy so as to offer a high-priced hybrid Gold OA option, coupled with an infinitely long Green OA embargo, in order to ensure that the RCUK author must pay for hybrid Gold OA. This would be a terrible, unintended consequence of the RCUK policy, and a huge blow to OA and Green OA worldwide.

I cannot say whether the RCUK policy will have this terrible unintended consequence. All I can do is urge RCUK to patch it up -- and the rest of the world to ignore it.

The best solution would be the PATCH. If the RCUK is not patched, then I predict a tremendous (and justified) researcher revolt against the policy, with the result that the policy will not be complied with, and will have to be revised after a few lost fallow years of failure.

Other funders and institutions should learn a lesson from this: There is a trade-off between embargo-tolerance and OA-cost: If you don't want to induce journals to charge -- and oblige authors to pay -- needless and bloated hybrid Gold OA fees, don't try to constrain journal choice too radically: mandate immediate deposit (whether Gold or Green), specify an allowable Green OA embargo length (preferably no more than 6 months), but don't forbid authors to publish in journals whose embargo exceeds the specified length. Rely on the Button (and human nature) rather than forcing authors into gratuitous expenses, constrained journal choices, or non-compliance with the mandate.

Embargoes will die their well-deserved death as a natural matter of course, under the growing pressure of Green OA mandates, but not if a nonviable, unscalable mandate model is adopted.

Stevan Harnad

---

RETRACTION:
Yes, RCUK did follow almost the same lines that Robert Kiley helped set down in the Finch Committee.

Finch recommends only funding Gold and downgrading Green to preservation archiving. RCUK allows Green, but only if a publisher does not offer Gold. If a subscription publisher offers hybrid Gold as well as Green, RCUK authors must pick and pay for Gold.

Robert Kiley is right -- and the result is right disastrous, both for worldwide OA and for the UK's former leadership on OA policy.

---

Robert Kiley [Wellcome Trust] wrote in GOAL:

My reading of the RCUK policy is somewhat different to Stevan’s. In short, I see clear parallels between what Finch recommended (disclosure – I sat on the Finch Working Group) and the RCUK policy...

Finch recommended gold OA and flexible funding arrangements to cover OA gold costs. RCUK have released a policy that allows for gold publishing, and provides flexible funding (via block grants to HEI’s) to support these aims.

Finch said when publishers didn't offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold, it was reasonable for funders to demand an embargo period of less than 12 months. [See paragraph 9.10 of the Finch Report]. The RCUK have followed this.

Finch said that support of OA publications should be supported by policies to “minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use”. RCUK have followed this, and indeed pushed further to require than when an APC is levied the article must be published under a CC-BY licence. This is identical to the policy change the Wellcome Trust announced at the end of June....

There were a long string of posts on this forum at the end of last week calling for an end to the counter-productive squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold, the obsession with costing models, etc. The RCUK policy is entirely compatible with the recommendations of the Finch Report, and continually rubbishing Finch seems counter-productive on many levels.

In response to Robert, let's keep it simple and go straight to the heart of the matter:

1. Ever since the historic 2004 Report of the UK Parliamentary Select Committee which made the revolutionary recommendation to mandate (what has since come to be called) Green OA self-archiving as well as to fund (what has since come to be called) Gold OA journal fees, RCUK (and later the EC and other funding councils worldwide) have been mandating Green and funding Gold.

2. The Finch report recommended phasing out Green and only funding Gold.

3. RCUK and EC declined to follow the Finch recommendation and reaffirmed (and strengthened) their Green OA mandates.

That's the substance of the "squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold".

The Finch Report is "compatible with the recommendations of the Finch Report" only in the sense that -A & B is more "compatible" with A & B than with A & -B. (RCUK could, I suppose, have retained its Green mandate but dropped its Gold funding, contradicting its own prior policy, but it did not…)

The Wellcome Trust's pioneering historic lead in OA has since 2004 alas hardened into rigid dogma, at the cost of much lost growth potential for OA (as well as of much potential research funding).

The 2004 UK's Parliamentary Select Committee's prescient recommendation eight years ago had been this:

“This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way... [T]o encourage… experimentation… the Report [also] recommends that the Research Councils each establish [an experimental] fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish...”

CC-BY is not nearly as urgent and important as "Gratis" OA (free online access): not all authors want it, most users don't need it, and it would immediately make endorsing un-embargoed Green ruinous to subscription publishers: so demanding it today, pre-emptively leads to less OA and longer embargoes (just as demand for pre-emptive Gold does). See: "Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY/CC-BY-NC for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research."

(Lest it sound as if I am lauding the pre-emptive funding of Gold today: I am not. It was historically important to demonstrate that fee-based Gold OA is conceivable and viable, in order to fend off the publishing lobby's doomsday contention that OA would destroy publishing. So the early Gold OA proof-of-principle, especially by PLOS-Biology and PLOS-Medicine, was very timely and useful. But the subsequent mindless Gold Rush, at the expense of neglecting the enormous power of cost-free Green OA mandates to accelerate the growth of OA, not to mention the needless waste of money diverted from research to fund Gold pre-emptively, have been exceedingly detrimental to overall OA growth. The simplest way to summarize the underlying logic and pragmatics is that pre-Green-OA pre-emptive Gold OA, at today's inflated asking prices and while subscriptions still prevail, is extremely bad for OA progress: wasteful, unscalable, and unsustainable, it generates very little global OA, very slowly. In contrast, post-Green-OA, downsized Gold OA, once Green OA has prevailed globally, making subscriptions unsustainable and forcing journals to downsize and convert to Gold OA for peer review service alone, at a far lower cost, paid out of subscription cancelation savings instead of scarce research funds, will be affordable, scalable and sustainable)

Stevan Harnad

For the perplexed reader who is wondering about what on earth all the current to and fro on GOAL is about:

1. Gratis Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

2. Libre OA means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles + certain re-use rights (often CC-BY).

3. Green OA means OA provided by authors self-archiving their peer-reviewed final drafts free for all online (either in the author's institutional repository or website or in an institution-external central repository)

4. Gold OA means OA provided by authors publishing in OA journals that provide free online access to their articles (Gratis or Libre), often at the cost of an author publication fee.

5. Global OA today stands at about 20% of yearly journal article output, though this varies by discipline, with some higher (particle physics near 100%) and some lower (chemistry among the lowest).

6. About two thirds of the global 20% OA is Green and one third is Gold. Almost all of it is Gratis rather than Libre.

7. Institutions and funders that mandate Green OA have much higher Green OA rates (70%+), but only if they have effective Green OA mandates -- and only a tiny proportion of the world's institutions and funders mandate OA as yet have Green OA mandates at all.

8. Ineffective Green OA mandates are the ones that require self-archiving only if and when the publisher endorses self-archiving: 60% of journals endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving; 40% ask for embargoes of varying in length from 6-12 months to 5 years or indefinitely.

9. Effective Green OA mandates (ID/OA: Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) are the ones that require immediate deposit of all articles, but if the publisher has an OA embargo, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access" during the allowable embargo period (preferably no more than 6 months).

10. During any embargo, the institutional repository has an automated email-eprint-request button that allows users to request a copy for research purposes with one click, and allows the author to comply with one click. (This is not OA but "Almost-OA".)

11. The rationale for ID/OA + the Almost-OA button is to ensure that 100% of papers are immediately deposited and accessible for research purposes, not just the 60% that have publisher endorsement.

12. The expectation is that once ID/OA is mandated globally by 100% of institutions and funders, not only will it provide 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA, but it will hasten the end of OA embargoes, as the power and utility of OA become evident, familiar and indispensable to all researchers, as authors and users.

There are additional details about optimal mandates. (Deposit should be designated the sole procedure for submitting publications for institutional performance review, and funders should mandate convergent institutional deposit rather than divergent institution-external deposit.)

And the further expectation is that once Gratis Green OA is mandated by institutions and funders globally, it will hasten the advent of Libre OA (CC-BY) and Gold OA.

All the frustration and complaints being vented in the recent GOAL postings are with the lack of OA. But frustration will not bring OA. Only mandates will. And the optimal mandate is ID/OA, even if it does not confer instant global OA.

First things first.

Don't let the unreachable best get in the way of the reachable better.

Grasp what is already within reach.

Stevan Harnad

Comment on:
Ian Mundell, European Voice:
Red light for green open access approach,

"One of the clearest findings from the [PEER] study is that...‘[G]reen open access' does not work if it is left to academics to deposit their own manuscripts. The active collaboration of publishers is required to feed the repositories." [Michael Mabe, STM]

PEER was a self-interested project of publishers whose motivation was not to provide open access to research but to protect publishers' revenue streams.

Green Open Access (OA) is authors making their peer-reviewed final drafts accessible free for all online by depositing them in institutional OA repositories. What is needed to make Green OA work is not collaboration from authors' publishers but Green OA mandates from authors' funders and institutions.

Green OA can be -- and is being -- mandated (required) worldwide by over 50 research funders (including all the UK Research Councils, the EU, and NIH in the US) and nearly 200 universities (including UCL, Harvard and MIT). The US has a congressional bill (the Federal Research Public Access Act, FRPAA) that would extend Green OA mandates to all the major US research funders. A US public petition supporting this has just reached its target threshold of 25,000 signatures within 2 weeks.

“When research is funded by the EU, we will require open access to the research, whether by green or gold routes”. [Neelie Kroes, VP, EC]

Institutional subscriptions are paying, in full, for research publication today. If universal Green OA ever makes the subscription model unsustainable, institutional subscription cancellations will release the money for a transition to "Gold OA" publishing, in which the cost of publication is paid per outgoing paper rather than per incoming journal.

What is missing and urgently needed now, for research impact and progress, is research access for all potential users, not new sources of revenue for publishers while subscriptions are paying for publication.

Paying pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions are still paying the full cost of publication is a waste of scarce funds in exchange for precious little OA: Full speed ahead on Green OA mandates.

Stevan Harnad

Comment on:
Open-access petitioners trigger White House response, Paul Jump, Times Higher Education

Open Access (OA) means online access free for all -- specialized researchers and general public alike. Hence there is no conflict at all about whether OA is needed for researchers or for the public. It's needed by both. Moreover, researcher access is itself in the interest of the public: It is for the benefit of the public that researchers use, apply and build upon the research that is funded for that purpose by the public.

Nor is it just a few disgruntled researchers who lack access -- and hence cannot use, apply and build upon the research that the public has funded. No research institution, not even the richest, can afford subscription access to all, most or even much of the research that is published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals; most research institutions can only afford access to a small fraction of those journals. That means that most research is accessible only to a fraction of its intended users. This is borne out by the finding, in field after field, that research that is accessible free for all is used and cited significantly more than research that is accessible only to subscribers.

But only about 20% of research is made OA spontaneously by its authors today, and the main reason is that authors are afraid to make it OA (even though the majority of journals have already given authors their official blessing to make their peer-reviewed final drafts OA immediately, with no embargo, by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories).

This is why official OA self-archiving mandates from authors' institutions and funders are so important and urgent today.

And this is why over 25,000 people have petitioned the White House to mandate OA for publicly funded research.

Stevan Harnad