Definition of Open Access

Comment on: Bohannon, John (2013) Who's Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342 (6154) 60-65

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To show that the bogus-standards effect is specific to Open Access (OA) journals would of course require submitting also to subscription journals (perhaps equated for field, age and impact factor) to see what happens.

But it is likely that the outcome would still be a higher proportion of acceptances by the OA journals. The reason is simple: Fee-based OA publishing (fee-based "Gold OA") is premature, as are plans by universities and research funders to pay its costs:

Funds are short and 80% of journals (including virtually all the top, "must-have" journals) are still subscription-based, thereby tying up the potential funds to pay for fee-based Gold OA. The asking price for Gold OA is still arbitrary and high. And there is very, very legitimate concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards (as the Science sting shows).

What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) in their institutional OA repositories, free for all online ("Green OA").

That will provide immediate OA. And if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions), that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition), offload access-provision and archiving onto the global network of Green OA repositories, downsize to just providing the service of peer review alone (on a no-fault basis), and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs.

The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

That post-Green, no-fault Gold will be Fair Gold. Today's pre-Green (fee-based) Gold is Fool's Gold.

None of this applies to no-fee Gold.

Obviously, as Peter Suber and others have correctly pointed out, none of this applies to the many Gold OA journals that are not fee-based (i.e., do not charge the author for publication, but continue to rely instead on subscriptions, subsidies, or voluntarism). Hence it is not fair to tar all Gold OA with that brush. Nor is it fair to assume -- without testing it -- that non-OA journals would have come out unscathed, if they had been included in the sting.

But the basic outcome is probably still solid: Fee-based Gold OA has provided an irresistible opportunity to create junk journals and dupe authors into feeding their publish-or-perish needs via pay-to-publish under the guise of fulfilling the growing clamour for OA:

Publishing in a reputable, established journal and self-archiving the refereed draft would have accomplished the very same purpose, while continuing to meet the peer-review quality standards for which the journal has a track record -- and without paying an extra penny.

But the most important message is that OA is not identical with Gold OA (fee-based or not), and hence conclusions about peer-review standards of fee-based Gold OA journals are not conclusions about the peer-review standards of OA -- which, with Green OA, are identical to those of non-OA.

For some peer-review stings of non-OA journals, see below:

de Gloucester, P. C. (2013). Referees Often Miss Obvious Errors in Computer and Electronic Publications. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance 20(3), 143-166.

Harnad, S. R. (Ed.). (1982). Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in scientific quality control Cambridge University Press

Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Labbé, C., & Labbé, D. (2013). Duplicate and fake publications in the scientific literature: How many SCIgen papers in computer science? Scientometrics 94(1): 379-396.

Newton, D. P. (2010). Quality and Peer Review of Research: An Adjudicating Role for Editors. Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance 17(3), 130-145, this is available as open access:

Peters, D. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1982). Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5(2), 187-195.

Seidl, C., & Schmidt, U., & Grösche, P. (2005). The performance of peer review and a beauty contest of referee processes of economics journals. Estudios de Economía Aplicada, 23(3): 505-551

C P Chandrasekhar (2013) Only the Open Access Movement can address the adverse impact of Western domination of the world of knowlege. Frontline (Oct 4 2913)

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Interesting article, but I am afraid it misses the most important points:

1. As so often happens, the article takes "OA" to mean Gold OA journals, completely missing Green OA self-archiving and the importance and urgency of mandating it.

2. The article greatly underestimates the role of quality levels and quality control (peer review standards) in the perceived and actual importance and value of research findings, journal articles and journals -- focusing instead on over-reliance and abuse of citation metrics (which does indeed occur, but is not the central problem behind disparities in (a) user access to journals to read, (b) author access to journals publish in, or (c) researcher access to funding to do research with).

Providing OA can completely remedy (a), which will in turn help mitigate (b) and that in turn may improve (c). (OA will also greatly enrich and strengthen the variety and validity of metrics.)

But not if we instead just tilt against impact factors and press for new forms of "branding." Branding is simply the earned reputation of a journal based on its track-record for quality, and that means its peer review standards, as certified by the journal's name ("brand").

What is needed is neither new Gold OA journals, nor new forms of "branding." What is needed is Open Access to the peer-reviewed journal literature, such as it is, free for all online: peer-reviewed research needs to be freed from access-denial, not from peer review.

And the way for India and China (and the rest of the world too) to reach that is for their research institutions and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving of all their peer-reviewed research output.

That's all there is to it. The rest is just ideological speculation, which can no more provide Open Access than it can feed the hungry, cure the sick, or protect from injustice. It simply distracts from the tried and tested practical path that needs to be taken to get the job done.

Stevan Harnad

Mike Taylor wrote:

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MT: "Where have the Wellcome Trust opposed mandating immediate-deposit Green? I don’t see how the fact that they pay their grantees’ Gold APCs implies any objection to people taking other routes. Unless they’ve said something that I missed."

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In their recommendations and support for the Finch Report, which declared Green ineffective and recommended downgrading it to preservation archiving instead of OA. See:

On Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) on Finch Report and RCUK Mandate

RCUK: Don't Follow the Wellcome Trust OA Policy Model!

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MT: "My own position, stated several times, is that I’ve got no very strong preference for either Gold or Green, caring much more about Open Access. I do think there are advantages to Gold, and that our current Green infrastructure needs a lot of work, but those are minor issues compared with the big one of open vs. non-open."

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The advantages you see in Gold lie in your preferred definition of OA (and of "open" vs. "non-open"). And we are talking about Green OA and Gold OA, not Green and Gold. Your preferences are hence camouflaged by using the terminology generically.

There are, as you know, two kinds or degrees of OA:

Gratis OA: Free online access

Libre OA: Free online access plus certain re-use rights (e.g., CC-BY).

You are an advocate for Libre OA, and when you use the words "OA" and "open" you mean Libre OA.

I am an advocate for Green OA, and have given many reasons -- empirical, logical, strategic and practical -- for why Green, Gratis OA must come first:

1. Gratis OA is a prerequisite of Libre OA.

2. Gratis OA is more urgently needed than Libre OA.

3. Gratis OA is needed by all fields, Libre OA only by some.

4. Gratis OA faces far fewer publisher obstructions than Libre OA (because it is much less of a threat to publishers).

5. Green Gratis OA can be mandated without over-riding author choice of journal, Libre OA cannot.

6. Green Gratis OA entails no extra cost; Libre Gold OA does.

So when you say you have no preference between Green and Gold and what you care about is OA, what you mean is Libre OA, which in turn entails a preference for Gold OA at the expense of Green OA (hence OA).

And that is exactly what you have been defending in your many public postings: You have criticized Green OA mandates for not requiring Green Libre OA (even though such mandates are presently impossible and would lead to author non-compliance and non-feasibility of Green OA mandates) and you have endorsed paying for Libre Gold OA in preference to providing just Gratis Green.

Not only is Libre OA just as premature and out of reach of mandates today as (Fool's) Gold OA (overpriced, double-paid, and, if hybrid, also double-dipped) is out of reach financially today, but even immediate, unembargoed Gratis Green OA is still not quite within reach of mandates yet:

The compromise has to be precisely theLiège-FNRS model immediate-deposit mandates now being recommended by BOAI-10, HOAP, HEFCE and BIS (with the eprint-request Button tiding over user needs during any allowable embargo) first.

Once those mandates are adopted globally, they will not only provide a great deal of (Gratis, Green) immediate-OA (at least 60%), plus Button-mediated Almost-OA for all the rest (40%): with all articles being immediately deposited, and with immediate-OA just one access-setting click away they will also exert mounting global pressure for immediate-OA. And 100% immediate-OA will in turn eventually exert cancelation pressure on publishers, which will force downsizing and conversion to Fair-Gold OA and as much Libre OA as users need and authors wish to provide.

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MT: "What I have been very negative about, and this may be what you’re thinking of, is the specific form of Green that Finch favours, i.e. prohibiting commercial use and in any case embargoes for one to two years. When that is the Green on offer, then yes, I prefer Gold. But the much better Green that the BIS select committee is recommending is much more appealing."

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Yup, I know that's what you prefer! And I've explained why your preferences are not directly realizable above. They are pre-emptive over-reaching. Grasp what's reachable first -- immediate-deposit mandates -- and that will bring the rest of what you seek within reach. Keep counselling unrealistic over-reaching instead, and we'll have yet another decade of next to nothing. First things first.

And that is precisely what BIS (and HEFCE and BOAI-10) are recommending to be mandated (not what you seem to be imagining).

OA mandates can only work if it is in authors' interests to comply willingly: if mandates try to co-opt authors' choice of journals, or cost them money, authors will not comply, and mandates will fail.

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MT: "(For that matter I am also not super-keen on Finch-flavoured Gold, which seems to be £2000 APC fed to double-dipping troll-access publishers.)"

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Even at one quarter the fee, and non-hybrid, the cost would still be double-paid (core-journal institutional subscription payments, uncancelable till their contents are accessible without them + individual author Gold journal APC payments), hence unaffordable Fool's Gold (and hence a disaster for a UK that pays it unilaterally). Only Green OA-induced cancellation pressure can downsize them to Fair Gold.

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Postscript

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MT: "I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make in your last paragraph, so I will simply repeat: we never, ever delete comments because of not agreeing with their message..." [emphasis added]

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...we just ignore them...

Stevan Harnad

It is heartening to know that 50% of articles published in 2011 were freely accessible online by the end of 2012. But when did they become accessible? It could have been at any time from the date of acceptance for publication to December 2012!

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A = Access (can be free or paid, open or restricted, immediate or delayed)
SA = Subscription Access (also called TA: toll access, to include subscription access, licensed access, and pay-to-view)
OA = Open Access (immediate, permanent, Gratis or Libre)
Gratis OA = toll-free online access
Libre OA = toll-free online access plus certain re-use rights
DA = Delayed Access (free online access after a delay period or embargo)
Green OA = OA provided by author self-archiving
Gold OA = OA provided by the publisher -- sometimes, but not always, for a publication fee
Green DA = free online access provided by the author after a delay (instead of immediately upon publication, which would have been Green OA)
Gold DA = free online access provided by the publisher after a delay (instead of immediately upon publication, which would have been Gold OA)

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The purpose of Open Access (OA) is to maximize the uptake, usage, applications and impact of research findings by making them accessible to all users online, rather than just to those users who have subscription access (SA).

There are two ways for authors to make access to their published findings free for all: Publish them in a journal that makes the articles free for all online ("Gold OA"). Or publish them in any journal at all, but also self-archive the final, peer-reviewed draft free for all online ("Green OA").

But both the Green and the Gold paths to access can be taken immediately, or only after a delay of months or years.

If subscription access (SA) is not OA but restricted access, because it is restricted to subscribers only, then surely both delayed Green Access and delayed Gold Access are not OA either, because access is restricted during any delay period.

Some journals, for example, impose a 12-month embargo on Green self-archiving. And of those subscription journals where the journal itself makes its articles freely accessible at no extra charge to the author, some journals only do so 12 months after publication or longer.

In many fields, the growth tip for accessing and building upon new findings is within the first year or even earlier. (See the figure from Gentil-Beccot 2009). With delays, potential research progress is slowed and reduced, some of it perhaps even permanently lost.

Hence 50% DA is certainly better than 25% DA -- but until research has 100% OA, there's really not that much to tipple about...

Harnad, S (2013) OA 2013: Tilting at the Tipping Point. Open Access Archivengelism 1022

The (shared) goal of open access advocates is presumably open access (OA), not abstractions.

If papers are made OA, it means they are freely accessible to everyone online: both peers and public. If not, not.

So the only problem is getting the papers to be made OA -- and that means getting their authors (peers) to make them OA.

If all or most peers made their papers OA of their own accord, that would be it: The OA era would be upon us.

But most peers don’t make their papers OA of their own accord — for a large variety of reasons, all of them groundless, but nevertheless sufficient to have held back OA for over 20 years now.

The solution, fortunately, is known, and already being adopted, though not quickly or widely enough yet: OA has to be made mandatory. The peers have to be required by their funders and their institutions to provide OA.

The only other thing that is needed, then, is to persuade all research funders and institutions to mandate OA.

To do that, you have to give them a reason that is sufficient to convince funders, institutions and peers that all research needs to be made OA, hence that OA needs to be made mandatory.

So it all comes down to what is a sufficient reason for funders and institutions to mandate and peers to provide OA.

The public’s need for access is a reason for providing OA, to be sure, but not a sufficient reason. Fortunately, it need not be, because peer access is a sufficient reason, and peers are part of the public too, hence OA provides access to both peers and public.

So why all this empty shadow-boxing about ideology and elitism, when the only thing that matters is pragmatics?

What will successfully get all peers to provide OA? Telling them that it’s because the public has a burning need to read their papers certainly will not, since they all know perfectly well that in most (not all!) fields of research hardly anyone needs or wants to read their papers. The few exceptions do not make it otherwise.

Nor do they need to. For making research accessible to all of its potential users (of which the overwhelming majority are of course peers), rather than just to subscribers, as now, is reason enough for funders and institutions to mandate OA, and for peers to provide it.

Anyone is free to say to funders and institutions who mandate OA primarily to ensure peer access: “No, no, you must do it in order to ensure public, not just peer access access!”

But it’s a pointless exercise. And will not get OA provided for all of us sooner; it will just distract us from pragmatics (yet again) in favor of idle ideology.

The Global Research Council’s Open Access Action Plan is, overall, timely and welcome, but it is far too focused on OA as (“Gold”) OA publishing, rather than on OA itself (online access to peer-reviewed research free for all).

And although GRC does also discuss OA self-archiving in repositories (“Green” OA), it does not seem to understand Green OA’s causal role in OA itself, nor does it assign it its proper priority.

There is also no mention at all of the most important, effective and rapidly growing OA plan of action, which is for both funders and institutions to mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving. Hence neither does the action plan give any thought to the all-important task of designing Green OA mandates and ensuring that they have an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance.

The plan says:

“The major principles and aims of the Action Plan are simple: they are (a) encouragement and support for publishing in open access journals, (b) encouragement and support for author self-deposit into open access repositories, and (c) the creation and inter-connection of repositories.”

Sounds like it covers everything -- (a) Gold, (b) Green, and (c) Gold+Green – but the devil is in the details, the causal contingencies, and hence the priorities and sequence of action.

“In transitioning to open access, efficient mechanisms to shift money from subscription budgets into open access publication funds need to be developed.”

But the above statement is of course not about transitioning to OA itself, but just about transitioning to OA publishing (Gold OA).

And the GRC’s action plans for this transition are putting the cart before the horse.

There are very strong, explicit reasons why Green OA needs to come first -- rather than double-paying for Gold pre-emptively (subscriptions plus Gold) without first having effectively mandated Green, since it is Green OA that will drive the transition to Gold OA at a fair, affordable, sustainable price:

Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Action 5: Develop an integrated funding stream for hybrid open access

Worst of all, the GRC action plan proposes to encourage and support hybrid Gold OA, with publishing not just being paid for doubly (via subscriptions to subscription publishers + via Gold OA fees to Gold OA publishers) but, in the case of hybrid Gold, with the double-payment going to the very same publisher, which not only entails double-payment by the research community, but allows double-dipping by the publisher.

That is the way to leave both the price and the timetable for any transition to OA in the hands of the publisher.

Action 6: Monitor and assess the affordability of open access

There is no point monitoring the affordability of Gold OA today, at a stage when it is just a needless double-payment, at the publisher’s current arbitrary, inflated Gold OA asking price.

What does need monitoring is compliance with mandates to provide cost-free Green OA, while subscriptions are still paying in full (and fulsomely) for the cost of publication, as they are today.

Action 7: Work with scholarly societies to transition society journals into open access

The only thing needed from publishers today – whether scholarly or commercial – is that they not embargo Green OA. Most (60%) don’t.

The transition to Gold OA will only come after Green OA has made subscriptions unsustainable, which will not only induce publishers to cut obsolete costs, downsize and convert to Gold OA, but it will also release the concomitant institutional subscription cancellation windfall savings to pay the price of that affordable, sustainable post-Green Gold.

Action 8: Supporting self-archiving through funding guidelines and copyright regulations
“The deposit of publications in open access repositories is often hampered not only by legal uncertainties, but also by the authors’ reluctance to take on such additional tasks. Funding agencies will address this issue by exploring whether and how authors can be encouraged and supported in retaining simple copyrights as a precondition to self-archiving. In doing so, funders will also address authors’ need to protect the integrity of their publications by providing guidance on suitable licenses for such purpose.”

Yes, Green OA needs to be supported. But the way to do that is certainly not just to “encourage” authors to retain copyright and to self-archive.

It is (1) to mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving (as 288 funders and institutions are already doing: see ROARMAP), (2) to adopt effective mandates that moot publisher OA embargoes by requiring immediate-deposit, whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed, and (3) to designate institutional repository deposit as the mechanism for making articles eligible for research performance review. Then institutions will (4) monitor and ensure that their own research output is being deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Action 9: Negotiate publisher services to facilitate deposit in open access repositories

Again, the above is a terribly counterproductive proposal. On no account should it be left up to publishers to deposit articles.

For subscription publishers, it is in their interests to gain control over the Green OA deposit process, thereby making sure that it is done on their timetable (if it is done at all).

For Gold OA, it’s already OA, so depositing it in a repository is no challenge.

It has to be remembered and understood that the “self” in self-archiving is the author. The keystrokes don’t have to be personally executed by the author (students, librarians, secretaries can do the keystrokes too). But they should definitely not be left to publishers to do!

Green OA mandates are adopted to ensure that the keystrokes get done, and on time. Most journal are not Gold OA, but a Green OA mandate requires immediate deposit whether or not the journal is Gold OA, and whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed.

Action 10: Work with publishers to find intelligent billing solutions for the increasing amount of open access articles

The challenge is not to find “billing solutions” for the minority of articles that are published as Gold OA today. The challenge if to adopt an effective, verifiable Green OA mandate to self-archive all articles.

Action 11: Work with repository organisations to develop efficient mechanisms for harvesting and accessing information

This is a non-problem. Harvesting and accessing OA content is already powerful and efficient.

It can of course be made incomparably more powerful and efficient. But there is no point or incentive in doing this while the target content is still so sparse – because it has not yet been made OA (whether Green or Gold)!

Only about 10 – 40% of content is OA most fields.

The way to drive that up to the 100% that it could already have been for years is to mandate Green OA.

Then (and only then) will be there be the motivation to “develop [ever more] efficient mechanisms for harvesting and accessing [OA] information”

Action 12: Explore new ways to assess quality and impact of research articles

This too is happening already, and is not really an OA matter. But once most articles are OA, OA itself will generate rich new ways of measuring quality and impact.

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1)

(Some of these comments have already been made in connection with Richard Poynder's intreview of Johannes Fournier.)

1. The Green/Gold Open Access (OA) distinction concerns whether it is the author or the publisher that provides the OA.

2. This distinction was important to mark with clear terms because the conflation of the two roads to OA has practical implications and has been holding up OA progress for a decade and a half.

3. The distinction between paid Gold and free Gold is very far from being a straightforward one.

4. Free Gold can be free (to the author) because the expenses of the Gold journal are covered by subscriptions, subsidies or volunteerism.

5. The funds for Paid Gold can come from the author's pocket, the author's research grant, the author's institution or the author's funder.

6. It would be both absurd and gratuitously confusing to mark each of these economic-model differences with a color-code.

7. Superfluous extra colors would also obscure the role that the colour-code was invented to perform: distinguishing author-side OA provision from publisher-side OA provision.

8. So, please, let's not have "diamond," "platinum" and "titanium" OA, despite the metallurgical temptations.

9. They amplify noise instead of pinpointing the signal, just as SHERPA/Romeo's parti-colored Blue/Yellow/Green spectrum (mercifully ignored by almost everyone) does.

10. OA is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed journal articles, not about cost-recovery models for OA publishing (Gold OA).

11. The Gold that publishers are fighting for and that researcher funders are subsidizing (whether "pure" or "hybrid") is paid Gold, not free Gold.

12. No one knows whether or how free Gold will be sustainable, any more than they know whether or how long subscription publishing can co-exist viably with mandatory Green OA.

13. So please leave the economic ideology and speculation out of the pragmatics of OA policy making by the research community (institutions and funders).

14. Cost-recovery models are the province of publishers (Gold OA).

15. What the research community needs to do is mandate OA provision.

16. The only OA provision that is entirely in the research community's hands is Green OA.

And, before you ask, please let's not play into the publishers' hands by colour-coding OA also in terms of the length of the publisher embargo: 3-month OA, 6-month OA, 12-month-OA, 24-month-OA, millennial OA: OA means immediate online access. Anything else is delayed access. (The only quasi-exception is the "Almost-OA" provided by the author via the institutional repository's email-eprint-request Button when complying with publisher embargoes -- but that too is clearly not OA, which is immediate, free online access.)

And on no account should the genuine, substantive distinction between Gratis OA (free online access) and Libre OA (free online access plus various re-use rights) be color-coded (with a different shade for every variety of CC license)!

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Maybe there will be an eventual realization that the failure of the new BIS/Finch/RCUK OA policy was not just due to publisher counter-lobbying but also to premature and disastrously counterproductive insistence on Gold and CC-BY by certain overzealous OA advocates.

Notice that the new US Presidential OA Directive we all now applaud makes no mention of Gold OA or CC-BY, just free online access (and of course the way it will be implemented will be largely via Green OA self-archiving). That's exactly what the UK Select Committee proposed in 2004.

Gold OA -- and as much CC-BY as users need and authors wish to provide -- will come, inexorably. But its coming is only slowed by grit-toothed insistence on having it first, at the expense of the free online access that all (not just some) research needs far, far more urgently than it needs Gold or CC-BY -- and that will pave the way for Gold and CC-BY.

First things first: Don't let the "best" become the enemy of the better.

What is a peer-reviewed journal?

1. A journal is a peer-review manager and copy-editor (the peers -- qualified, answerable specialists -- chosen by the editor, review for free; the editor adjudicates the reviews and the author revisions).

2. If the article is accepted, the accepted draft is certified with the journal's name.

3. The journal generates and distributes (3a) a print and/or (3b) online edition.

A journal that does not generate a print edition (3a) is still a journal.

A journal that does not generate an online edition (3b) is still a journal.

The journal certifies (and answers for) its content and quality standards with its name and track-record.

If the journal's costs are paid by subscriptions, it's a subscription journal.

If costs are paid by subsidies, it's a subsidized journal. 

If costs are paid by the author, it's an author-pays journal.

OA is free online access to journal articles, immediately upon publication.

If OA is provided by the journal, it's Gold OA publishing.

If OA is provided by the author, it's Green OA self-archiving.

If the journal is OA, it's a Gold OA journal. If not, not.

There is hence no need for (nor any new information provided by) new terms like "diamond," "overlay" or "epi" journal.

An OA journal that charges neither subscriptions nor author-fees is a subsidized journal ("diamond" adds no further information or properties).

An OA journal that generates neither a print nor an online version is an OA journal that generates neither a print nor an online version: the self-archived version is the only version.

The vast majority of free online journals (Gold OA) do not charge APCs.

It is arbitrary and unilluminating to invent a spectrum of colours or precious metals to classify their various possible cost-recovery models as if they were forms of OA.

OA is not about cost-recovery models (nor about peer-review models); it is about research access. (Don't conflate OA with publication cost-recovery models.)

The reason (some) physicists and mathematicians speak of "overlay" journals is that many physicists and mathematicians, before submitting their papers to a journal for peer review, self-archive their unrefereed "preprints" in Arxiv. Most then also go on to self-archive their final, peer-reviewed "postprints" in Arxiv. They think of the peer-review, copy-editing, and certification as an "overlay" on their unrefereed preprint.

But, by the same token, the peer-review, copy-editing and certification is an "overlay" on every author's unrefereed preprint, whether the journal is print, online, both, or neither.

And most authors don't self-archive their unrefereed drafts at all.

Some fields of mathematics and physics already have close to 100% (Green) OA, by self-archiving in Arxiv.

So it looks as if Episciences.org is just a new online journal platform -- there are others) -- one that has neither a print edition nor an online edition. That means the self-archived version will be the version of record. (Green will become Gold.)

Submission is done by depositing the unrefereed draft in Arxiv (instead of just emailing it to the journal, or sending a URL from the author's website or institutional repository, as with most other journals, OA and non-OA, subscription-based, subsidy-based, and/or author-fee-based).

In addition, it looks as if Episciences.org is hoping to cover the costs of 1 and 2 above (peer review and certification) for its start-up mathematics journal(s) out of subsidies (from CCSD and Institut Fournier/Grenoble) rather than subscriptions or author fees. 3a and 3b (print and online edition) and their costs are being dropped and access-provision and archiving are to be offloaded onto Arxiv.

This is a very sensible idea, but it may be premature for sustainability: All other disciplines may first have to (be mandated to) provide 100% Green OA, as some subfields of maths and physics have long been doing, unmandated, and then all institutional subscription journal subscription funds will be freed to pay the remaining costs of 1 and 2 (whether via Gold OA fees or subsidies). Nor will Arxiv be the main locus of self-archiving in most other disciplines: Authors' own institutional repositories will be.

In principle it does not matter in the least whether the self-archiving is in a central repository like Arxiv or in each author's own institutional repository, from which one or many subject repositories (and search engines) harvest, just as long as the preprints and postprints are reliably deposited and archived online. But in practice, there are many reasons why institutional and funder mandates should stipulate institutional deposit rather than institution-external deposit.

There are no new entities needing the name "epijournals" -- just journals. What is being proposed is by Episciences.org is journals with no print or online edition, in a subdomain (of mathematics and physics) where all authors already self-archive (100% Green). (Postpublication commentary on peer-reviewed journal articles is postpublication commentary -- not peer review.)

Let's see if subsidies work to keep episciences.org journals sustainably afloat. If not, they will of course have to convert to author fees. Either way, it's just another (proposed) new Gold OA journal.

My own view is that it is too early to bury either the print or the online edition of subscription journals: Not while they still publish most of the top journals, and hence institutions cannot cancel them, nor can authors stop publishing in them.

The time for institutions to cancel, and for journals to downsize to just peer review alone and to convert to Gold, with institutions paying the (much lower) author fees out of their cancelation savings, is after Green OA is at or near 100% (as it already is in some areas of physics and mathematics).

What I think Tim Gowers and Jean-Pierre Demailly (and CERN) should hence be preaching to the world is not "epijournals" but Green OA self-archiving: Mathematicians and physicists (and, before them, computer scientists) did it without mandates, but after 20 years we see that the other disciplines won't do it until their institutions and funders mandate it.

No-print, no-online, no-subscription, no-author-fee Gold OA journals are not "complements" to subscription journals: they are simply another competing journal.

There does exist a complement to subscription journals today: It is not Arxiv, but Green OA self-archiving by authors, in all disciplines, now at last growing because of OA mandates from their institutions and funders.

When Green OA self-archiving approaches 100% across all disciplines, however, it will indeed become a "competitor," forcing journals to jettison their print and online editions and convert to Gold OA fees to cover their much lower remaining costs" peer review.

1. "Open Access" does not mean "Open Access Publishing."

2. "Open Access" (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed, published journal articles.

3. OA comes in two "degrees": "Gratis" OA is free online access and "Libre" OA is free online access plus various re-use rights. (Most of the discussion right now is about Gratis OA, which is the most important, urgent and reachable degree of OA.)

4. Authors can provide OA in two ways: (4a) by publishing in a subscription journal and making their final, peer-reviewed drafts free for all online by self-archiving them in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication ("Green OA") or (4b) by paying to publish them in an OA journal that makes them free for all online ("Gold OA").

5. Both Green OA and Gold OA is peer-reviewed: no difference there.

6. But Gold OA costs extra money (which the Finch Report proposes to take out of already-scarce research funds).

7. Green OA is free of extra cost (because subscriptions are still paying in full -- and handsomely -- for publication).

8. About 60% of journals officially recognize their authors' right to provide immediate Green OA, but about 40% impose an embargo of 6-12 months or longer before their authors may provide Green OA.

9. All the UK Research Councils (RCUK) mandate that their authors provide Green OA with a maximum allowable embargo of 6 months (12 for AHRC and ESRC). They also make some funds available to pay Gold OA fees.

10. The Finch report, under very strong lobbying pressure from publishers, recommended that cost-free Green OA be phased out and that only funded Gold OA should be provided.

11. Both RCUK and the EC demurred, and continue to mandates Green OA as well as funding Gold OA.

12. The tumult from researchers and OA advocates is about the diversion of scarce research funds to pricey Gold OA what Green OA can be provided cost-free.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)