Definition of Open Access

Research intelligence - Empty buckets or pure gold? by Paul Jump in Times Higher Education 17 March 2011: "Open-access advocates ponder weak repository growth as publishers restate dire warnings."

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Response:

(1) What is self-archived in institutional open access repositories is quality-controlled, peer-reviewed final drafts of journal articles, immediately upon acceptance for publication..

This (contrary to what Michael Mabe keeps implying, despite frequently being corrected on this very same point) is what is meant by "green open access."

(2) The reason green open access self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles is growing too slowly is very simple: It has to be mandated by researchers' institutions and funders.

It is the green open access mandates (of which there are now about 200 worldwide, see ROARMAP) that are still growing too slowly; and the reason for that is persistent misunderstandings on precisely these two matters (that what is self-archived is peer-reviewed articles and that they will only be self-archived when self-archiving is universally mandated) along with the third misunderstanding implicit in the above article:

(3) Green open access self-archiving has to come before gold open access publishing.

Universal green open access mandates by institutions and funders will generate universal green open access. If and when that makes journal subscriptions unsustainable, then journals can and will convert to gold open access and institutions can and will use their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings to pay for their authors' gold open access publication fees.

But to talk about journal collapse now -- when subscriptions revenues are doing just fine, thank you, whereas open access is still lacking -- is utter nonsense. One can only wonder how long such nonsense will continue to be taken seriously by researchers' institutions and funders. For once this canard is laid to rest, perhaps they will get around to the optimal, inevitable and obvious solution: Mandate green open access self-archiving. The rest will take care of itself quite naturally of its own accord.

Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship

Anonymous query: "Sorry for my ignorance. But is it possible to speak about  the golden road to open access and whether any institutions have taken up that road at all?"

The golden road to Open Access (OA) is to publish in Gold OA journals (free for the user online).

The green road to OA is to publish in conventional (non-OA) journals and to make the articles OA (free for the user online) by self-archiving them in the author's institutional repository.

About 20% of journals (but not the top 20%) are Gold OA journals.

Institutions and funders can mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving, but they cannot mandate Gold OA publishing. 

(They can neither require 80% publishers to be Gold OA nor can they require their researchers to publish in 20% Gold OA journals and not in 80% non-OA journals. There is also little or no extra institutional money to pay for Gold OA publication fees while the institutions' potential funds are still being spent on their annual journal subscriptions.)

Mandating Green OA can provide 100% OA (Green OA) with certainty.

Once it is universally mandated, 100% Green OA will probably (but not with certainty) lead to institutional subscription cancelations, making subscriptions no longer sustainable as the way of covering the remaining costs of publication.  If/when that comes to pass, journals will convert to Gold OA, and the Gold OA publication fees will be paid out of the institutional windfall subscription cancelation savings.
 
See:

http://www.openscholarship.org/

http://roarmap.eprints.org/

Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green. Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59. 

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society, 13-22

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

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access: The Green Road to Maximizing Research Impact [Interview in Danish]. Bibliotek og Medier, 2010 (4). pp. 4-7.

Excerpt from English version:

"...How long will it be before green OA is an integrated and accepted part of the academic society?"

"OA will happen within about two years after the time that OA is universally mandated by institutions, and it will happen institution by institution. For the 180 or so institutions and funders that have already mandated Green OA (see ROARMAP), they already have open access for their own research output today. Now it’s time for the rest of the 3,000 top research institutions and the rest of the c. 12,000 worldwide to mandate Green OA, and then everyone will have OA to all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals. I cannot second-guess how long it will take for administrators to have the good sense to do what’s best for their institutions, for their researchers, for research itself and for the public that funds the research; it’s already long overdue, but they will do it, sooner or later..."

Stevan Harnad

EnablingOpenScholarship

Theodorou, R (2010) OA Repositories: the Researchers' Point of View Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (3) DOI: 10.3998/3336451.0013.304

"[H]ow often do researchers... choose to publish in an OA journal or institutional repository? How trustworthy do they consider those journals and repositories? Would they prefer that OA repositories be more selective?"

If we keep asking researchers the wrong question we will keep getting the wrong answer:

(1) Publishing an article in an OA journal is one thing ("Gold OA"). Publishing an article in a subscription journal and making it OA by self-archiving it in an OA institutional repository is another ("Green OA"). Conflating the two is sowing confusion. Depositing a refereed, published paper in an institutional repository is not an alternative form of "publication"; it is a way of providing OA to refereed, published articles.

(2) To talk about institutions and institutional repositories needing to "referee" already-refereed journal articles is therefore to build non-sequiturs upon non-sequiturs.

(3) A journal is as good as its peer-review standards, no better, no worse, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with its cost-recovery model -- subscription or OA. It depends purely on its quality-control standards. (Since a track-record for quality-control standards must be established across time, older journals will -- rightly -- be trusted sooner than new ones; this too has nothing to do with OA.)

Surveys should not simply chronicle ignorance and misinformation: they should try to dispel it, both in the way they ask their questions and in the way they report and interpret their responses.

"This research examined how researchers view OA publications, and whether they want a more strict method of evaluation for scientific information published through OA repositories."

The underlying logic here is alas comparable to solemnly inquiring whether respondents have or or have not stopped beating their spouses! If one plays into a false assumption one is inevitably fed back the same tune one has sung:

When refereed journal articles are deposited in institutional repositories it is a way to maximize access to them, not an alternative way of publishing them. They have already been "evaluated" by the journal that accepted them for publication. Researchers need to be told that fact, rather that just rehearsing, broadcasting, and thereby reinforcing their ignorance of it.

"This research is trying to determine why acceptance and growth of open access, particularly open access repositories, has been so slow."

A worthy goal -- but not likely to be reached if the study simply echoes and compounds the very misinformation that has been slowing down OA growth, rather than debunking it.

"The majority of the participants in this survey have, at some point, used OA publications as readers, although not all of them seem to trust them as much as they trust traditional subscription journals."

A downright self-contradiction -- if the question was about refereed articles published in traditional subscription journals and made OA by depositing them in an institutional repository. And a non-sequitur if the question was about OA journals, interpreted as an answer about institutional repositories. Or completely irrelevant if it was a question about depositing unrefereed, unpublished papers in institutional repositories (which is definitely not what OA is about: OA is about freeing access to peer-reviewed research, not about freeing research from peer review).

"The vast majority of the participants said they would welcome more strict acceptance procedures for institutional repositories. This would enhance their trust and they would feel much more inclined to submit their works for publication."

Again, this is just compounding misunderstandings, since the target of the OA movement is refereed, published research, not unrefereed content. And what is missing today is not "strict acceptance procedures" for deposits to repositories (repositories don't "accept": journals accept; repositories simply provide access to refereed, accepted work); what is missing is the deposits themselves. And the remedy for that is already known too: deposit mandates (not re-refereeing of refereed content!).

Stevan Harnad

EnablingOpenScholarship

SUMMARY: Free online access to refereed research ("Gratis OA") is already within the global research community's immediate reach, because it can be mandated by research institutions and funders. "Libre OA" (Gratis OA plus various further re-use rights) is not within reach because not all researchers want to allow it, hence it cannot be mandated without allowing author opt-out. Yet global Gratis OA is very likely to encourage authors to go on to provide Libre OA too. The worldwide research community should accordingly grasp what is already within its reach, by mandating Gratis OA, rather than over-reaching for what is not yet within its grasp, delaying the immediate benefits of Gratis OA for research uptake, impact and progress.

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Peter Murray-Rust and I are — and have always been — on the same team. Our disagreements have not been about the ultimate goals, but about the immediate means of reaching those goals. "Gratis OA" is free online access; "Libre OA" is free online access plus various re-use rights. So Gratis OA is a necessary condition for Libre OA: Libre OA is more than Gratis OA, but you cannot have Libre OA without Gratis OA.

But we do not yet have Gratis OA! Less than 20% of yearly refereed research output is OA at all. So the strategic difference between Peter and me is very easy to state and to understand: It is easier to ask researchers, institutions and funders for less than it is to ask them for more, especially when most are not yet providing the less, let alone the more.

How can researchers be induced to provide at least Gratis OA? Their institutions and funders can mandate that they self-archive their refereed final drafts in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. That is Green, Gratis OA. Making journals OA (Gold OA) is in the hands of the publishing community, not the researcher community, hence Gold OA — whether Gratis or Libre — cannot be mandated; only Green OA can be mandated. Moreover, Green, Gratis OA mandates are in far less conflict with either the policies of most publishers or the desires of most authors.

Hence (by my lights) the overwhelming priority today for those who seek OA worldwide should be to see to it that Green, Gratis OA mandates are adopted by institutions and funders worldwide. The rest — Libre OA and Gold OA — will eventually come, once we have mandated universal Green, Gratis OA. But not even Green, Gratis OA will come if we needlessly over-reach now, and insist on more, when we do not even have less.

As we approach universal Green, Gratis OA mandates worldwide, search and harvesting will become incomparably more powerful than it is now. (It is already very powerful now, with Google Scholar, Citeseerx and other new search engines, despite the sparseness of the OA content base (<20%). As OA content becomes less sparse, harvesting and search will become all the more sophisticated and powerful, and the "global bibliography" Peter recommends will assemble across the global network of distributed in institutional OA repositories of its own accord, part of the repository deposit procedure and tagging. The problem today is content, not search.)

As to Peter's concern about the right to re-use figures in Gratis OA articles: It is already possible (and easy) to write a java or perl script today that will call up a figure embedded in a Gratis OA document. Instead of literally reproducing the figure in another work, as in the Gutenberg era (which required permission), the online era allows us to embed a pointer URL that has virtually the same effect -- mediated by one click by the user, to get to the locus of the figure in the Gratis OA article.

As to other Libre OA uses (e.g., data-mining): Those researchers today who (for some reason I find rather difficult to fathom) feel they need advance statements, formal and explicit, of their "harvesting rights" (when everyone else today is happily crawling and harvesting the entirety of web gratis content with impunity) will have to wait patiently until we have Gratis OA; once we have mandated it, Gratis OA's own benefits and potential will induce more and more researchers to seek and provide Libre OA, formally. Over-reaching by asking for more today, when most researchers are not yet even providing Gratis OA, nor being mandated to provide Gratis OA, will not motivate them to provide Libre OA.

In closing, I would like to remind everyone that we are just beginning to think of freeing research from the constraints of the Gutenberg era of Closed Access; throughout the Gutenberg era 100% of research was (and 80% of it still is) neither Gratis nor Libre. In print days, you could not even access a paper if your institution did not have a subscription to the journal in which it was published (and if you did access it, all you could do was read it, and use the information -- not re-use, re-mix, or re-publish the text or figures). The online era made it possible for researchers to make their papers accessible to all potential users, not just those whose institutions subscribed to the journal in which it was published. The further idea of various re-use rights — (and note that there are a number of different levels or degrees of potential re-use rights, all the way to making the document public-domain) — was not even thinkable prior to the online era, when we did not even have Gratis OA — because of the inescapable economic constraints of the Gutenberg medium.

So if Libre OA feels urgent now, it is only because the online era has made Gratis OA possible. But before we try to reach the farther possibility, surely we should first seize the benefits of the nearer possibility that the online era has already opened up for us (free online access), for that is a proximal goal that we already have within our grasp the tried, tested and effective practical means of reaching (Green Gratis OA mandates by research institutions and funders), rather than continuing to ask for more — without any tried, tested and effective means of getting it.

Peter could perhaps cite the possibility of adopting stronger Green OA mandates — copyright reservation mandates like Harvard's (about which I am sceptical, because of their opt-out clauses) — but Peter is sceptical about mandates in general (whereas I am only sceptical about mandates that needlessly raise the goal-posts while mandates themselves are still sparse worldwide and successful consensus on adopting them is still slow to reach).

The practical question to be asked of anyone who is desirous of immediate Libre OA rather than Gratis OA is hence this: How do you propose to persuade researchers to provide it?

Stevan Harnad

EnablingOpenScholarship

The Value of Shared Access and Reuse of Publicly Funded Scientific Data
A Public Symposium

Board on Research Data and Information
National Academy of Sciences

20 F Street Conference Center
Conference Room B, 20 F Street NW
Washington, DC
December 1, 2010, 2:00-4:15 p.m.
"The scientific community generates increasingly vast amounts of publicly funded digital data and information, and disseminates much of it online. The public investment in the production and management of such data resources in the United States alone is estimated to be several billions of dollars. Research communities within the United States and throughout the world have adopted different policies regarding whether or not to require publication of publicly funded data, how the research data and information created by individuals and projects are to be made available, and the terms under which that material may be reused by other parties. At the same time, there appears to be a broad recognition in both the public and private sectors of the importance of broad access to and reuse of publicly funded scientific data, not only for other researchers, but for the economy and society at large. The intangible social benefits of different types of scientific data are harder to measure, but they also can be very significant. They include educational, research, good-governance, and various other benefits that contribute directly and indirectly to improvement of the public welfare.

"At the same time, there are many legitimate reasons for not disclosing scientific data publicly – among them, the need to protect national security and law enforcement, personal privacy, proprietary interests, and confidentiality. Furthermore, many data sets are not sufficiently documented or organized, or of good enough quality, to make them useful to others. Questions about how to properly balance these competing interests and deficiencies in the preparation, access, and reuse of datasets remain unresolved, but will be addressed in the future work of the Board and elsewhere.

"Despite the huge public investments in generating and managing publicly funded data, and the even larger estimated downstream spillover effects of making it available, surprisingly little is known about the costs and benefits of open access and reuse on downstream research for our information society, and the knowledge economy. Many government agencies, academic organizations, and the research community generally are beginning to look into these issues in more depth.

"This public symposium will look at some of the research, economic, and social benefits that can be derived from providing online access to publicly-funded scientific data, as well as how such benefits can be evaluated, with a view to adding to that inquiry. The event will include presentations on the scientific data sharing and reuse policies of the federal government; compelling examples of the value of free online access and unfettered reuse of data; methods of assessing the value and effects of research, the economy, and society; and comments by Board members. The symposium is open to the public, but advance registration is requested (contact: Cheryl Levey, clevey@nas.edu or call 202-334-1531)."

Symposium Program

2:00 p.m.        Opening remarks by the Board Chair
                         Michael Lesk
                         Rutgers University
 
2:10                Overview of scientific data sharing and reuse policies of the Federal government      
                        [TBD], Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, OSTP*
* Not yet confirmed

2:30                Benefits of data sharing and reuse in policyr esearch: case studies in environmental sciences        
                        Rod Atkinson and Jan Johansson, Congressional Research Service
 
2:50                Benefits of data sharing and reuse in biomedical research: the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
                        Neil S. Buckholtz
                        National Institute on Aging, NIH
 
3:10                Evaluating the effects of federal data programs       
                        Carl Shapiro
                        U.S. Geological Survey
 
3:30                 Evaluating the effects of open access to scientific data and literature
                         Heather Joseph
                         SPARC
 
Comments
 
3:50                 Michael Carroll
                         Washington School of Law, American University
 
4:00                 Paul David
                         Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University
 
4:10                 Stevan Harnad
                         Université du Québec à Montreal & University of Southampton
 
4:15                 Concluding observations by Symposium Chair, Michael Lesk   
 
4:20                 End of Symposium

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Some supplementary remarks on Open Access and Open Data (part of a brief pre-recorded video to be delivered at the above NAS symposium):

Open Access to Refereed Research Publications and Open Access to Research Data: A Crucial Strategic Distinction

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montreal
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton

(1) On the Open Access Impact Advantage for Refereed Research Reports

It has now been repeatedly demonstrated that refereed research articles that are made Open Access (OA) are used and cited significantly more in every scientific and scholarly field tested than those that are not made OA. It has now also been shown that this OA advantage is just as great for mandated OA as it is for self-selected OA. This means that the OA Advantage is not (as some have suggested) simply an artifact of selectively making higher-impact research open access: OA is the cause of the increased research impact. This finding greatly increases the importance and urgency of mandating OA for the sake of increasing and accelerating research uptake and progress.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5(10): e13636.   

(2) On the Importance and Potential of Open Access Data-Archiving

Although there is not yet enough OA data to be able to demonstrate that the same kind of impact benefits will be generated by OA to research data as those that have been demonstrated for OA to research articles, it is highly probable that that will prove to be the outcome. Moreover, the impact benefits of making research articles OA, and the rich new means of measuring research usage and impact that OA is generating will also serve as incentives to encourage researchers to provide OA to both their articles and their data.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web:  Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly, 3 (3). 

(3) On the Crucial Differences Between Research Archiving and Data-Archiving -- And Why Immediate Data-Archiving Cannot be Mandated

There is, however, a crucial difference between providing OA to research articles and providing OA to data: Scientists and scholars are not primarily data-gatherers. They gather data in order to data-mine, analyze, interpret and build further findings, theories and applications on it. Hence (except in the rare cases where the data speak for themselves), researchers cannot be expected (or mandated) to make their data OA immediately upon having collected or generated it, for all other researchers to data-mine and analyze. Researchers must be given sufficient time to data-mine their data, having invested the time and effort into collecting or generating it. And the length of the fair embargo interval on Open Access to data will vary depending on the nature of the data and the time, effort and ingenuity required to collect or generate it. This is fundamentally different from the case of refereed research reports, for which there is no justification whatsoever for embargoing Open Access once the paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication.

Hence providing OA to refereed research reports can and should be mandated by researchers' institutions and funders, immediately upon acceptance for publication. Such immediate OA mandates cannot, however, be simplistically extended to research data (nor to unrefereed preprints of research reports) without generating the risk of needless and counterproductive conflicts of interest with the researchers that gathered the data. OA data-archiving, as soon as possible, should be strongly encouraged; in some cases embargo length limits can be set. But it cannot and should not be mandated (except in very special cases where the data-gathering itself is the research that is being funded.)

OA, OA self-archiving, OA publishing, and data archiving

Open Access and Open Data

On Not Conflating Open Data (OD) With Open Access (OA)

More on Potential Conflict of Interest with Open Data (OD) Mandates

Don't Risk Getting Less By Needlessly Demanding More

How Green Open Access Supports Text- and Data-Mining

On Patience, and Letting (Human) Nature Take Its Course

Open Access: What Comes With the Territory

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

One can sympathize with Larry Lessig's frustration in "An Obvious Distinction":

LL:
"In 2010, [for David Wallace-Wells] to suggest [in a 6000-word review in The Nation] that [the Creative Commons movement] 'exhort[s]… piracy and the plundering of culture'... betrays not just sloppy thinking [but] extraordinary ignorance… [and lack of] respect for what has been written… This terrain has been plowed a hundred times in the past decade… Reading is the first step to… respect for what has been written... Reading is what Wallace-Wells has not done well."

Larry tries to correct Wallace-Wells's 6000 sloppy words with 878 carefully chosen ones of his own. Let me try to atone for my own frequent long-windedness by trying to put it even more succinctly (20 words):

Creative Commons' goal
is to protect
creators' give-away rights --
not consumers'
(or 2nd-party copyright-holders')
rip-off rights.

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Harnad, Stevan (2000/2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French version: Harnad, S. (2003) Cielographie et cielolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la resoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte a l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: 77-103.

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The persistent "piracy" canard calls to mind others like it, foremost among them being:
"OA ≡ Gold OA (publishing)"...

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Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus

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Expert Conference on Open Access and Open Data, German National Library of Medicine, Cologne, December 13-14 2010

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OA, OA self-archiving, OA publishing, and data archiving

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montréal
CANADA
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM

OVERVIEW: Open Access (OA) means free online access to the 2.5 million articles published every year in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research journals. OA can be provided in two ways: To provide "Green OA," authors self-archive the final refereed drafts of their articles in their institutional OA repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication (by conventional, non-OA journals). To provide "Gold OA," authors publish their articles in OA journals that make all their articles free online immediately upon publication. (Sometimes a fee is charged to the author's institution for Gold OA.) Because of the benefits of OA (in terms of maximized visibility, accessibility, uptake, usage and impact) to research, researchers, their institutions and the taxpayers that fund them, institutions and funders worldwide are increasingly mandating (i.e. requiring) Green OA self-archiving. Gold OA publishing cannot be mandated by authors' institutions and funders, but universal Green OA self-archiving mandates may eventually lead to a global transition to Gold OA publishing; it depends on whether and how long subscriptions remain sustainable as the means of covering the costs of print and online publication; if subscriptions become unsustainable, authors' institutions will pay journal publishers for peer review out of a portion of their annual windfall subscription cancellation savings. Data-archiving cannot be mandated, because researchers must be allowed the exclusive right to mine the data they have collected if they wish; but as Green OA self-archiving grows, data-archiving too will grow, because of their natural complementarity and the power of global collaboration to accelerate and enhance research progress.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010)  Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5(10) e13636

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

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

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

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

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. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28: 55-59

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds) 

UNESCO Conference on Open Access - Global and Danish Challenges. Ministry of Education, Copenhagen, Denmark, 6 December 2010

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The Open Access Paradigm: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université du Québec à Montréal
CANADA
&
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM

OVERVIEW: With the adoption of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates worldwide so near, this is the opportune time to think of optimizing how they are formulated. Seemingly small parametric or verbal variants can make a vast difference to their success, speed, and completeness of coverage:
What to mandate: The primary target content is the author's final, peer-reviewed draft ("postprint") of all journal articles accepted for publication.
Why to mandate self-archiving: The purpose of mandating OA self-archiving is to maximize research usage and impact by maximizing user access to research findings.
Where to self-archive: The optimal locus for self-archiving is the author's own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR). (It is highly inadvisable to mandate direct deposit in a Central Repository (CR) -- whether discipline-based, funder-based, multidisciplinary or national. The right way to get OA content into CRs is to harvest it from the IRs (via the OAI protocol).)
When to self-archive: The author's final, peer-reviewed draft (postprint) should be deposited in the author's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. (The deposit must be immediate; any allowable delay or embargo should apply only to the access-setting, i.e., whether access to the deposited article is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access, in which only the author can access the deposited text; in either case, the article's metadata are immediately accessible webwide, allowing users to request eprint copies by email from the author immediately and semi-automatically during any embargo period).
How to self-archive: Depositing a postprint in an author's IR and keying in its metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) takes less than 10 minutes per paper. Deposit analyses comparing mandated and unmandated self-archiving rates have shown that mandates (and only mandates) work, with self-archiving approaching 100% of annual institutional research output within a few years. Without a mandate, IR content just hovers for years at the spontaneous 15% self-archiving rate.

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010)  Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5(10) e13636

Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

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

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

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

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. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28: 55-59

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds) 

Oxford University Press Journals has issued a highly misleading press release -- "Open Access Uptake: Five Years On," not making it clear that it is not Open Access (OA) uptake that is declining, but merely the uptake of OUP's pricey "Oxford Open (OO)" paid hybrid-Gold OA option. 

OUP offers its authors the option of paying (a sizeable sum) to have an article that has been published in OUP's subscription journals made OA (freely accessible online). Each OUP journal continues to collect subscription income, and the rest of its articles continue to be non-OA, but the paid-up OO articles are made OA by OUP -- along with a promise to lower OUP journal subscription costs proportionately, as hybrid Gold uptake increases. So this OUP press release is really just telling us that the uptake for the OO option is not increasing, but decreasing.

What is stated, however, is that it is OA uptake itself that is decreasing, which is the very opposite of the truth.

Globally, across all journals, "Green OA" self-archiving, by authors, of their own articles in OA repositories -- already 2-3 times the uptake of OUP's paid hybrid Gold OA option -- is increasing, not decreasing, in no small part because Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors' institutions and funders, requiring them to deposit their articles in OA repositories, are increasing.

The existence of the Green OA option is also the obvious explanation of why OUP's OO hybrid Gold uptake is low: Why should authors pay for Gold OA when they can provide Green OA for free (especially while subscriptions are still paying the costs of publication -- as well as tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA)? 

But OUP does not mention Green OA. Nor does it mention that OUP is among the minority of major publishers that have not yet given their green light to their authors to provide Green OA immediately upon acceptance for publication, instead attempting to impose an embargo of 12 to 24 months on Green OA (perhaps in the hope of forcing their authors to resort to paying for the OO option instead).

OUP is definitely not giving a good account of itself as the history of OA is writing itself today. Cambridge University Press (CUP), for example, among university publishers, The American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Science magazine), among learned-society publishers, and even Elsevier and Springer, among commercial publishers are among the majority that are behaving far more responsibly and progressively than OUP, being on the "side of the angels" insofar as endorsing the immediate Green OA option for their authors is concerned.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum