Publishing Lobby

The Biosciences Federation: "supports increasing access to science research articles, and sees Open Access publishing as a workable approach for most disciplines, provided that research funders can make sufficient money available... so that the viability both of journals, and of the various activities which are made possible by journals income - conferences, meetings and other educational events as well as grants, bursaries and research funding - are not threatened... Open Access publishing would also reduce the risks of self-archiving, which could otherwise damage the viability of journals and thus threaten the substantial other contributions which learned societies make to UK science. The Federation is commissioning a study to quantify these contributions in order better to understand what the impact might be... The results of the research studies will be published early in 2008."

The Biosciences Federation's statement is familiar, old, many times rebutted stuff, and another Trojan Horse. It's of course not at all about promoting Green OA Self-Archiving, or Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates, but about continuing to try to delay or derail them. This time what is instead being self-servingly invoked (Good Cop, Bad Cop) is Gold OA Publishing -- something that cannot be mandated, and is growing far too slowly of its own accord, for many practical and logistical reasons (which is why OA's fast-track is Green OA and Green OA Mandates, rather than waiting for Gold OA).

The Biosciences Federation is simply making the bland statement that if you pay us for it, and pay us enough, and guarantee that payment, we will not oppose Gold OA! Meanwhile, we will continue to oppose Green OA and Green OA mandates, and we will commission yet another study to "investigate" the damage they are likely to do. (This time, it will look at how hypothetical lost subscriptions will affect Learned Societies' "good works," such as the funding they provide for conferences and scholarships, and -- a new one! -- the funding they provide for research!)

Well, several of these self-serving studies (in reality just delay-tactics, in an ongoing filibuster) have already been commissioned and conducted by various sectors of the publishing industry (and others are still underway).

Meanwhile, there is no such spare money to be had, to pay for or guarantee advance payment for Gold OA, and no one to guarantee it. That potential money is all tied up right now in subscriptions. McDonalds would also happily commit itself to free burgers for anyone on the planet if all those who are currently paying for burgers would commit in advance to guarantee to keep paying for them all in advance, at an agreed flat rate, in perpetuum. (That formula always trumps Supply and Demand...)

Pretending not be opposed to OA is just one of the conscious (and unconscious) stratagems to which those who perceive their revenues to be at potential risk are resorting in order to try to stave off the optimal and inevitable (for research), and instead keep everything running on their terms.

We should not be taken in by this: Research is not funded, conducted and published as a service to the publishing industry, but vice versa. We need to stop letting the publishing tail wag the research dog!

"Learned Societies: By Their Works Shall Ye Know Them"

Peter Suber has done the decisive rebuttal to this latest delay strategy by the Biosciences Foundation here, raising (in a far gentler way) all the points that are raised above -- and have been raised countless times before.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Thomas & McDonald (2007) wrote:

"This study's findings only reinforce... predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior"

Sandy Thatcher, President, AAUP, responded:

'If you'll remember our prior discussion about open access, Stevan, I warned that just this "success" might be the "tipping point" to drive a host of commercial and society publishers out of the business of journal publishing. One "tipping point" causes another? Witness, as partial proof, the reaction of STM publishers represented by the PRISM initiative. I read that as a warning that, if the government forces a change in their business model, they may just walk away from the business. I assume you wouldn't consider that a bad thing at all, but my question would be what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?'

What is remarkable is how actual empirical facts (very few) are being freely admixed, willy-nilly, with fact-free speculations for which there is, and continues to be zero empirical evidence, and, in many cases, decisive and familiar counterevidence, both empirical and logical.

Nothing has changed since our prior discussions except that there have (happily) been some more Green OA mandates (total adopted: 32, plus 8 further mandates proposed).

There has been no "tipping point." Just talk about tipping points, and that talk about tipping points has been going on for years.

There has been no one driven out of business, nor any empirical evidence of a trend toward being driven out of business. Just talk about being driven out of business, and that talk about being driven out of business has been going on for years.

And as to the "partial proof" in the form of the STM/PRISM "reaction" -- that very same reaction (with the very same false, alarmist arguments) has been voiced, verbatim, by the very same publisher groups (STM, AAP, ALPSP), over and over, for over a decade now. And they have been debunked just as often (see long list of links below). But that certainly hasn't been enough to make the publishers' anti-OA lobby cease and desist. Do you consider the relentless repetition, at louder and louder volume, of exactly the same specious and evidence-free claims, to be "proof" of anything, partial or otherwise?

And the phrase "the government forces a change in their business model" is just as false a description of what is actually going on when it is spoken in Sandy's own well-meaning words as when it is voiced by PRISM and Eric Dezenhall: The government is not forcing a change in a business model. The funders of tax-payer-funded research -- and, increasingly, universities, who are not "the government" at all! -- are insisting that the researchers they fund and employ make their peer-reviewed research freely available to all would-be users online, in line with the purpose of conducting and funding and publishing research in the first place.

This quite natural (and overdue) adaptation to the online age on the part of the research community -- mandating Green OA self-archiving -- may or may not lead to a transition to Gold OA publishing: no one knows whether, or when it will. But what is already known is that OA itself, whether Green or Gold, is enormously beneficial to research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds research and for whose benefit it is funded, conducted and published. (OA is also a secondary benefit to education and the developing world.)

So the "tipping point" for Green OA itself would be an unalloyed benefit for everyone except the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry, whether or not it led to a second tipping point and a transition to Gold OA.

But reality today, to repeat, is a growth in Green OA mandates, not a tipping point (let alone two), not a subscription decline, not publishers going out of business, not government pressure toward another publishing model.

You ask "what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?" I presume you are referring to the multiple hypothetical conditional: if Green OA mandates reach the tipping point that generates 100% Green OA, and if that in turn generates journal cancellations that reach the tipping point that generates a transition to Gold OA? The answer (which I have provided many times before) is simple: That "structure" will be Gold OA, funded out of (a part of) the institutional cancellation savings.

And this is not about publishing in general -- commercial, society, university, or otherwise. It is only about peer-reviewed journal publishing, and their hypothetical transition to Gold OA under cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA.

(2005) Critique of ALPSP'S 1st Response to RCUK's Open Access Self-Archiving Proposal.
(2005) Rebuttal of STM Response to RCUK Self-Archiving Policy Proposal.
(2005) Applying Optimality Findings: A Critique of Graham Taylor's Critique of RCUK Policy Proposal.
(2006) Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing"
(2006) How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate
(2006) Critique of AAP/PSP Critique of FRPAA Proposal
Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique
(2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration
A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy
Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry
Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal
Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal
Critique of Stanford/HighWire Press Critique of NIH Proposal
Critique of APS Critique of NIH Proposal
Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!
Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration
Critique of Research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal
Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society
Feedback on the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access
The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

As there is a concerted disinformation campaign now underway on the part of some (but not all) members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) "PRISM" coalition, an anti-OA lobby faithfully following the high-priced pit-bull script that AAP purchased from corporate image trouble-shooter Eric Dezenhall in January 2007 for the express purpose of combatting Open Access, I would like to bring some simple home truths to the attention of all interested parties (for free):

(1) Peer-Reviewed Journal-Article Authors Give Journals Their Articles for Free: No Royalties. The authors of peer-reviewed journal articles, unlike all other authors, donate their articles to journal publishers for free, allowing the publisher to sell their articles for a (subscription) fee that goes exclusively to the publisher: Not a penny of royalty revenue, salaries or fees is sought or received by these authors (or their funders, or their employers) out of the total income that their publishers earn from selling their articles. This is not "work for hire." The only thing these authors ask in exchange for granting to their publishers the right to sell their articles is peer review, to ensure and certify their article's quality.

The authors' research and writings are funded by government research grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).

(2) Peers Review for Free. The peers who review the papers that these authors submit to journals likewise donate their expertise and time for free. Not a penny of compensation for their services is sought or received by the peer reviewers (or their employers) from the journal publisher. The only thing the peers ask in return for donating their services to the journal is a fair management of the peer review process, in order to ensure and certify quality.

The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).

(3) Publisher Revenues from Institutional Subscriptions Are Currently Paying the Full Cost of Managing the Peer Review, Several Times Over. The cost of managing the peer review process is recovered by the journal publisher out of a small portion of the income earned from selling subscriptions to the paper and online edition of the journal (mostly to authors' institutions).

That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors' institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the peers.

These authors, however (who are also the peers, as well as the users, and whose progress and careers depend on the uptake of their research by other author/researchers) have never been satisfied with leaving their research accessible only to those users whose institutions could afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published. In the paper era, if a would-be user lacked subscription access, they would write to the author to request a reprint, which the author would then mail to the requester, at the author's own expense.

Then email made it faster and cheaper to send eprints to requesters by email. And finally the web made it possible to self-archive the eprint in the author's institutional repository, making it openly accessible to all would-be users who could not afford access to the publisher's version, without the bottle-neck of an email exchange. This is called Open Access Self-Archiving or "Green OA."

The funder and university Green OA mandates that are the target of the anti-OA lobby are simply the effort on the part of researchers funders and universities to maximize the benefits of the research that they themselves have funded and salaried, by ensuring that all of it is deposited in an OA repository, freely accessible online to all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford paid access.

Sixty-two percent of journals have already endorsed this new means of maximizing access to research in the online era, while 38% still seek to block or embargo access. But this is not what the anti-OA lobbying is about, because the proposed and adopted funder and university Green OA mandates can allow access embargoes (with semi-automatized email eprint request buttons to tide over access needs during the embargo period).

The anti-OA lobbying is instead based on the remarkable (and alarming) claim that OA mandates will destroy peer review, and thereby scientific quality.

But just a little reflection should make not only the falsity but the self-servingness of this claim completely transparent:

(4) If Institutional Subscriptions Are Ever Cancelled, Peer Review Management Costs Will Be Paid Out of the Institutional Subscription Cancellation Savings. If and when institutional subscriptions were ever cancelled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called "OA publishing" or "Gold OA."

The Gold OA cost-recovery model is premature today, when there is still a healthy demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition. But it is the natural and obvious answer to the question of what will pay for managing peer review if and when that demands disappears and subscriptions become unsustainable.

Hence what the anti-OA lobby is actually worrying about is the loss of their subscription revenues, not the loss of peer review. So far, however, there is no evidence that Green OA has caused any subscription cancellations at all. The demand for both the paper edition and the publisher's online edition are still healthy. But the real question is whether the demonstrable benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and the general public are to be renounced in order to protect journal publishers from a possible risk to their revenue streams.

This is not about peer review at all, but about an industry trying to resist adapting to technological developments in the online era merely in order to maximize its own interests, at the expense of the public interest.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has launched "PRISM" (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), an anti-OA lobbying organization, to counteract the accelerating growth of OA and the dramatic success of the pro-OA Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) lobbying organization in the US and the EC Open Access Petition in Europe.

See Peter Suber's splendid, measured critique of PRISM's statements in Open Access News (more to come in Peter's September SPARC Open Access Newsletter [SOAN]).

The blogosphere is also on the case. (See especially the brilliant caricature of the publishing lobby's arguments here.) Unlike the pro-OA lobby, which has a huge and growing public support base worldwide, the anti-OA lobby is up against the problem that it has neither a public support constituency, nor any ethical or practical case to build one on. It is simply an industry trying to favor its corporate interests over the public interest without quite saying so. Hence PRISM is now applying, quite literally, the "pit-bull" tactics recommended to them by the PR firm of Eric Dezenhall, namely, to pretend (i) that OA represents government interference in both the corporate sector and the research sphere and (ii) that OA puts both peer-review and scientific quality at risk.

Although the bickering and blogging and spinning on this will be frenetic, the actual issues behind it are extremely simple:

(1) Open Access (OA) (free online access to peer-reviewed research) maximizes access to research findings. It thereby also maximizes the uptake, usage, and application of research findings, hence research productivity and progress.

(2) OA is therefore in the best interests of research, researchers, research institutions (universities), research funders (private and governmental), the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research and the research institutions, and for whose benefit the research is being conducted.

(3) OA might, however, be in conflict with the best interests of the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry, as it might reduce their subscription revenues or even eventually force them to downsize and change their cost-recovery model from subscription charges paid by the user-institution to peer-review service charges paid by the author-institution. (So far none of this has happened, but with the growth of OA, it might.)

(4) OA can grow in two ways:

Gold OA: publishers can make research OA by becoming OA publishers -- by providing OA to their online versions and/or converting to the OA cost-recovery model -- or,

Green OA: Researchers and their institutions can make research OA by self-archiving their own peer-reviewed, published journal articles in their institutional or discipline-based repositories.

(5) Researchers' institutions and funders cannot mandate the transition of publishers to Gold OA, but they can mandate their own transition to Green OA.

(6) Hence it is these Green OA mandates, being adopted and proposed worldwide, that are the real target of the anti-OA lobby.

(7) The anti-OA lobby's argument against OA and OA mandates is that they represent (7a) government interference in private-sector industry and (7b) they will destroy peer-reviewed journals, peer-review, and the research quality that peer-review certifies.

(8) The reply is very simple:

(8a) Inasmuch as research is publicly funded, it is for the funders to decide the conditions under which that public money is spent;

(8b) it is likewise up to the universities to decide on the conditions under which their employees publish their findings;

(8c) peer review is done by researchers for free; publishers merely fund the management of the peer review process;

(8d) if and when subscription demand can no longer sustain the cost of managing peer review, that cost can be covered through a conversion to the Gold OA cost-recovery model, with the OA institutional repositories themselves providing all the access and the archiving, and the Gold OA journals merely managing the peer review and certifying its outcome with their name.

That's all there is to it: The online era has made possible an obvious benefit for research, and the publishing lobby is trying to resist adapting to it. What needs to be kept clearly in mind is that research is not conducted and funded as a service to the publishing industry, but vice versa.

Fortunately, the very openness of the online era is to the benefit of the pro-OA lobby, as the specious arguments of the anti-OA lobby can be openly exposed and answered rather than being left to be voiced solely in closed corridors (lobbies), where their obvious rebuttals cannot be promptly echoed in reply.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique.

________ (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Harnad, S. (2005) Critique of ALPSP'S 1st Response to RCUK's Open Access Self-Archiving Proposal.

________ (2005) Rebuttal of STM Response to RCUK Self-Archiving Policy Proposal.

________ (2005) Applying Optimality Findings: A Critique of Graham Taylor's Critique of RCUK Policy Proposal.

________ (2006) Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing".

________ (2006) How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate

________ (2006) Critique of AAP/PSP Critique of FRPAA Proposal

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy

Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry

Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of Stanford/HighWire Press Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of APS Critique of NIH Proposal

Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!

Critique of Research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal

Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

Feedback on the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: Professor Imboden's excellent essay in Research Europe points out that the defeat of the EC's proposed Green Open Access self-archiving mandate by the publishing lobby in Brussels in March is likely to prove to have been only a temporary triumph. The mandate, recommended in 2004 by the UK Select Committee and in 2005 by Berlin 3 in Southampton, has already been adopted by about 30 institutions and funders; counter-lobbying against the publisher lobby is growing -- in the UK, Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia and Asia -- to embolden institutions and funders to adopt the mandate; and the clamour just keeps getting louder.
   Professor Imboden also recommends that research funders should not buy into hybrid Gold OA at this time. They should only mandate Green OA self-archiving. Research funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's cautions about pre-emptive Gold OA, and about the need carefully to think things through, for both scalability and sustainability. And meanwhile, full speed ahead on mandating Green OA!

---

These are (belated) comments on a very timely and important paper by Dieter Imboden (President, Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation) that appeared in Research Europe at the end of March. These comments appear as a letter in Research Europe 12 July 2007:

Publishers Divide and Rule on Open Access
Dieter Imboden, Research Europe, 29 March 2007

Professor Imboden's piece is excellent: Exactly on target, it raises all the crucial issues, and is still very timely. (It appeared in March when the EC meeting took place.)

..."a paradox over access to that knowledge, which has defeated even the Commission, at least for the moment, judging by its communication last month on open access publishing..."

Professor Imboden is quite right to point out this defeat of the EC's proposed Green Open Access self-archiving mandate by the publishing lobby. There is reason for hope, however, that that defeat will prove only to have been a temporary one.

"The clamour of the research community for open access publishing..."

The clamour is actually for Open Access (not necessarily for Open Access Publishing (Gold OA), which is only one of the two ways to provide Open Access -- and not the surest or fastest way, which is Open Access Self-Archiving (Green OA), as Professor Imboden himself later notes in his essay).

"open access means 'free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles'. Obviously, this would bring the traditional reader-paid publication system to an end."

That outcome is perhaps likely, but it not obvious: No one knows how long there will still be a demand for the print edition, nor whether and when Green OA self-archiving would make subscriptions unsustainable. The only sure and obvious thing is that 100% Green OA self-archiving will provide 100% OA (and that 100% OA is a huge benefit to research that is already fully within reach: all that needs to be done is to mandate it).

"When libraries began to cancel journal subscriptions for financial reasons, funders saw an important pillar of their research policy dwindling. As a result, many signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003."

Many may have signed the Berlin Declaration because of journal unaffordability, but many others have signed because of research inaccessibility. OA is not primarily about journal economics but about research access.

"The declaration requires researchers to deposit their manuscripts in an open-access repository or to make sure that papers published in traditional journals are accessible free of charge after not more than 6 to 12 months."

Alas, the Berlin Declaration itself does not require this, and hence the many signatories have not committed themselves to this. However, the UK Select Committee (2004) and Berlin 3 (Southampton 2005) do recommend requiring this, and ROARMAP lists the c. 30 institutions and funders that have already adopted such a requirement, and several more that have proposed it.

"In reality, however, still only a very small fraction of authors fully exploit the potential of the traditional system."

Yes, and this is because only about 30 institutions and funders have as yet required the Berlin 3 Policy recommendation. Counter-lobbying against the publisher lobby is growing -- in the UK, Europe, the US, Brazil, Australia and Asia -- to embolden institutions and funders to adopt the mandate; and the clamour just keeps getting louder.

"[S]ome (mostly private) research funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute... ask their grantees to publish exclusively in pure or hybrid open-access journals, with free online access to author-paid articles."

Strictly speaking, Wellcome and HHMI merely require that their authors make their articles OA, whether the Green or the Gold way.

"If a library pays for online access, it means access to articles supported by HHMI or the Wellcome Trust is paid for twice. Thus, at least during a transition time, the well-intended initiative of some funders will pump even more money into the commercial publishing system."

This is absolutely correct, and points out a deep strategic error or shortsight on the part of HHMI and Wellcome. Funders should not pay for hybrid Gold OA at this time. They should only mandate Green OA self-archiving. (If they have funds to spare, let them spend them on supporting more research!)

"...changing to a total open-access world would shift the financial burden from institutions to funders [and] the research system as a whole... the distribution of public money for research (whether national or European) would have to change accordingly -- either by reducing support to institutions or by increasing the budgets of funders."

This shift would only happen if we agreed to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA now. If we instead only mandate Green OA, and let time and the market decide whether and when subscriptions become unsustainable, then, if and when subscriptions do become unsustainable (a portion of) the resulting institutional windfall subscription cancellation savings themselves can be redirected to pay for Gold OA, without the need to divert any new research or institutional funds. There is already more than enough money "in the system" (as Peter Suber puts it) now to pay all publishing costs. Gold OA will not cost more -- indeed it will cost a good deal less (only the cost of peer review, with Institutional Repositories taking over the distributed burden of archiving and access-provision).

"If every funder, small or large, weak or powerful, has to negotiate individually with the various publishers, we will be back where we began -- in a publishing world where economic power dictates the deals between libraries and publishers. Was not the feeling that scientists and libraries were at the mercy of big publishing companies one reason for the open-access initiative in the first place? It would be a tremendous mistake just to replace one victim by another -- that is to free the institutions at the expense of the funders. What can we do instead?

"Remember: the main issue is not to save money, but to provide fairer access to scientific information."

Hear, Hear! Pre-emptive payment for hybrid Gold OA is a Trojan Horse, and funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's words.

Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor

"So, funders and institutions should proceed together on the route to open access. The green route is easy and without major problems, but a good and just strategy for the golden route is still missing. Even if the intentions are good, we should not rush into unknown territory without considering the consequences."

Again, research funders and institutions would do well to heed Professor Imboden's cautions about pre-emptive Gold OA, and the need carefully to think things through, for both scalability and sustainability. But meanwhile, full speed ahead on mandating Green OA!

"Not all the funders have the same opportunities. Not all the disciplines are as powerful as particle physics, which, according to CERN director Robert Aymar, can easily finance the transition of the few journals in the field to complete open access."

Not all physicists are so sanguine about CERN's pre-emptive move toward Gold OA:

Harnad, John (and others) (2007) Debating the future of physics publishing. Physics World 29 (3): 22

"Let us -- scientists, funders, institutions, libraries and publishers -- talk together, before too many new boundary conditions make a rational solution difficult."

Indeed. And meanwhile, full speed ahead with Green OA mandates!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

---

---

SUMMARY: Early Access means starting the Open Access advantage (enhanced research usage and citations) earlier. This does not just mean phase-advancing the lifetime citation expectancy of an article (i.e., same total number of citations, but just starting earlier). Paper uploads generate downloads, which then generate usage and citations, which generate more downloads, which generate more usage and citations, etc. This interactive cycle can increase not just the onset of the citation curve, but its total area. And not just horizontally, but vertically: If it is obvious that it is not irrelevant to the usage and impact of a finding whether it is published two months before it is needed for use in a related study by another researcher, or ten years after, then it should not take much imagination (just a change in time-scale) to see how Early Access does not just mean earlier usage and citations but more usage and citations, because of the widening self-potentiating uptake cycle of research. And this of course applies to both preprints and postprints: An article that is published at time T but only made OA at time T + 12 months (embargo) stands to lose a good deal of its potential uptake and impact (especially in fast-moving fields) -- some of it lost forever; and meanwhile research loses widening cycles of potential progress. It is only to those who are straining to persuade us to resign ourselves passively to publisher embargoes -- as if they made no difference at all to our research usage, uptake, impact, and progress -- that these banal truths will be anything less than obvious.

---

Matt Hodgkinson [MH] of BioMed Central has raised some important points about the Early Access Advantage in the SPARC Open Access Forum. I add a few supporting comments here:

MH: "in a famine it is no good if food is in the shops, but the prices are too high for the starving to afford it."

Spot on.

MH: "I don't want to pay $25-50 to read an article I'm not sure is worth the money... Indeed, if it is not immediately available online then even a visit to the library... I would avoid if possible..."

And it's virtually certain that huge quantities of potential usage and impact are being lost daily, worldwide, for this very reason. Indeed, a component in the OA usage/impact advantage is surely a competitive advantage (CA): The articles that are not yet freely accessible online lose out to the ones that are. CA is not the only component in the OA advantage, nor necessarily the biggest one. And CA (along with the self-selection Quality Bias QB -- the greater tendency for the better articles/authors to be among the self-archived/self-archiving ones) will of course vanish completely once everything is OA. But for now, CA is an extra -- and potentially substantial -- competitive edge that the OA articles have over the non-OA ones while much of research is still non-OA.

MH: "I don't quite understand something about [Early Access] - is it solely an effect of preprints/self-archiving?"

No, it definitely applies to all OA papers, whether preprint or postprint, whether published in a non-OA journal and self-archived or published in an OA journal. Early Access means having the OA advantage earlier. The earliest possible moment for the refereed draft is the moment when the final version is accepted for publication; that is the latest time at which it should be made OA. (Until then there may still be changes and corrections from the refereeing; and in many fields cautious users will not want to risk relying on the unrefereed preprint. So preprint self-archiving must be discretionary; it is postprint self-archiving that must be mandatory.)

I strongly doubt the claim that Early Access just means phase-advancing the lifetime citation expectancy of an article -- i.e., the claim that the total number of citations remains the same: they just start happening earlier. I think it might look like that for fields that are virtually 100% OA already, like astrophysics: There it has been reported that the citation curves look the same for articles that are and are not self-archived as preprints, the only difference being that for the preprinted ones the citation curve starts earlier.

What this leaves out is when the curve ends! Two wave-fronts may look the same, apart from a phase difference, but then there's the question of the long-term total area under the wave. The way paper uploads generate downloads -- which then generate usage and citations, which then generate more downloads, which generate more usage and citations, etc. -- also suggests that this interactive cycle can increase not just the earliness of the onset time of citations but the total area (citations) under the curve. And not just horizontally, but vertically too: Other research is going on in parallel. If it is obvious that it is not irrelevant to the usage and impact of a finding whether it is published two months before it is needed for use in a related study by another researcher, or ten years after, then it should not take much imagination (just a change in time-scale) to see how Early Access does not just mean earlier usage and citations but more usage and citations, because of the widening self-potentiating cycle of research.

And this of course applies to both preprints and postprints: An article that is published at time T but only made OA at time T + 12 months (embargo) stands to lose a good deal of its potential impact (especially in fast-moving fields) -- some of it lost forever; and meanwhile research loses widening cycles of potential progress.

MH: "[Early Access] appears to be a somewhat complicated way of saying that if an article is available earlier, it can be read and cited sooner."

Which is in turn a somewhat complicated way of saying that if an article is accessible, it can be read and cited, and the more it is accessible -- whether more widely or earlier -- the more it can be read and cited. In other words, OA applies to both time and space: The sooner and the more widely findings are accessible, the sooner and the more widely they can be taken up, applied, built upon, used, and cited. Early Access benefits are merely a particular case of OA benefits.

It is only to those who are straining to persuade us to resign ourselves passively to publisher embargoes -- as if they made no difference at all to our research usage, uptake, impact, and progress -- that these banal truths will be anything less than obvious.

MH: "Is the rapid dissemination of science not a good thing, and should this result not encourage all authors to deposit preprints and postprints?"

Of course it is, and should. The only ones who would have us think otherwise are those who feel their revenues might be put at risk by such deposits (which, eventually, they indeed might). But instead of just coming out and saying that -- "Please don't self-archive, because it might make me lose some subscription revenue" -- publishers try to persuade researchers not to self-archive because it wouldn't make any difference to research. (And at the same time they lobby governments not to mandate OA self-archiving, as if the only thing at issue were publishers' potential revenue losses, rather than research's actual impact losses -- for all the world as if publicly funded research were being conducted in the service of the publishing industry, rather than vice versa.)

This strategy calls to mind nothing less than the efforts of polluting industries to persuade the public that the pollution makes no difference to their climate, or the efforts of tobacco companies to persuade smokers that the smoking will make no difference to their health. The strategy is essentially the same as that of OJ Simpson's Dream Team: Simply take every piece of empirical evidence (that is unfavourable to your client), find some ad hoc flaw in it, no matter how trivial, and crank and spin that so as to sow a seed of doubt in every instance. Such a strategy worked for the tobacco industry until the evidence became overwhelming. But meanwhile, smokers needlessly lost years of health, just as research is now needlessly losing years of impact and progress.

I have for years been restraining myself from making these analogies with the tobacco and pollution industries, because it seemed too shrill: impact, after all, is not as vital as health. Maybe, maybe not (the two are not unconnected!). But what is making me less inclined to continue to be so restrained and charitable is the relentless (and mostly successful) lobbying by the publishing industry against Green OA mandates. The motivation is identical: Do and say whatever it takes to protect your revenue streams, whether it's at the cost of research impact or health impact.

The gloves are now off...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

PS I don't particularly mean Sally Morris, of course, who wrote in SPARC Open Access Forum:

"[Early Access] is to do with the article being available sooner, not more widely (that would be the 'OA advantage', if any). Articles in OA journals are available no sooner than those in conventional journals - i.e. on publication."

but the publishing industry's pit-bulls, who have so far successfully lobbied the DTI in the UK, NIH in the US, the Bundesrat in Germany, the EC in Brussels and the Industry and Finance ministries in Canada. OA has no lobby, but it has a far, far bigger constituency, which needs merely to be rallied to show its collective strength: researchers, research institutions, research funders, the vast R&D industry, and the public whose taxes support the research.