Publishing Lobby

Phil Davis continues his inexplicable preoccupation with what's best for the publishing industry, at the expense of what is best for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds them -- the ones by and for whom the research funded.

Phil's latest point is that the low uptake by authors of committed Gold OA funds indicates that authors don't really want OA.

But authors themselves have responded quite clearly, and repeatedly, in Alma Swan's international surveys, that they do need, want, and value OA. Yet they also state that they will only provide OA to their own writings if their institutions and funders require (i.e., mandate) them to provide it.

(There is definitely a paradox here, but it is not resolved by simply assuming that authors don't really want OA! It's rather more complicated than that. Authors would not publish much, either, if their institutions and funders did not require them to "publish or perish." And without that, where would the publishing industry be?)

I have dubbed the condition "Zeno's Paralysis," which is the fact that for a variety of reasons (38 at last count) -- all groundless and easily defeasible but relentlessly recurrent nonetheless, including worries about copyright, worries about getting published, worries about peer review, and even worries about the time and effort it might require to provide OA -- most authors will not provide OA spontaneously. And the cure is not only known, but has already been administered by over 150 institutions and funders: Mandate OA.

And the only form of OA that institutions and funders can mandate is Green OA self-archiving of all peer-reviewed journal articles, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Apart from that, all they can do is provide some of their scarce funds (largely tied up in paying for subscriptions) to pay for a little Gold OA publishing. The uptake for that is even lower than for unmandated Green OA self-archiving, but that's certainly not evidence against Alma Swan's survey findings about what authors want, and what it will take to get them to provide it (and Arthur Sale's data confirming that authors actually do as they say they will do, if mandated).

---

Ironically, the book Phil cites -- Stephen Jay Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" -- was also a critique, some of it well-taken, but likewise tainted by an ideological bias. In  Gould's case the ideological bias was far, far more noble than Phil's parochial bias in favor of publishers' interests and the status quo: Gould was an idealistic marxist whose bias was against evidence indicating that there are genetic differences between human populations. In the core chapter of that book -- "The Real Error of Cyril Burt" -- Gould tried to show that psychometricians had made a methodological and conceptual error in interpreting the "G" factor -- a strong positive common factor that kept being observed among multiple, diverse psychometric tests across diverse populations -- as if it were an empirical finding, whereas (according to Gould) it was merely an inevitable result of their method of analysis: the  "positive-definite manifold" that invariably results from the construction of a lot of positively correlated tests. (What Gould missed was that there was nothing about the analytic method that guaranteed that the joint correlations should all be positive, and certainly not that the resultant G factor should turn out, as it did, to be correlated with genetic differences between populations.)

The consensus in the field of psychometrics and biometrics today is that in this case the real error was Gould's.

Well, this is a rather unflattering account, but since (though a few are a tad out of context) not a word of it is untrue, I'm in no position to object! All I can add is that perhaps it is not the frequency of comments that matters, but their substance. And that I was not so ferocious a decade and a half ago, when the "naive but important" comments were still new.

One is tempted to reply to Lord Drayson that since the US is now contemplating a directive a good deal more ambitious than the one Lord Drayson thinks would be a "real seismic shock" to the UK, perhaps it will prove just a mild post-tremor aftershock here. But the truth is that the UK is already far ahead of the US in mandating open access, with all the UK Research Councils having already mandated it whilst the US is still contemplating the move...

If universities were to prove foolish enough to scrap their own Institutional Repositories, renouncing their efforts to reclaim custody of their own research assets at long last, to heed instead the siren call urging that they entrust them yet again to 3rd parties -- and commercial ones like scribd, to boot -- then, frankly, they are unsalvageable and deserve everything that's coming to them.

I don't for a minute, however, believe that the Academy would fall for this, having been once bitten, now twice shy, any more than they are falling for the concerted bid by some publishers to "leave the open-access archiving to us!"

Rather, this is a highly anomalous and dysfunctional era of academic "outsourcing" that is happily nearing its well-deserved end.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

January 16, 2009 11:38:30

Dear Stevan

Yes, please use the quotes with our permission. If you want to refer to the whole document please link to it on our website at [this link]

If you are interested in posting the full document on your website you have permission to do this - with the proviso that any modifications/commentary must be prominently noted and distinguished from our document and that you link it to the original on the STM site.

Thanks for the chance to post “background context and objectives”. Perhaps you could note to your ePrints site the gist of my emails, namely:

(1) Our document was originally intended as briefing for a STM member-publishers to help them develop policies and a greater understanding of the current environment

(2) STM welcomes open discussion of these matters and will be interested to learn about any comments you receive

(3) That I’d like to reserve the opportunity to comment at a later date if it seems that would be helpful

Best, Michael

Michael A Mabe
Chief Executive Officer
International Association of STM Publishers
Prama House, 267 Banbury Road
OXFORD, OX2 7HT, UK
Web: www.stm-assoc.org

---

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again), there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of the PRISM/pitbull misadventure of 2007.

Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are unavoidably -- almost ritually -- repetitive, because the errors and misinformation themselves are so repetitive.

STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES

Issues that drive... [publisher] policies [on IR deposits] center around assessments of their impact on the integrity of the scientific record and their potential to undermine the funding that drives scholarly communication today. These assessments are especially crucial when public posting of final and authoritative versions of scholarly articles on IRs are concerned.

This is a fair statement: The issues for the research community are research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress. The issue for the publisher community is their financial bottom line.

Publishers become concerned when IRs involve themselves in publishing and distribution activities currently being done efficiently and effectively by the scholarly publishing community. When this happens, a parallel publishing system is created that lacks the quality controls and value-added processes publishers already employ.

(1) IRs do not publish: peer-reviewed journal publishers publish. IRs provide access to their own authors' (peer-reviewed, published) output -- for all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's toll-based proprietary version -- so as to maximize the access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress of their research output.

(2) The version of the published article that the authors deposit in their IRs is the final, revised, peer-reviewed draft (the "postprint"), accepted for publication, but not the publisher's proprietary PDF. Hence deposit does have the quality controls provided (for free) by the peer-reviewers. (If the copy-editing should happen to detect any substantive errors -- which is exceedingly rare! -- these too can be corrected in the deposited postprint.)

If IRs become primary publishing outlets, many are concerned that key elements of today’s scholarly communication system such as quality controls, preservation standards, and the discoverability of research, will suffer.

IRs are not substitutes for publishing but supplements to it, providing access to research for access-denied would-be users, for the sake of maximizing research progress. The deposited postprints have undergone the essential quality-control for researchers: peer review.

The discoverability of postprints in IRs (via search engines like google, google scholar, citeseerx, scirus and scopus) is excellent. No problems, and no complaints from all the would-be users webwide who would otherwise lack access to them.

(Preservation is a red herring: Preservation of what? As supplements, rather than substitutes, authors' self-archived postprints are not the versions with the primary preservation burden (although IR deposits are of course being preserved). The primary preservation burden is on the publisher's proprietary version, the official version of record, as it always has been.)

Publishers rely on copyright transfers or publishing licenses from authors for the rights they need to ensure that the funding sources for the scholarly communications process... are not undermined by the availability of alternative versions. In return, authors’ manuscripts are improved, enriched, promoted, and branded as part of a web-based peer-reviewed journal publishing system developed and maintained by publishers.

(a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, and impact, by maximizing access to them.

(b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

(c) But if and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

(d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) merely in order to insure publishers' current funding model against any possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

(e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them, for research purposes. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

Publishers are not alone in expressing concern about the potential misuse and dangers of IRs. Most recently, Dorothea Salo of the University of Wisconsin library has raised issues about the expense and utility of IRs in an article entitled “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel”

(Publishers might do better to pay serious attention to the substantive rationale and evidence concerning IR deposits and IR deposit mandates, rather than to the opining of roach motel keepers.)

As an executive in the publishing industry, you may be asked to comment on news and developments in the academic community about these IR policies, which are sometimes also less accurately described as “authors’ rights” or “open access” policies.

IR deposit mandates are accurately described as institutional open access policy. (But IR deposit mandates are certainly not "authors' rights" policies.)

The purpose of this document is to provide a summary of the situation as it currently exists; to enable you to review and monitor your own policies and approaches; and to respond to members of the media if desired.... Key points for internal review:

-- What publishing rights are necessary to support our business model(s)? E.g. subscription models will generally need at least exclusive publishing rights while author-pays models may not

This mixes up issues: The only relevant issue here for IRs and IR deposit policies is whether or not the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication. (This is called a "Green" publisher policy on OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with author-pays/Gold OA publishing models. And authors paying for the "right" to deposit would be absurd and out of the question.)

-- In our journal publishing agreement(s), do we offer rights to authors for IR postings? If not, under what terms and conditions might we?

If the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication, the publisher is Green. If there is no endorsement, or OA is embargoed, the publisher is Gray.

-- What distinctions do we draw between pre-print servers, voluntary IRs, and mandated IRs in terms of copyright policies and business model(s)?

The only potential distinction is between authors' own institutional IRs and institution-external 3rd-party central repositories. Although OA is OA (and means free online accessibility webwide, irrespective of the locus of deposit), some publishers only endorse deposit in the author's own IR, in order not to endorse 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers: This limitation is innocuous, and no problem for OA. (In fact, there are many reasons why it is preferable for both kinds of Deposit mandates -- those from funders as well as from institutions -- to converge on institutional IR deposit, from which the metadata can then be harvested centrally.)

What would be arbitrary (and absurd, and unenforceable) would be to attempt to endorse only voluntary IR deposit and not mandatory IR deposit by authors!

-- Intramural Policies: We allow posting of final or near-final versions of articles on an Intranet site with no public access permitted;

Let there be no ambiguity about this: Such a policy would be Gray, not Green, on OA IR self-archiving.

-- Extramural Policies: We allow posting of early versions of articles [e.g. pre-prints, revised author manuscripts prior to copy-editing and formatting'] on an Internet site with public access permitted and journal-specific embargo periods;

Without an embargo, this policy would be fully Green, and neither IRs nor OA ask for anything more. With an embargo, it would be Gray.

-- Linking Policies: We allow posting of final versions of articles on a publisher web site with links from institutional sites

If the posting on the publisher's website is done immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access to it is immediately open to all users webwide, that would be fully Green too. (For such cases, IRs could, for internal record-keeping purposes, mandate the deposit of the author's postprint in the IR, but in Closed Access, with the OA link going to the publisher's freely accessible version for the duration of the publisher's embargo on making the IR version OA too: no problem.)

-- Sponsorship Policies: We allow posting of final versions of articles on an institutional site and/or our own site and/or other repository site with direct financial support of agency, institution, author or sponsor

Paying to deposit in researchers' own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community.

Key points to consider in possible interactions with the media:

-- More scholarly journal literature is more visible and more accessible to more individuals now than at any time in history, principally because of the efforts and investments of publishers

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress by making all research accessible to all of its would-be users webwide (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe) that the OA movement was launched. And that is why Green OA self-archiving, generated by funder and institutional IR deposit mandates, is growing, to the great benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.)

-- Today’s system of web-based peer-reviewed journals is a vital component of the scholarly communication process and is used by funding agencies and the institutions alike to make critically important personal and professional decisions

Correct. And both the research itself, and the peer review, are provided by the research community, free of charge, to the publishing community, in exchange for the neutral 3rd-party management of the peer review, and the certification of the outcome with the journal's name and track-record. The publishing community is compensated for the value it has added by receiving the exclusive right to sell the resultant joint product (and no need to pay authors royalties from the sales of their texts).

But that does not mean that researchers cannot and will not continue to give away their own peer-reviewed research findings also to those would-be users who cannot afford to buy the resultant joint product. Nor does it mean that researchers' institutions and funders cannot and will not mandate that they do so, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress for the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

-- Posting on an institutional repository is not the same as publishing in a journal— journals have established editorial policies and perspectives, peer review systems, editing, tagging, and reference-linking services

Correct. And individual authors depositing the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their published articles in their IRs is not publication but supplementary access provision, for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version.

-- If not carefully conceived and managed, IRs can become nothing more than alternative, free-access parallel (but inferior) publishing and distribution systems which risk undermining the incentives and ability of publishers to invest in managing the peer-review of research and to provide and maintain the well-organized infrastructure necessary to publish, disseminate and archive journal articles

This is merely the repetition of the same point made earlier:

No, IR deposits of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles are not publishing, nor substitutes for publishing, they are author supplements, provided for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version:

    (a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, impact, by maximizing access to them.

    (b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

    (c) If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

    (d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    (e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

-- IRs require investment and management. They should be undertaken only if they have a clear mission and purpose other than merely offering an alternative parallel publishing and distribution system

IRs are undertaken by universities and research institutions -- i.e., the research community. It is not at all clear why the publishing community is providing this advice to the research community on its undertaking...

-- Researchers should be fully briefed about possible adverse and long-term effects on scholarly communication before granting broad and ill-defined rights to IRs

Researchers can and should be fully briefed about the already demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and the researcher's institutions -- the benefits generated by maximizing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress through Green OA self-archiving and IR deposit mandates.

Researchers need this full briefing on research benefits, because it is based on actual facts and experience.

But is the publishing community suggesting that -- in addition to these empirical and practical facts -- researchers should also be briefed on publishers' speculations about how Green OA self-archiving might conceivably induce an eventual change in publishers' funding model?

Why?

    If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to protect publishers' current funding model from the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

-- Faculty authors should retain the freedom to choose how and where to publish

By all means. And they should continue to exercise their freedom to supplement access to their published research by depositing their postprints in their IRs for all would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version.

-- Universities proposing to obtain rights from their faculty should also work with publishers to avoid adverse effects on the system of web-based peer-reviewed journals which currently underpins today’s unprecedented rate of scientific advancement

It would be excellent if all authors reserved OA self-archiving rights in their copyright agreements with their publishers. Then all authors could immediately deposit all their peer-reviewed research in their IRs, and immediately make them OA without any further ado. But for at least 63% of journals, formally reserving that right is already unnecessary, as those journals are already Green, so those articles can already be made immediately OA today by self-archiving them in the author's IR.

For the remaining 37%, their authors can likewise already deposit the postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance without the need of either copyright reservation or any formal endorsement or permission from the publisher: if they wish, they can set access to the deposit as "Closed Access" -- meaning only the author can access it. Then the authors can provide "Almost OA" to those deposits with the help of their IR's "email eprint request" button: Individual would-be users who reach a Closed Access deposit link (led there by the deposit's OA metadata) need merely press the Button and insert their email address in order to trigger an immediate automatic email to the author to request a single copy for personal research purposes; the author receives the eprint request, which contains a URL on which he can click to trigger an immediate automatic email to the would-be user containing a single copy of the requested postprint. This is not OA, but it is Almost-OA.

OA is indisputably better for research and researchers than Almost-OA. But 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA will tide over the worldwide research community's immediate usage needs for the time being, until the inevitable transition to 100% OA that will follow from the worldwide adoption of Immediate IR Deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

This is the information on which the research community needs to be clearly briefed. The publishing community's conjectures about funding models are important, and of undoubted interest to the publishing community itself, but they should in no way constrain the research community in maximizing access to its own refereed research output in the Web era by mandating IR deposit universally.

To repeat:

    What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is much harder, however, for institutions to successfully achieve consensus on adopting an IR deposit mandate at all if the mandate in question is a copyright-reservation mandate rather than an IR deposit mandate. And because it is even harder to ensure compliance with a copyright-reservation mandate (because of authors' worries that the negotiations with their publishers to reserve immediate-OA self-archiving rights might not succeed and might instead put at risk their right to "choose how and where to publish"), the one prominent institutional copyright reservation mandate (Harvard's) contains an author opt-out clause that makes the mandate into a non-mandate. The simple solution is to add an Immediate-Deposit requirement, without opt-out. Even simpler still, adopt an Immediate-Deposit mandate as the default mandate model suitable for all, worldwide, and strengthen the mandate only if and when there is successful consensus and compliance in favor of a stronger mandate.]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

[Two members of STM have kindly, at my request, allowed me to see a copy of the STM Briefing on IRs and Deposit Mandates. I focused the commentary below on quoted excerpts, but before posting it I asked STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to include the quotes. As I do not yet have an answer, I am posting the commentary with paraphrases of the passages I had hoped to quote. If I receive permission from Michael, I will repost this with the verbatim quotes. As it stands, it is self-contained and self-explanatory.

(Permission since received. Please see the version with verbatim quotes HERE.)]

---

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again), there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of the PRISM/pitbull misadventure of 2007.

Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are unavoidably -- almost ritually -- repetitive, because the errors and misinformation themselves are so repetitive.

STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES

[Publisher policy on IRs is concerned with how IR deposit mandates might affect publishing and publishing revenues, particularly in the case of refereed final drafts.]

This is a fair statement: The issues for the research community are research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress. The issue for the publisher community is their financial bottom line.

[Publishing and distribution today is successful and adequate. IRs publish an inferior version.]

(1) IRs do not publish: peer-reviewed journal publishers publish. IRs provide access to their own authors' (peer-reviewed, published) output -- for all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's toll-based proprietary version -- so as to maximize the access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress of their research output.

(2) The version of the published article that the authors deposit in their IRs is the final, revised, peer-reviewed draft (the "postprint"), accepted for publication, but not the publisher's proprietary PDF. Hence deposit does have the quality controls provided (for free) by the peer-reviewers. (If the copy-editing should happen to detect any substantive errors -- which is exceedingly rare! -- these too can be corrected in the deposited postprint.)

[Publishing by IRs compromises quality, preservation and discoverability.]

IRs are not substitutes for publishing but supplements to it, providing access to research for access-denied would-be users, for the sake of maximizing research progress. The deposited postprints have undergone the essential quality-control for researchers: peer review.

The discoverability of postprints in IRs (via search engines like google, google scholar, citeseerx, scirus and scopus) is excellent. No problems, and no complaints from all the would-be users webwide who would otherwise lack access to them.

(Preservation is a red herring: Preservation of what? As supplements, rather than substitutes, authors' self-archived postprints are not the versions with the primary preservation burden (although IR deposits are of course being preserved). The primary preservation burden is on the publisher's proprietary version, the official version of record, as it always has been.)

[Exclusive copyright transfer is essential so the availability of alternative versions does not prevent publishers from making ends meet. Publishers add value in return for the exclusive rights.]

(a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, and impact, by maximizing access to them.

(b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

(c) But if and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

(d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) merely in order to insure publishers' current funding model against any possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

(e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them, for research purposes. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is not just publishers that think IRs pose risks; librarian Dorothea Salo has questioned IRs' costs and usefulness in “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel”.]

(Publishers might do better to pay serious attention to the substantive rationale and evidence concerning IR deposits and IR deposit mandates, rather than to the opining of roach motel keepers.)

[It is inaccurate to speak of IR policies as “authors’ rights” policies or “open access” policies.]

IR deposit mandates are accurately described as institutional open access policy. (But IR deposit mandates are certainly not "authors' rights" policies.)

[Talking points in responding to the media: subscription publishing does require exclusive copyright transfer; perhaps OA publishing doesn't.]

This mixes up issues: The only relevant issue here for IRs and IR deposit policies is whether or not the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication. (This is called a "Green" publisher policy on OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with author-pays/Gold OA publishing models. And authors paying for the "right" to deposit would be absurd and out of the question.)

[Should we endorse IR deposit? Under what conditions?]

If the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication, the publisher is Green. If there is no endorsement, or OA is embargoed, the publisher is Gray.

[Should we make distinctions between preprint repositories, unmandated IRs and mandated IRs?]

The only potential distinction is between authors' own institutional IRs and institution-external 3rd-party central repositories. Although OA is OA (and means free online accessibility webwide, irrespective of the locus of deposit), some publishers only endorse deposit in the author's own IR, in order not to endorse 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers: This limitation is innocuous, and no problem for OA. (In fact, there are many reasons why it is preferable for both kinds of Deposit mandates -- those from funders as well as from institutions -- to converge on institutional IR deposit, from which the metadata can then be harvested centrally.)

What would be arbitrary (and absurd, and unenforceable) would be to attempt to endorse only voluntary IR deposit and not mandatory IR deposit by authors!

[Should we only endorse IR deposits that are open only to institution-internal users?]

Let there be no ambiguity about this: Such a policy would be Gray, not Green, on OA IR self-archiving.

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only after an embargo period?]

Without an embargo, this policy would be fully Green, and neither IRs nor OA ask for anything more. With an embargo, it would be Gray.

[Should we only allow links from IRs to final versions on the publisher's website?]

If the posting on the publisher's website is done immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access to it is immediately open to all users webwide, that would be fully Green too. (For such cases, IRs could, for internal record-keeping purposes, mandate the deposit of the author's postprint in the IR, but in Closed Access, with the OA link going to the publisher's freely accessible version for the duration of the publisher's embargo on making the IR version OA too: no problem.)

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only for a fee?]

Paying to deposit in researchers' own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community.

[Inform the media that publishers have made journal articles more accessible today than ever before.]

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress by making all research accessible to all of its would-be users webwide (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe) that the OA movement was launched. And that is why Green OA self-archiving, generated by funder and institutional IR deposit mandates, is growing, to the great benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.)

[Online refereed journals are crucial for funders, universities, authors, and authors' careers.]

Correct. And both the research itself, and the peer review, are provided by the research community, free of charge, to the publishing community, in exchange for the neutral 3rd-party management of the peer review, and the certification of the outcome with the journal's name and track-record. The publishing community is compensated for the value it has added by receiving the exclusive right to sell the resultant joint product (and no need to pay authors royalties from the sales of their texts).

But that does not mean that researchers cannot and will not continue to give away their own peer-reviewed research findings also to those would-be users who cannot afford to buy the resultant joint product. Nor does it mean that researchers' institutions and funders cannot and will not mandate that they do so, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress for the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

[Depositing in an IR is not equivalent to journal publishing, with its editing, peer review, and other added values.]

Correct. And individual authors depositing the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their published articles in their IRs is not publication but supplementary access provision, for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version.

[IRs might provide a lower quality option that makes publishers unable or unwilling to perform their value-added services.]

This is merely the repetition of the same point made earlier:

No, IR deposits of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles are not publishing, nor substitutes for publishing, they are author supplements, provided for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version:

    (a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, impact, by maximizing access to them.

    (b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

    (c) If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

    (d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    (e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[IRs cost money and should only be created if they have a distinct goal rather than just parallel publishing and access-provision]

IRs are undertaken by universities and research institutions -- i.e., the research community. It is not at all clear why the publishing community is providing this advice to the research community on its undertaking...

[Researchers should be advised of the damage IRs could do to research publication and dissemination.]

Researchers can and should be fully briefed about the already demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and the researcher's institutions -- the benefits generated by maximizing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress through Green OA self-archiving and IR deposit mandates.

Researchers need this full briefing on research benefits, because it is based on actual facts and experience.

But is the publishing community suggesting that -- in addition to these empirical and practical facts -- researchers should also be briefed on publishers' speculations about how Green OA self-archiving might conceivably induce an eventual change in publishers' funding model?

Why?

    If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to protect publishers' current funding model from the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

[Researchers should stay free "to choose how and where to publish."]

By all means. And they should continue to exercise their freedom to supplement access to their published research by depositing their postprints in their IRs for all would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version.

[Institutions that want their employees to reserve certain rights for their published journal articles should collaborate with journal publishers so as not to damage their business.]

It would be excellent if all authors reserved OA self-archiving rights in their copyright agreements with their publishers. Then all authors could immediately deposit all their peer-reviewed research in their IRs, and immediately make them OA without any further ado. But for at least 63% of journals, formally reserving that right is already unnecessary, as those journals are already Green, so those articles can already be made immediately OA today by self-archiving them in the author's IR.

For the remaining 37%, their authors can likewise already deposit the postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance without the need of either copyright reservation or any formal endorsement or permission from the publisher: if they wish, they can set access to the deposit as "Closed Access" -- meaning only the author can access it. Then the authors can provide "Almost OA" to those deposits with the help of their IR's "email eprint request" button: Individual would-be users who reach a Closed Access deposit link (led there by the deposit's OA metadata) need merely press the Button and insert their email address in order to trigger an immediate automatic email to the author to request a single copy for personal research purposes; the author receives the eprint request, which contains a URL on which he can click to trigger an immediate automatic email to the would-be user containing a single copy of the requested postprint. This is not OA, but it is Almost-OA.

OA is indisputably better for research and researchers than Almost-OA. But 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA will tide over the worldwide research community's immediate usage needs for the time being, until the inevitable transition to 100% OA that will follow from the worldwide adoption of Immediate IR Deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

This is the information on which the research community needs to be clearly briefed. The publishing community's conjectures about funding models are important, and of undoubted interest to the publishing community itself, but they should in no way constrain the research community in maximizing access to its own refereed research output in the Web era by mandating IR deposit universally.

To repeat:

    What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is much harder, however, for institutions to successfully achieve consensus on adopting an IR deposit mandate at all if the mandate in question is a copyright-reservation mandate rather than an IR deposit mandate. And because it is even harder to ensure compliance with a copyright-reservation mandate (because of authors' worries that the negotiations with their publishers to reserve immediate-OA self-archiving rights might not succeed and might instead put at risk their right to "choose how and where to publish"), the one prominent institutional copyright reservation mandate (Harvard's) contains an author opt-out clause that makes the mandate into a non-mandate. The simple solution is to add an Immediate-Deposit requirement, without opt-out. Even simpler still, adopt an Immediate-Deposit mandate as the default mandate model suitable for all, worldwide, and strengthen the mandate only if and when there is successful consensus and compliance in favor of a stronger mandate.]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Re: More on the AAP complaints about the NIH policy

When will research journal publishers realize that research is conducted by researchers and funded by the tax-paying public for the sake of what is best for research, researchers, their institutions, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public? Research is not being conducted and funded as a service to the research journal publishing industry.

Publicly elected officials and the NIH especially need to realize and remember this, rather than allowing themselves to be persuaded by the publisher lobby that there is some sort of "balance" issue here.

Research publishing is a service industry: Publishers are given the results of funded research, by researchers, for free, to be refereed (by researchers, again for free) and then published for subscription sales revenue (in which the researchers ask no share), so that the refereed research can be made accessible to all those who can use, apply and build upon it -- once again, to the benefit of research, researchers, and the tax-paying public that funds them.

Publishers' revenues come from subscription sales, which are currently making ends meet quite adequately.

If and when it should ever come to pass that Green Open Access self-archiving mandates make subscriptions unsustainable, the obvious solution will be for journal publishers to convert to Gold Open Access publishing (which some publishers have done already). But AAP is pre-emptively lobbying (and now even threatening to sue!) to continue to restrict the very access for the sake of which research is being given to publishers to be published -- in order to protect their current cost-recovery model from the hypothetical risk of one day having to convert to Gold OA Publishing.

Though the analogy is a bit shrill, it is very much as if tobacco companies were lobbying against no-smoking ordinances because they might hurt their sales (even though they protect public health) -- except that in the case of the no-smoking mandates, there isn't even Gold waiting at the end of the rainbow!

Drawn by Judith Economos
(feel free to use to promote OA and to bait "pit-bulls")


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: Joseph Esposito, a management consultant, says Open Access (OA) is "research spam." But OA's explicit target content is all 2.5 million peer-reviewed articles published annually in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals. (So either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).
   Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal articles (they already have that): rather, it's not having the time to read them. This will come as news to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the articles in the journals their institution cannot afford, and to the authors of those articles, who are losing all that potential research impact.
   Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends on being able to afford the subscription tolls. Esposito also says OA is just for a small circle of peers: How big does he imagine the actual usership of most journal articles is?
   Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access only to those who can afford to pay them for it (and for their bonuses).
   Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying, but he does not attach a name to what anti-OA publishers are doing when they hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent OA self-archiving from being mandated. (Another surcharge for researchers, in addition to paying for their bonuses?)
   Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over 80% of those researchers report that they would self-archive willingly if mandated. (And where does Esposito think publishers would be without existing publish-or-perish mandates?)
   Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research article output is the time it takes to do the few keystrokes per article it takes to provide OA. That is what the mandates (and the metrics that reward them) are meant to accomplish at long last.

---

Joseph Esposito is an independent management consultant (the "portable CEO") with a long history in publishing, specializing in "interim management and strategy work at the intersection of content and digital technology."

In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article, "The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work"), Esposito says Open Access (OA) is "research spam" -- making unrefereed or low quality research available to researchers whose real problem is not insufficient access but insufficient time.

In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model," Esposito manages to fall (not for the first time) into many of the longstanding fallacies that have been painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in the self-archiving FAQ. (See especially Peer Review, Sitting Pretty, and Info-Glut.)

Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests, Esposito does the double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold OA) with OA self-archiving (of non-OA journal articles) (Green OA), and (2) of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles with unpublished preprints. It would be very difficult to call OA research "spam" if Esposito were to state, veridically, that Green OA self-archiving means making all articles published in all peer-reviewed journals (whether Gold or not) OA. (Hence either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).

Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for unrefereed or low quality research, which is simply false: OA's explicit target is the peer-reviewed, published postprints of all the 2.5 million articles published annually in all the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, from the very best to the very worst, without exception. (The self-archiving of pre-refereeing preprints is merely an optional supplement, a bonus; it is not what OA is about, or for.)

Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal articles: They already have that via their institution's journal subscriptions; their real problem is not having the time to read those articles, and not having the search engines that pick out the best ones.

Tell that to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the specific articles they need in the journals to which their institution cannot afford to subscribe. (No institution comes anywhere near being able to subscribe to all 25,000, and many are closer to 250.)

And tell it also to the authors of all those articles to which all those would-be users are being denied access; their articles are being denied all that research impact. Ask users and authors alike whether they are happy with affordability being the "filter" determining what can and cannot be accessed. Search engines find it all for them, tantalizingly, but whether they can access it depends on whether their institutions can afford a subscription.

Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60? 600? but not 6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership of most of the individual 2.5 million annual journal articles to be? Peer-reviewed research is an esoteric, peer-to-peer process, for the contents of all 25,000 journals: research is conducted and published, not for royalty income, but so that it can be used, applied and built upon by all interested peer specialists and practitioners, to the benefit of the tax-payers who fund their research; the size of the specialties varies, but none are big, because research itself is not big (compared to trade, and trade publication).

Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access only to those who can afford to pay them for it.

Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers' amateurish efforts to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying -- passing in silence over the fact that the real lobbying pro's are the wealthy anti-OA publishers who hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent Green OA from being mandated.

Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would comply with OA mandates ("it's not news that people would comply with a requirement"), but he omits to mention that most researchers surveyed recognised the benefits of OA, and over 80% reported they would self-archive willingly if it was mandated, only 15% stating they would do so unwillingly. (One wonders whether Esposito also finds the existing and virtually universal publish-or-perish mandates of research institutions and funders tautological -- and where he thinks the publishers for whom he consults would be without those mandates.)



Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research output is the time it takes to do a few keystrokes per article. That, and only that, is what the mandates are all about, for busy, overloaded researchers: Giving those few keystrokes the priority they deserve, so they can at last start reaping the benefits -- in terms of research access and impact -- that they desire. The outcome is optimal and inevitable for the research community; it is only because this was not immediately obvious that the outcome has been so long overdue.

But the delay has been in no small part also because of the conflicting interests of the journal publishing industry for which Esposito consults. So it is perhaps not surprising that he should perceive it otherwise, unperturbed if things continue at a (nautilus) snail's pace for as long as possible...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint. Nature started out being Green, but then back-slid to pale-Green in 2005, introducing a 6-month embargo on self-archiving. But the ACS (American Chemical Society) is Gray. Rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM, ACS is the only Gray publisher to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green!
    Chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. The surest and fastest antidote for ACS's grayness, however, is for universities and research funders to adopt the Immediate-Deposit (ID/OA) Mandate, which allows a Closed Access Embargo, but requires deposit of the postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication (allowing the Institutional Repository's semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" or "Fair Use" Button to provide almost-OA almost-immediately, to tide over any embargo period).

---

[Identity Deleted]: "At the AAAS 2007 meeting held in San Francisco, Tony Hey, in his presentation to a panel chaired by Christine Borgman, made the point that some form of open access to text and data would be the norm in about ten years from now. Ironically, AAAS [along with ACS] is among the few leading professional societies which opposes open access tooth and nail! What can we do to convince the AAAS management (as well as the ACS management) to see the point that is obvious to us? Some believe that AAAS opposes OA while commercial publishers such as Nature Group supports OA in some form..."

AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint; hence there is nothing we need to convince AAAS of!

(Indeed, it is Nature that back-slid to pale-Green in 2005: Nature started out being Green, but then introduced a 6-month embargo on self-archiving coinciding with the announcement that the NIH agreed had agreed to embargoes.)

But it is ACS (American Chemical Society) that is Gray.

And although it is a good idea to keep trying to convince them, my own guess is that ACS will be among the very last of the publishers to go Green. ACS was rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM. (The other two were rumored to be Elsevier, which is fully Green, and Wiley, which is Pale-Green).

ACS is the Learned Society with the biggest and most remunerative publishing operation. With Chemical Abstracts they make a lot more money than the American Physical Society (APS), which was the very first of the Green publishers, and which set the standard for all the rest.

The strongest weapon against the ACS's Gray policy is the movement for data-archiving. (The two strongest contingents of the movement for data-archiving are in Biology and in Chemistry; I have branched this to Peter Murray-Rust, Jeremy Frey, and Michael Hursthouse.)

The chemical research community, accustomed to the status quo, with Chemical Abstracts and the other ACS products and services, is one of the most quiescent on the movement to provide OA to journal articles, but they can be roused on the subject of data-archiving.

And, ironically, ACS is also the most vulnerable there: Other publishers, since they do not publish data, have no big stake in data-archiving, one way or another. But for ACS, data-archiving (just like article-archiving) represents (or appears to them to represent) a risk to their revenue-streams.

So chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. And in chemistry, of all fields, the two are very closely coupled, since many chemical publications (e.g. in crystallography) consist of just the description of a new molecule. See:

(1) Southampton Crystal Structure Report Archive/EPSRC
(2) Mineralogical Society of America/NSF
(3) RRUF/NSF
(4) NCL in Pune (theses)
(5) Elsevier's somewhat half-hearted (because ambivalent) "Chemistry Preprint Server"

So NSF is a potential ally in influencing the ACS. So too would be NIH (if it weren't the victim of ACS's successful anti-OA lobbying at the moment); and the UK's EPSRC (which is obviously conflicted on this issue, being the last of the UK funding councils to still hold out as non-Green!)

One last point: Please do not confuse a publisher's stand on Gold OA (publishing) with their stand on Green OA (self-archiving). Gold OA is welcome, but it is Green OA that is urgently needed. In this regard, AAAS (Green) is fully on the side of the Angels, whereas Nature (Pale-Green) is not.

The only two differences between AAAS and Nature are that (1) AAAS is still (nominally) supporting the "Ingelfinger Rule" on prepublication preprints (but that is not a legal matter, and those authors who wish to ignore the unjustified and unenforceable Ingelfinger Rule can ignore it). and (2) Nature has begun to experiment with Gold. This experimentation can be cynical and self-serving, but it is not, I think, in the case of Nature.

In the case of ACS, however, which has begun to "experiment" with the Trojan Horse of "AuthorChoice," it has become the only Gray publisher, as far as I know, to have the temerity to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green!

In my opinion, there is nothing to reproach AAAS with. I'd be somewhat more inclined to shame Nature, with its 6-month embargo, but the best solution for that is to adopt the Immediate-Deposit Mandate (ID/OA), which allows a Closed Access Embargo, but requires deposit of the postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication (allowing the Institutional Repository's semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" or "Fair Use" Button to provide almost-OA almost-immediately, to tide over any embargo period).

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Alma Swan replied:

Alma Swan: "There is no need to shame Nature because those who think self-archiving is worth doing, do it despite Nature's embargo, as I showed by my little study on Nature Physics: see "Author compliance with publisher open access embargoes: a study of the journal Nature Physics."
"The important action point is what it always has been - get through to authors and their bosses and persuade them of the benefits and rationale for OA. Turn them all into physicists, in other words."

I agree completely with Alma: It is, and always has been, perfectly possibly -- and practised -- to go ahead and self-archive with impunity, sensibly ignoring all the formal nonsense about only being allowed to post on "a Windows-based personal website on Tuesdays if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle"! Those who elect to self-archive spontaneously are sensible enough to know that the "permissions barriers" are in reality all just so much unenforceable Wizard-of-Ozzery.

But the fact remains that only about 15% of researchers elect to self-archive spontaneously! That is why the mandates are needed. And whereas rightly dismissing the posturing of publishers as mere Wizard-of-Ozzery is an easy option for individual authors, already inclined to self-archive spontaneously (as generations of Green self-archiving computer-scientists and physicists and others have by now amply demonstrated), it is not an easy option for most institutions and funding agencies contemplating the adoption of formal self-archiving mandates. They must adopt a policy that is not only practically feasible, but also formally legal. (Even there, I don't think the institutions are at any real risk, but they are at a perceived risk.)

That is why -- despite being in possession of her strong, welcome, and compelling evidence on how many Nature authors do self-archive immediately indifferent to Nature's shameful 6-month embargo -- Alma is a co-author of the optimal institutional (and funder) self-archiving policy, which recommends (if you cannot agree on the stronger version, which is to require immediate deposit and immediate, unembargoed Open Access) a weaker compromise, namely, the ID/OA mandate: require immediate deposit, but merely encourage immediate OA -- allowing the option of a Closed Access embargo period for the likes of Nature authors):

"[drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement]"

So, yes, the embargoes are a paper tiger, but we still have to offer a formal policy option that treats their appearance of being real as if it were really real, and can be adopted universally without any worry about illegality, or even the appearance of illegality)!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

From Peter Suber's Open Access News:

"How many publishers have publicly disavowed PRISM or distanced themselves from it?  Nine and counting (with links to their public statements): Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, University of Chicago Press.  How many publishers have been identified on the PRISM web site as members of the PRISM 'coalition'? Zero."

Hiring the high-profile PR pitbull Eric Dezenhall seems to be turning into something of a high-priced, high-profile PR disaster for the publishers' anti-OA lobby.

Sandy Thatcher, President, Association of American University Presses (AAUP) wrote:

ST: "You make it all sound so simple, Stevan, but there is nothing simple about a transition from Green OA to Gold OA, including the redirection of savings from journal subscriptions to funding Gold OA journals, because as many wise people like Jim O'Donnell have pointed out on this list [liblicense], universities don't work that way."

I make no wishes, wise or unwise. And I make no conjectures ("Hypotheses non Fingo") -- except perhaps (if forced) as counter-conjectures, to counter others' unforced conjectures.

The actual empirical evidence (neither wish nor conjecture) is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) is (1) feasible, (2) being done, (3) beneficial, and (4) being mandated. Whether and when it ever goes on to generate cancellations and transitions and redirections is all pure speculation, based on no empirical evidence one way or the other (except that it hasn't happened yet, even in fields that reached 100% Green OA years ago). But if you insist on asking a hypothetical "what if?" question just the same, I respond with an equally hypothetical "then..." answer.

The factual part is fact. If wise men have privileged access to the future, so be it. I have none. I have only the available evidence, and logic. (And logic tells me, platitudinously, that necessity is the mother of invention, and where there's a will, there's a way, especially if/when the hypothetical cancellation windfall savings that no one has yet seen should ever materialize. Till then, I'll just go with the evidence-based four -- OA self-archiving (2), OA self-archiving mandates (4), and their already demonstrated feasibility (1) and benefits (3) -- leaving the speculation to those who prefer that sort of thing.)

ST: "Wishing it were so does not make it so. And by talking about peer review only, you oversimplify what is involved in journal publishing, which requires skills that go beyond simply conducting peer review and that are not most economically carried out by faculty, who are not trained for such tasks and whose dedication of time to them detracts from the exercise of their main talents as researchers."

Well, I could invoke my quarter century as founder and editor in chief of a major peer-reviewed journal as evidence that I may know what I am talking about...

But I'd rather just point out that the conjecture about journal-publication downsizing to just peer-review service-provision is part of the hypothetical conditional that I only invoke if someone insists on playing the speculation game. It is neither a wish nor a whim. I am perfectly content with 100% Green OA. Full stop.

Apart from that, I'll stick with the empirical facts -- reminder: self-archiving, self-archiving mandates, their demonstrated feasability and their demonstrated benefits -- and abstain from the hypothesizing.

ST: "You are also wrong in interpreting PRISM as just another repetition of the same old tired anti-OA rhetoric. As a member of the publishing community whose press is a member of the PSP (but not an endorser of PRISM), I can tell you that this is not just more of the same."

If PRISM is making any new points -- empirical or logical -- I would be very grateful if Sandy (or anyone) would point out to me exactly what those new points are. For all I have seen has been a repetition of the very few and very familiar old points I and others have rebutted so many, many times before...

(Sandy seems to have overlooked the linked list of 21 references I included as evidence that these points have all been voiced, and rebutted, repeatedly, in bygone days. If anyone sends me a list of new points, it would be very helpful if they first checked that list to see whether those points are indeed new, rather than dated, discredited duplicates.)

ST: "Whether we are getting close to a "tipping point" is of course a matter of conjecture, but then so is the overall benefit from Green OA, which you always state as though it were an established fact rather than a hypothesis with some evidence in support of it yet hardly overwhelming evidence at this point in time."

First, since we are talking about wishful thinking, I know full well that the OA self-archiving advantage -- in terms of citations and downloads -- is something that the anti-OA publishers dearly wish were nonexistent, or merely a methodological artifact of some kind.

Second, I and others are quite happy to continue conducting actual empirical studies and analyses confirming the OA advantage, and demonstrating that it is not just an artifact (of either early access or self-selection bias for quality). That interesting ongoing question is at least substantive and empirical, hence new (especially when the challenges come from those -- such as Kurtz and Moed -- who have no vested interests in the outcome one way or the other). The doomsday prophecies and the hype about government control and censorship are not.

"Where There's No Access Problem There's No Open Access Advantage"

(I expect that the tobacco industry did more than its share of wishing that the health benefits of not smoking would turn out to be nonexistent or a self-selection artifact too: When money is at stake, interpretations become self-selective, if not self-serving, too!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum