Definition of Open Access

The Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University in Montreal on Monday May 31 featured a symposium on The Age of Open Access: New paradigm for universities and researchers. To see the web-stream of the session, click here.

John Willinsky (Stanford University) and Heather Joseph (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Washington) reported on the progress and promise of OA; Michael Geist (University of Ottawa) discussed the more general question of copyright in the digital age, and Gerald Beasley (Concordia University) reported on the very productive faculty consultations that led up to the adoption in April of the Concordia mandate, Canada's first university-wide Green Open Access mandate (motivated in part to coincide with this very Congress, and strongly encouraged by the Congress's Academic Convenor, Ronald Rudin, Professor of History at Concordia).

Most of the subsequent discussion from the audience focused on the funding of Gold OA publishing rather than on the mandating of Green OA self-archiving that has been spearheaded among US universities by Harvard's Robert Darnton (who also spoke at Congress) and Stuart Shieber and among Canadian universities by Concordia's Ronald Rudin and Gerald Beasley. Yet it is Green OA Mandates that will usher in "The Age of Open Access" -- which, all the presenters agreed, has not yet arrived!.

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On Wednesday, June 2, there are two further OA events at Congress:

"Open Access: Transforming research in the developing world"

Access to knowledge is fundamental to all aspects of human development, from health to food security, and from education to social capacity building. Yet access to academic publications is severely restricted for many developing countries. As well, the prohibitive cost of publishing and distributing journals in the developing world means much of the research done there remains ‘invisible’ to the rest of the world. This panel will bring together experts to explore the potential impact of Open Access on the developing world.

Moderated by Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Trent University), this panel will bring together Buhle Mbambo-Thata (UNISA Library, South Africa), Leslie Chan (University of Toronto) and Hebe Vessuri, (Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research). It will be followed by a celebration of Concordia University’s commitment to Open Access at the Libraries, 5pm - 7pm, at the Webster Library (LB Building 2nd Floor)

Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University has given a splendid (if a trifle US-centric, indeed Harvard-centric!) talk at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University.

Caveat 1: Journal Articles Versus Books. Professor Darnton's three jeremiads (one on journal articles, two on books) are all spot-on -- but best kept separate, partly because only journal articles are, strictly speaking, Open Access (OA) issues, but mostly because the journal article access problem already has a straightforward solution -- and Harvard was the first university in the US (though only the 16th worldwide!) to adopt it: Mandating "Green" OA self-archiving of all journal articles published by its authors.

In contrast, book OA cannot be mandated, for the simple reason that all journal article authors already wish to give away their articles free for all users online, rather than leaving them accessible only to users at universities that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published; this is far from being true of the authors of all or even most books. Hence trying to treat or even conceptualize journal article access and book access as the same problem would handicap the journal article access problem -- which already has a simple, immediate, and complete solution (OA mandates) -- with the complications of the book access problem, which does not.

Caveat 2: The "Give-Away/Buy-Back" Argument. Nor does it diminish the importance and effectiveness of the mandate solution to the journal article access problem which Harvard has so successfully championed that one of the arguments many (including Professor Darnton) have invoked in its favour happens to be specious. The need and wish on the part of the authors of refereed journal articles (for the sake of both research progress and the progress of their own careers) to make them accessible to all would-be users -- rather then leaving them accessible only to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe -- is already decisive. There is no need to add to it the "we give it to publishers for free and then we have to buy it back" argument, because it's just not valid:

When a university subscribes to a journal, it does not do so in order to buy back its own published research articles: It does so in order to buy in the research articles published by other universities! In that respect, the transaction is the same as it is with books -- except that book authors may be seeking royalties whereas journal articles are not.

So this specious argument -- though it does well express the frustrations of university libraries because of the way their swelling annual serials budgets keep cannibalizing their book budgets -- is not needed in order to make the case for mandating journal article OA: The fact that mandating journal article OA is feasible and effective, that it maximizes article usage and impact, and that it is beneficial and desirable to all journal article authors is already argument enough, and decisive.

Caveat 3: Funding Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA. Similarly unnecessary is continued worry about university journal budgets -- once universities universally follow Harvard's example and mandate Green OA self-archiving. For once all journal articles are freely accessible online, whether and when to cancel unaffordable journals is no longer the agonizing problem it is now: The inelastic need is satisfied by the Green OA version, hence the subscription demand (and the resultant cannibalization of book budgets by journal budgets) is no longer inelastic.

In addition to its Green OA self-archiving mandate, Harvard has also launched the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a commitment to provide some money to pay the costs of Harvard authors who wish to publish in "Gold" OA journals (journals that make their articles OA). The purpose of funding COPE is to encourage publishers to make a transition to Gold Open Access publishing. This is commendable, but it needs to be noted that it is not really urgent or necessary at this time, when journal publication is still being abundantly funded by universities' annual subscriptions -- which cannot be cancelled until and unless Green OA first prevails!

So committing spare funds that Harvard may have available to pay for Gold OA for some of Harvard's article output is of course welcome, given that Harvard has already mandated Green OA for all of its article output. But alas COPE has now inspired membership by other universities that are emulating Harvard only in committing funds to pay for Gold OA, not in mandating Green OA, thinking that they are thereby doing their bit for OA! The Harvard model would be much more useful for the universities worldwide that are keen to emulate it if it were made clear that COPE should only be committed as a supplement for a Green OA mandate, not as a substitute for it. (See some of my own jeremiads on this matter.)

Fortunately, Concordia University, the host for this Congress, has adopted a Green OA mandate before even thinking about whether or not it has any extra cash to commit to COPE!

(If and when universal Green OA frees universities to cancel journals, it will by the same token free that windfall cancellation cash to pay for Gold OA.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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Corrigendum: False alarm. The Reuss article is not new. Peter Suber has since noted (May 23 2010):

"Though I tagged the Reuss article yesterday, thinking it was new, I removed the tag soon afterwards. I believe the article is the same one he published in February 2009, framed with a new advertisement and current date -- apparently the newspaper's way of highlighting stories from its archive..."

But the critiques still bear repeating till the "Heidelberg Appeal"'s repealed and the author corrects its canards...

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Roland Reuss "Eine heimliche technokratische Machtergreifung"

Same old tune. Same false notes:

Green-OA/Gold-OA conflated.
Books/articles conflated.
Imaginary "authors' rights violations" absurdly alleged.

Newspapers clearly have no peer review for either facts or logic...

See: "Heidelberg Appeal Peeled."

SH: "Benjamin Geer suggests [requiring OD] immediately upon publication (presumably the publication of a refereed journal article based on the data in question). But the first of the [data-] collector's articles based on that collection or the last? How many are allowed with exclusivity? and how long?... What if [the data-collector has] gathered a lot of time-consuming data, amenable to a lot of time-consuming analysis?"

BG: "What if they've gathered enough data for a lifetime of analysis?  Should they have the right to hoard their data for the rest of their life?   Where do you draw the line?  Does it make any difference, ethically, whether they collected that data using public funds?"

It's not for me (or anyone) to draw the line uniformly, a-priori. The length of time researchers may need to embargo access to the data they have gathered is something that depends on the field and data, and hence OD needs to be negotiated with the funder, possibly on a case by case basis.

This is notably not the case with OA to published research, in which, without exception, research, researchers, their funders and their institutions all benefit most from OA being provided immediately upon acceptance for publication (and the only conflict of interest is with a 3rd-party service-provider: the publisher).

Benjamin Geer proposes, simply, that research data should be made OD immediately upon publication. I am pointing out the genuine complications that this is failing to take into account. I am not at all suggesting that OD, as soon as possible, is not a good and desirable thing. It is simply far from being as straightforward as OA, especially insofar as mandating (i.e., requiring) is concerned, because there is no conflict with the researcher's interest in the case of OA, whereas there may well be considerable conflict with the researcher's interest in the case of OD. And it is all about timing.

As a consequence, it is very important to keep OA and OD separate, especially as regards mandates. Because of the conflict of interest, this is not a matter to be settled by a-priori ideology or edict, but by realism, fairness and pragmatics.

(By way of an indication that I am fully cognizant of (and opposed to) authors sitting unnecessarily long on their database, there was in my own field a case in which a team of researchers had been funded to collect data worldwide for a global color perception database. There was considerable controversy and consternation in the field after the data-gathering because of delays in publication and release. Many researchers in the field felt that the delays in both had slowed rather than advanced research progress. Here was a case where an advance negotiation between the funders and the researchers on the permissible length of the access embargo would have been helpful, would probably have speeded the research, and would probably have resulted in greater research progress. But the punchline from such cases is certainly not that for all data the embargo should therefore be of length zero, either between data of collection and date of publication or between data of publication and date of data-release as OD. The punchline is that OD parameters need to be negotiated in advance, on a case by case basis, with an emphasis on publication as well as release as soon as fair and practicable. There is nothing like this with OA.)

In summary, unlike the case of open access to refereed research articles, the case of open access to data, like the case of open access to books, is not an open and shut one. OD mandates are desirable, and justifiable, but their parameters will have to be negotiated field by field, case by case. And the terrain will be much better prepared for the more complicated case of mandating OD once we have successfully reached the simpler (and more urgent) goal of universally mandating OA.

Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum

Anon: "I hope you don’t mind my asking you for guidance – I follow the IR list and you are obviously expert in this area. I am having a debate with a colleague who argues that forcing researchers to give up their data to archives and repositories breeches their autonomy and control over intellectual property.  He goes so far as to position the entire open access movement in the camp of the neoliberal agenda of commodifying knowledge for capitalist dominated state authority (at the expense of researchers – often very junior team members – who actually create the data).".

It is important to distinguish OA (Open Access to refereed research journal articles) from Open Data (Open Access to research data, OD).

All researchers, without exception, want to maximise access to their refereed research findings as soon as they are accepted for publication by a refereed journal, in order to maximise their uptake, usage and impact. Otherwise they would not be providing access to them, by publishing them. The impact of their research findings is what their careers, as well as research progress, are all about.

But raw data are not research findings until they have been data-mined and analysed. Hence, by the same token (except in rare exceptions), researchers are not merely data-gatherers, collecting data so that others can go on to do the data-mining and analysis: In science especially, their data-collection is driven by their theories, and their attempts to test and validate them. In the humanities too, the intellectual contributions are rarely databases themselves; the scholarly contributions are the author's analysis and interpretation of their data -- and these are often reported in books (long in the writing), which are not part of OA's primary target content, because books are definitely not all or mostly giveaway content, written solely to maximise their uptake, usage and impact (at least not yet). [See Figure, below.]

In short, with good reason, OD is not immediate, exception-free author give-away content, whereas OA is. It may be reasonable, when data-gathering is funded, that the funders stipulate how long the data may be held for exclusive data-analysis by the fundee, before it must be made openly accessible. But, in general, primary research data -- just like books, software, audio, video, and unrefereed research -- are not amenable to OA mandates because there may be good reasons why their creators do not wish to make them OA, at least not immediately. Indeed, that is the reason that all OA mandates, whether by funders or universities, are very specifically restricted to refereed research journal publications.

In the new world of OA mandates, which is merely a PostGutenberg successor to the Gutenberg world of "publish-or-perish" mandates, it is critically important to distinguish carefully what is required (and why) from what is merely recommended (and why).

Anon: "I agree there is a risk of misuse and appropriation of the open access agenda, but that is true for any technology, or any social change more generally".

Researchers' unwillingness to make their laboriously gathered data immediately OA is not just out of fear of misuse and misappropriation. It is much closer to the reason that a sculptor does not do the hard work of mining rock for a sculpture only in order to put the raw rock on craigslist for anyone to buy and sculpt for themselves, let alone putting it on the street corner for anyone to take home and sculpt for themselves. That just isn't what sculpture is about. And the same is true of research (apart from some rare exceptions, like the Human Genome Project, where the research itself is the data-gathering, and the research findings are the data).

Anon: "And I believe researchers generally have more to gain than lose from sharing data but hard evidence on this point – again for data, not outputs, is almost non-existent so far. If you can direct me to any articles or arguments, I would be grateful".

There is no hard evidence on this because -- except in exceptional cases -- it is simply not true. The work of science and scholarship does not end with data-gathering, it begins with it, and motivates it. If funders and universities mandated away the motivation to gather the data, they would not be left with an obedient set of data-gatherers, duly continuing to gather data so that anyone and everyone could then go ahead and data-mine it immediately. They would simply be mandating away much of the incentive to gather the data in the first place.

To put it another way: The embargo on making refereed research articles immediately OA -- the access delay that publishers seek in order to protect their revenue -- is the tail wagging the dog: Research progress and researchers' careers do not exist in the service of publishers' revenues, but vice versa. In stark contrast to this, however, the "embargo" on making primary research data OD is necessary and justified (in most cases) if researchers are to have any incentive for gathering data (and doing research) at all.

The length of the embargo is another matter, and can and should be negotiated by research funders on a field by field or even a case by case basis.

So although it is crucial not to conflate OA and OD (thereby needlessly eliciting author resistance to OA when all they really want to resist is immediate OD), there is indeed a connection between OA and OD, and universal OA will undoubtedly encourage more OD to be provided, sooner, than the current status quo does.

Anon: "An important point in addition is that the archives I work with, while aspiring to openness, cannot adopt full and unqualified open access.  Issues of sensitive and confidential data, and consent terms from human research subjects, have to be respected.  We strive to make data as open and free as possible, subject to these limits.  Typically, agreeing to a licence specifying legal and ethical use is all that is required.  So in fact, researchers do retain control, to some extent, over the terms and conditions of reuse when they deposit their data for sharing in data archives".

Yes, of course even OD will need to have some access restrictions, but that is not the point, and that is not why researchers in general have good reason not be favorably disposed to immediate mandatory OD -- whereas they have no reason at all not to be favorably disposed to immediate mandatory OA.

It is also important to bear in mind that the fundamental motivation for OA is research access and progress, not research archiving and preservation (although those are of course important too). Data must of course be archived and preserved as well, but that, again, is not OD. Closed Access data-archiving would serve that purpose -- and to the extent that researchers store digital data in any form, closed access digital archiving is what all researchers do already. Proposing to help them with data-preservation is not the same thing as proposing that they make their data immediately OD.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has made a deal with Springer that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA. But Springer is already on the side of the angels on OA, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. Hence all VSNU authors are already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment. So what in addition is meant by the VSNU deal with Springer? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on VSNU authors' behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA? In the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA. There are some signs, however, that this too might be on the way...

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In a press release entitled "Dutch higher education sector convinced of need for Open Access," the SURF Foundation in the Netherlands wrote:

"The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has reached agreement with Springer that in 2010 all articles by Dutch researchers in Springer journals will be made available Open Access, subject to the author agreeing. Other publishers too are providing opportunities for Open Access publication because they are following Springer in allowing researchers to arrange for Open Access when publishing their articles. Almost all publishers already allow researchers to upload the definitive author's version of their article to their institution's repository."

It would be very helpful if SURF or VSNU could explain a little more clearly what this means:

(1) Is it that VSNU has made a deal with Springer (as University of California has done) that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA?

(2) How will those articles be made OA?

Springer is already on the side of the angels, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. In other words, VSNU authors are all already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment.

Hence it is unclear what, over and above this, is meant by (1)? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on author's behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA?

It is important to raise these questions, because in the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA.

"One problem for scientists and scholars is the need to publish in prestigious and expensive journals so as to receive a good rating, which is important when applying for grants from organisations such as the NWO. Prof. Engelen said that the NWO would investigate ways of ensuring that publications in Open Access would count more significantly towards the author's 'impact factor.'"

Does this mean that Springer articles should now count more for NWO than they do now? Why? Should it not be the quality standards of each journal that determine how much it counts for NWO? (And also, of course, the citation impact of each article itself.)

Is being OA supposed to make an article count more? Why? (Especially since making an article OA has already been shown to increase its citation impact?)

Is this not the usual error, of assuming that "OA" means "published in a Gold OA journal" -- and assuming also that Gold OA journals are new journals, and have to compete with established journals in order to demonstrate their quality standards?

If so, why should any journal count more just because it is Gold OA?

And what about Green OA, which any Netherlands author can already provide for their articles, and especially with Springer articles, which already have Springer's endorsement for Green OA?

Green OA is already based on each journal's quality standards and track-record. No special preferential treatment is required.

"Paul Doop – a member of the board of Amsterdam University and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and chair of the ICT and Research platform board of SURFfoundation – argued that the problem could be solved by including a provision for mandatory Open Access in collective labour agreements."

This is certainly one possible way to mandate OA. Or, better, each VSNU university could simply adopt a policy, as over 100 universities worldwide have already done, that requires the deposit of all institutional refereed research output in the institution's repository.

But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the "problem" of making new Gold OA journals "count" more than they have earned with their quality standards, just as every other journal has done. Indeed, mandating Green OA has nothing to do with Gold OA journals at all (except that all Gold OA journals are also Green!)

"Many of those attending the seminar thought that was going too far. Prof. Engelen said, however, that his organisation was keeping close track of developments and that if insufficient progress had been made in a year’s time, the NWO would see whether it could make Open Access obligatory, as its sister organisations in the United Kingdom and the United States have already done."

This would be splendid. And I hope NWO will not wait so long to do what the US and UK (and many other countries) are already doing.

But it would be helpful if the very timely and commendable plan to mandate Green OA in the Netherlands is not conflated with the completely different question of paying for Gold OA, or with trying to make Gold OA journal articles "count" more.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Matthew Cockerill [MC] (BioMedCentral) wrote:

MC: "Agreement on terminology can really only ever be pragmatic"

Agreed.

MC: "Many of us use "open access" to mean what Stevan refers to as 'libre open access', and have distinguished this from "free access" which Stevan refers to as 'Gratis open access'."

This is alas all true too.

It is also true that "many of us" (not me!) use "open access" to mean "gold open access" (publishing) only.

And the progress of open access is likewise much the worse off -- pragmatically-- because of this other widespread conflation (sometimes willful, mostly just ignorant) too.

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[(1) Self-Archiving FAQ #31 "Waiting for Gold" (2) Stevan Harnad, "Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis," #15 and (3) Peter Suber "Field Guide to misunderstandings about open access" Misunderstanding #1: "All OA is gold OA" and its flip-side: Misunderstanding #22 "All OA is gratis OA." "The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin definitions of OA all describe forms of libre OA. However, there are good reasons to recognize gratis OA as a kind of OA... The current misunderstanding accepts that gratis OA is a kind of OA, but goes one step too far and assumes that gratis OA is the only kind of OA..." ]

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It is also true that what Stevan (and Peter, let's not forget) -- co-coiners of the original (nonbinding, nonlegal) BOAI definition of "open access" -- refer to as "libre open access" was coined specifically to distinguish it from "gratis open access," which means free online access (whereas libre OA means free online access plus some re-use rights, not all yet specified).

But from the very outset, there has been some (understandable) motivation on the part of gold open access publishers to co-opt the term "open access" to fit their product, and only their product. See the long, sad, "Free Access vs. Open Access" debate, started by BioMedCental's first editorial "Free Access is not Open Access" in "Open Access Now" on 28 July 2003).

What is one to say, except that some of it sounds a lot like a battle over a trademark -- which you need, if you are conducting a trade...

But not just a battle over trademark. Also ideology vs. pragmatics. (I don't, by the way, think Matt's motivation, in particular, is primarily commercial: I am certain that he believes, very sincerely, in (libre) OA.)

My own motivation is exclusively to get all of the refereed literature freely accessible online, at long last, as soon as possible (it's already more than a decade and a half overdue), in whatever way works, is within reach, works surely, and works fast.

Hence the only thing at stake for me when it comes to the trademark "OA" is the fate of free online access itself, which will certainly come much later if -- now that the term "OA" and the "OA Movement" are launched in public consciousness -- it is now declared, for either commercial or ideological reasons, that OA mandates are no longer OA mandates but "FA" mandates, the OA impact advantage is no longer the OA advantage but the FA advantage, and those who have been fighting for OA since long before it got a name have not, in fact, been fighting for OA but "FA." Moreover, it means that precious little of the (already precious little) OA we have to date (about 15% green plus about 15% gold) is in reality OA at all: It's just "FA."

I find all this doubly foolish, not only because (1) gratis OA (free online access) is a necessary condition, though not a sufficient condition, for libre OA (free online access plus some re-use rights, not all yet specified) and will (as is evident to anyone who gives it a few minutes of serious thought) almost certainly lead to libre OA soon after it becomes universal (if and when we do what we need to do to make gratis OA universal) but also because (2) over-reaching and insisting on libre OA first, and deprecating gratis OA as not really being OA at all, merely FA, is merely serving to delay the onset of libre OA too (just as insisting that only Gold OA publishing is OA is delaying the era of Gold OA publishing).

So, yes, as Matt says, use of the terminology is just a matter of pragmatics, but not linguistic pragmatics: strategic pragmatics. And needlessly, counterproductively over-reaching for libre OA (or Gold OA) now, when Green gratis OA is fully within our grasp is just about as unpragmatic and short-sighted as one can possibly be, in the short (but already far too long) history of OA. And the attempt to co-opt the term exclusively is simply making the "best" the enemy of the better.

(I can already sense that there are those who are straining to chime in that their insistence on libre OA, too, is driven neither by commercial considerations nor ideology but pragmatics: they need the re-use rights, now, and their research progress is hurting for the lack of them. Let me suggest that if you look more closely at this "pragmatic" case for libre OA it almost always turns out to be about open data, not OA (which is about journal articles). Yet those who are in a hurry for open data are apparently happy to conflate their case with OA's, even if it's at the expense of again gratuitously handicapping our reach -- for the green gratis OA to journal articles that is within our grasp -- with the independent extra burden of data re-use rights. And what is invariably forgotten in all this special-case over-reaching is the completely correctable general case that has been staring us in the face, uncorrected, lo these 15+ years, which is that every day countless would-be users are being denied access and usage for the 85% of journal articles that are accessible only to those with subscription access. That is the paramount problem that the online era has empowered us to solve, and instead we are fussing about extra perks that will surely come soon after we solve it, but not if we continue to make those extra perks a precondition for a solution -- or even for naming the problem!)

MC: "I believe the reason that many, including BioMed Central, reserve the term open access for the 'libre' sense is not simply the historical precedent of BOAI and Bethesda, but also the wider related usage of the term open (as in open source, open courseware, open wetware, open government). In all cases, these imply the availability, reusability and redistributability of the material, not the fact that it doesn't cost anything."

And in all cases, as soon as one takes the trouble of looking closely at the apparent similarities, the profound differences reveal that this conflation of senses is specious and superficial: article texts are not program code that needs to be re-used and re-written; article texts are to be read and then the ideas and findings in them are to be re-used in new research and writings. Same for the disanalogy with open data, which of course includes "open wetware." Inasmuch as open courseware is just text, free online access for all is all that's needed. (Put the URL in the coursepack instead of the text.) Inasmuch as courseware is programs, it's the same disanalogy between text code and software code. Ditto for "open multimedia" and rip/remix/mashup: not for scholarly/scientific text -- though fine for the scholarly/scientific ideas and findings described in the text (modulo plagiarism). And "open government" is about combatting secrecy, which is moot for published scientific research (whether or not access carries a price tag).

"On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned"

"Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons"

In other words, I don't know about Peter, but it's certainly true that for my own part it was not because of all of these superficial and in the end specious commonalities supposedly shared by this panoply of "open" X's that I favored the term "open access" as the descriptor for what the online era had made possible for refereed scholarly/scientific journal articles.

On the contrary. If I had known in 2002 what confusion and conflation it would make "OA" heir to, I would have avoided the term "open" like the plague. (There was one commonality, though, that both Peter and I did intentionally try to capitalize on in our choice of that term: the "open" in the "open archives initiative" protocol for metadata harvesting. That harks back to an even earlier decision point, this time in an email exchange with Herb van de Sompel in 1999 about what how to rename the "Universal Preprint Service" and its "Santa Fe Convention," which had been the original names for the OAI and OAI protocol. It was Herb who opted for "open" rather than "free" (which I seem to recall that I preferred), so OAI became OAI, and OA/BOAI followed soon afterward (though OAI's "archive" was soon jettisoned -- again for no good reason whatsoever, just arbitrariness and pedantry -- in favor of"repository"... Lexicalization is notoriously capricious, and unintended metaphors and other affinities can come back to haunt you...)

MC: "On which basis, one might refer to Gratis open access, as being 'non-open open access'.  Which is why it seems to me a problematic form of terminology, however well-intentioned."

On the contrary, Matt. You are being so seduced by your incoming biases here that you don't realize that you are making them into self-fulfilling prophecies: Gratis OA is only "non-OA OA" to those who wish to argue that free online access is not open access!

Let me close with an abstract of the keynote I will be giving at the e-Democracy Conference in Austria in May.

In that talk I also will be discussing the commonalities and differences among the various "open" movements, but note only that "The problem [of Green Gratis OA] is not particularly an instance of "eDemocracy" one way or the other...":

MANDATES TO CHANGES RESEARCHERS' BEHAVIOR TOWARD PROVIDING OPEN ACCESS TO THEIR GIVE-AWAY RESEARCH

ABSTRACT: The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals in all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers, not for royalty income. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already within reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of "eDemocracy" one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox). The solution is for the world's research institutions and funders to extend their existing "publish or perish" mandates to require their employees and fundees to maximize access and impact for the research they are employed and funded to conduct by depositing it in their Open Access Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication to make it freely accessible to all its potential users webwide. Open Access metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009, Stevan Harnad [SH2] wrote:

On June 27, 1994, Stevan Harnad [SH1] wrote:

SH2: "What on earth do you mean by "esoteric"? Are we supposed to have different criteria for a publication depending on how big a readership it is likely to have? In that case we need a sliding scale whose value we cannot possibly know in advance for every candidate piece of writing."

SH3: Just dull-wittedness. It should have been obvious already then that the primary target was refereed journal articles and that "esoteric" was a red herring.

SH2: "Paper publishing? Is this, then, merely about getting published articles online? That's not likely to be a very radical proposal, since (today, in 1994) it is surely a foregone conclusion that publishers will all have online editions within a few years. [So is this about] online, online-only, or free-online?"

SH3: More somnambulism: It should have been clearly stated as "free online access to refereed journal articles" (i.e., OA).

SH2: "Give-away writing might be a natural kind, but what distinguishes give-away writing from non-give-away writing? How does one recognize it in advance? And surely the distinction is not just based on probable market but on some other aspect of academic motivation. After all, textbooks are as "academic" as one can get, yet textbook authors are certainly motivated to sell their words, otherwise many would not do the work of writing them."

SH3: Addle-brainedness, yet again:

Refereed research articles are written purely for research usage and impact not for sales revenue. That's how you distinguish them. And you recognize them by the journal-names.

SH2: "Who are "peers"? And what is the reason for this obsession with reaching their "eyes and minds"? The fact that they are all in some sort of "esoteric" club surely is not the explanation."

SH3: Peers are the fellow-researchers worldwide for whose usage peer-reviewed research is conducted and published.

"Eyes and minds" should have been research uptake, usage and impact (e.g., as measured by downloads and citations).

SH2: "And this "building on one another's contributions" sounds cosy enough, but what is really going on here? It's certainly not about verbal Lego Blocks!"

SH3: Research uptake, usage, applications, citations.

SH2: "Fine. These authors are saints, or monks. But why? For what?"

SH3: Their research progress, their funding and their careers are based on the uptake and usage of their research findings, not on income from the sales of their writings. (User access-barriers are also author impact-barriers.)

SH2: "The criterion sounds like it's esotericity itself, but why? Besides, that's circular: Is give-away writing esoteric because its target readership is tiny? Or is its target readership tiny because the writing's esoteric?"

SH3: Fuzzy thinking again: Esotericity, though roughly correlated, is a red herring. Give-away writing is give-away writing, and wants to be freely accessible online because access-barriers are usage- and impact-barriers. (Yes, the potential users of most refereed research are few, but that's not the point, nor the criterion: the need to maximize usage and impact is the criterion.)

SH2: "And FTP archiving sounds fine, but isn't it already obsolete? This is June 27 1994, but Tim Berners-Lee created the Web 5 years ago!"

SH3: Ignorance, sir, pure ignorance.

SH2: "And there you go again with "electronic publication"? Is this just about moving to electronic publication? But that's surely going to happen anyway."

SH3: Fuzziness, pure fuzziness. It is and was about free online access, not about online publication.

SH2: "And is "esoteric" publication, then, merely "vanity press" publication? If so, then it's no wonder its likely readership is so tiny..."

SH3: It's about refereed publication, hence not vanity-press. (But there was definitely muddle and ambiguity regarding unrefereed vs. refereed drafts. The focus should have been directly on refereed drafts, with unrefereed drafts being only a potential entry point in some cases.)

SH2: "But physicists (who are doing it on the Web, by the way, not via FTP) have already been doing much the same thing (sharing their pre-refereeing drafts) on paper for years now, even before the web, or FTP, email, or the online medium itself. Is that all you mean by "esoteric"? And if so, the online medium's there now: those who want to share drafts are free to share them that way. That isn't even "publication," it's just public sharing of work-in-progress."

SH3: You're right, and that's yet another gap in my original logic. Nothing is or was stopping those who might wish to make their unrefereed drafts publicly accessible online from doing so; but that is not the point, nor the problem, nor the objective.

The problem is access to refereed, published research. All potential users need access to that; and all authors want their refereed research to be accessible to all its potential users (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happens to be published); whereas not all (or even most) authors want their unrefereed drafts to be accessible to all.

(And, yes, "esoteric" is once again a red herring. It ought to have been "peer-reviewed research" all along, to short-circuit potential ambiguities and misunderstandings.)

SH2: "Why didn't you say that in the first place? "peer-reviewed" rather than "esoteric.""

SH3: Mea culpa.

SH2: "But, again, nothing stands in the way of authors sharing unrefereed drafts online with their tiny intended public prior to submitting them for peer-review and then publication, does it? What's your point?"

SH3: The point is and should have been about peer-reviewed drafts. Earlier unrefereed drafts were just one potential entry point. (Perhaps I was just too timid or unimaginative to say "post your peer-reviewed drafts" at that time.)

But for me, another major motivation for posting writings was to elicit quote/commentary (as in this very commentary). And although the refereed, published draft can elicit commentary too, it is especially useful at the draft stage, when it can still help shape the final published version.

SH2: "But is [what's sought] really the "patina" of paper publishing, or the patina of peer-review, and a given publication's prior track record for peer-review quality standards?"

SH3: Just peer-review and track-record. The rest was again just ill-thought-through muddle.

(There may have been some faint excuse for such muddle way back in 1994; but one can hardly invoke that today, 15 years later, when all of these muddles have since been raised, rehearsed, and resolved, many times over, in countless online discussion forums, FAQs, conferences, and published articles, chapters and books. Hence the frayed patience of weary archivangelists even if they themselves are not free of original sin, insofar as not having thought all things through sufficiently rigorously at the very outset is concerned. There is no excuse for the same old muddles 15 years on...)

SH2: "And what, exactly, is the scope of "peer-reviewed publication"? Apart from journal articles (and refereed conference proceedings), aren't monographs, edited books and even textbooks "peer-reviewed"? And aren't some of them "non-esoteric," because revenue-seeking?"

SH3: There is genuine uncertainty about the cut-off point. All peer-reviewed journal articles are, without exception, author give-aways, hence all can and should be made freely accessible online to maximize their usage and impact.

The same may be true for some monographs, edited books (and possibly even some textbooks, if the authors are magnanimous). But none of these other categories is exception-free (rather the contrary). Freeing authors' writings online against their wills cannot be the objective of the Open Access (OA) movement. Nor can providing free access to writings to which the author does not want there to be free access serve as the basis for OA mandates by institutions and funders.

That is why the exception-free give-away content -- written solely for usage and impact -- is the primary target of the OA movement (and of OA mandates).

By the way, another enormous oversight in the Subversive Proposal (though I can hardly imagine how it could have been anticipated at that time) was the failure to call for (what we would now call) Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. It only became apparent after another half-decade had passed with researchers' fingers still not stirred into motion by the Subversive Proposal that mandates would be necessary...

SH2: "The (obvious) flaw with the hope of making all refereed publications free online by first making their unrefereed drafts free online is that, unlike physicists (and, before them, computer scientists, and economists), most authors in most disciplines do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public (either because they consider it unscholarly, or because they fear professional embarrassment, or because they don't want to immortalize their errors, or because they thing unrefereed results could be dangerous, e.g. to public health).

Hence if the road to free online access is reserved for papers that their authors are willing to make publicly accessible as unrefereed drafts first, it will not cover much of refereed research in most disciplines."

SH3: All true, and, again, mea culpa.

The road to the optimal solution -- the one that covers all refereed research, immediately upon acceptance for publication, has been somewhat circuitous:

First, the Subversive Proposal recommended self-archiving all unrefereed preprints (but that would not work for the many researchers and disciplines that do not wish to make unrefereed drafts public).

A variant on that strategy was the "preprints plus corrigenda" strategy, which recommended self-archiving unrefereed preprints and later also self-archiving a file containing all corrections arising from the refereeing. Likewise inadequate, partly because, again, many authors don't want to make unrefereed drafts public, and also because it would be awkward and inconvenient for authors to have to archive -- and for users to have to consult -- separate preprint and corrigenda files.

It has to be added that the P&C strategy was never really intended as an actual overt practice: it was just intended to assuage the worries of those who thought there was some sort of insurmountable obstacle in principle to self-archiving the refereed version in cases where the publisher objected.

In reality, some publishers have objected even to self-archiving the unrefereed preprint [this is called the "Ingelfinger Rule"], but most have since dropped this objection. And the sensible strategy for the refereed postprint is to self-archive it and reconsider only if and when a publisher requests a take-down. Sixty-three percent of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint. And in the past two decades, there have been virtually no publisher take-down requests for the many million refereed postprints that have been self-archived. It's absurd to let a one in a million exception drive practice, especially when all it would entail would be a take-down!

But for those authors (and for those mandates) that insist on refraining from making the refereed postprint OA for the remaining 37% of articles until their publishers endorse it (most endorse it after an embargo period), the best author practice is to deposit the refereed final draft in their own institutional repositories (IRs) anyway, immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to set access to it as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during any embargo. That way the repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to any would-be user during the embargo.

At the time of the Subversive Proposal, however, neither the OAI interoperability protocol, nor OAI-compliant institutional repository software, nor the notion of self-archiving mandates yet existed. So today's Best Practice solution was not yet in sight, namely: deposit, and mandate deposit, of all refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance; set access to the 63% of deposits that are published in Green journals to OA immediately; and, if you wish, set access to Closed Access for the remaining 37%, and rely on the Almost-OA Button during the embargo.

Once such IDOA -- Immediate Deposit, Optional Access -- mandates are adopted globally by institutions and funders, the days of embargoes are numbered anyway, under the overwhelming pressure of the benefits of OA.

And another thing that was not yet in sight in 1994 was the fact that the benefits of OA (likewise not yet named then!) could and would be demonstrated to authors and their institutions and funders quantitatively, in the form of the scientometric evidence of the "OA Advantage": significantly increased download and citation impact for OA articles, compared to non-OA ones. This too would eventually go on to encourage mandates as well as the increased the use of OA content to generate rich new metrics for measuring and rewarding research impact.

None of this was quite obvious yet in 1994.

SH2: "And what about all the published reprints that authors would prefer not to have shared with the world when they were just unrefereed drafts?"

SH3: Self-archive the refereed version immediately upon publication (and rely on the Button if you wish to observe the access-embargo).

SH2: "How and why did this "subversive proposal" (to the author community) turn into speculations about publishing and publishers?"

SH3: This is the plaint that plagues and shames me the most! For the needless and counterproductive speculation about the future of publication -- along with all the essential features of what would eventually be called "Gold OA publishing" -- were all introduced in that proposal, with the result that premature "gold fever" contributed to distracting from and delaying the ("Green OA") self-archiving that was the essence of the Subversive Proposal.

But I do think it was unavoidable -- in responding to the (now at least) 38 prima facie worries that immediately began to be raised time and time again about self-archiving -- particularly worries #8, #9, #14, #17, #19, #28, #30, & #31 -- by sketching the obvious way in which publication cost-recovery could evolve into the Gold OA model if and when universal Green OA self-archiving should ever make it necessary.

But I never imagined that the prospect of gold would become such an attraction -- mostly to those, like librarians, not in a position to provide Green OA themselves, but groaning under the burden of the serials crisis, but also to publishing reform theorists more interested in publishing economics and iniquities than in researchers' immediate access needs -- that gold fever would propagate and distract from providing and mandating Green OA, rather than reassuring and reinforcing it. (For some reason that neither Peter Suber nor I can quite fathom, people take to Gold much more readily than to Green, even to the extent of imagining that OA is synonymous with Gold OA publishing.)

Well, one reaps what one sows, and I accept a large part of the blame for having already begun to sprinkle gold dust way back in 1994, and continuing to stir it for some years to come -- -- until I at last learned from sorry experience to stop speculating about tomorrow's hypothetical transitions and focus only on the tried, tested and sure practical means of reaching 100% OA today: universal Green OA deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

I still think, however, that the proof-of-principle for Gold OA publishing by BMC and PLoS was, on balance, useful, even though premature, because it did serve to allay worries that universal Green OA self-archiving would destroy peer-reviewed publication altogether, by making subscriptions unsustainable, and hence making publication costs unrecoverable. No, it would merely induce a transition to Gold-OA publishing to recover the costs of publication. (Moreover, the costs of publishing then, after having achieved universal Green OA, would be far lower -- just the costs of peer review alone -- and paid for out of a fraction of the self-same annual institutional windfall savings on which the premise of subscription collapse underlying this set of worries is predicated.)

But there I go, succumbing to gold fever again...

SH2: "In this speculation about publishing media and costs, what have "pages" to do with it? And what, exactly, does the 25% figure pay for (and what is the 75% that is no longer needed)?"

SH3: Pages have nothing to do with it. That was just a regrettable momentary lapse into the papyrocentric thinking of the Gutenberg era.

The right reckoning is total publication costs per article. And once authors are all systematically depositing their refereed drafts in their institutional repositories, and users are using those OA drafts instead of the publisher's proprietary version, the global network of IRs becomes the access-provider and archive and the only remaining function (and expense) remaining for journals is the implementation of peer review, certified by their name and track-record. (The peers, of course, continue to referee for free, as they always did.)

SH2: "You seem to be pretty generous with other people's money. ["advance subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies)" And you seem to have forgotten the money already being paid for subscriptions."

SH3: More of the perils of premature speculation. Of course no extra funds are needed if the transition to Gold OA only comes after universal Green OA has been reached, and only if and when that universal Green OA in turn makes subscriptions unsustainable. For then, by the very same token, the subscription cancellation releases the funds to pay for Gold OA -- whereas paying pre-emptively for Gold OA now, while it is unnecessary, because most of the essential journals are still subscription-based, requires extra money (and at an inflated -- because again premature -- cost).

But you see how easy it is to keep getting taken up with Gold OA speculation instead of attending to Green OA practice, within reach since 1994, yet still not grasped?

SH2: "But what, exactly, is this money supposed to be paying for? (Again, there seems to be conflation of online-only publication, and its costs, with free online access-provision: surely they are not the same thing.)"

SH3: Today: nothing. After universal Green OA -- if and when that makes subscriptions collapse -- it will pay for peer-review alone.

SH2: "This still sounds quite muddled and vague: We've heard about "esoteric," give-away writings, but it has not yet been made clear what they are, and why they are give-ways."

SH3: Refereed journal articles, written only for research impact.

SH2: "We have heard about online publication, and online-only publication."

SH3: The Subversive Proposal was only meant to be about making refereed research freely accessible online.

SH2: "We have heard about (some) authors making their unrefereed drafts free online. But how (and why) do we get from that to free online refereed publication?"

SH3: Forget about the unrefereed drafts; they're just extras. The way to make refereed research free online is to deposit your refereed final draft, free for all, in your Institution's OA Repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

SH2: "And [how (and why) do we get] from there to paying to publish instead of paying to subscribe? (What needs to be paid for, how and why? And how do we get there from here, given that most authors do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public?)"

SH3: Right now, nothing needs extra to be paid for. Subscriptions are paying for it all, handsomely. All that's needed is author keystrokes, to deposit all final refereed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That's all that's been needed since 1994, but now we know the keystrokes need to be mandated, to set the fingers in motion, so what's needed is institutional and funder Green OA self-archiving mandates.

All of that is for sure, and will generate 100% OA with certainty.

The rest is speculation: If universal Green OA makes subscriptions no longer sustainable, publishers will cut costs, downsize to the essentials -- providing peer review alone -- paid for, on the Gold OA model, out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings.

SH2: Sounds like a rather inchoate proposal to me... (And you reputedly expect this to happen overnight? Might we have some more details about what we might expect to happen on that fabled night?)"

SH: Inchoate it was, in 1994, though the practical means to do it overnight (fingers) were already available in 1994. Since then, the OAI protocol and the IR software have made it a lot simpler and easier. But the keystrokes remain to be done. Thirty eight prima facie worries have kept fingers in a state of Zeno's Paralysis, despite all being answered, fully, many, many times over.

Now it is time to mandate the keystrokes. That too could be done overnight, by the stroke of a Department Head's, DVC's or VC's pen, as Wendy Hall (Southampton), Tom Cochrane (QUT), and Bernard Rentier (Liege) have since shown.

Will it be another 15 years before the remaining 10,000 universities and research institutions (or at least the top 1000) wield the mighty pen to unleash the even mightier keystrokes (as 68 Institutions and Departments, and 42 Funders have already done)? Or will we keep dithering about Gold OA, publishing reform, peer review reform, re-use rights, author addenda, preservation and the other 38 factors causing Zeno's Paralysis) for another decade and a half?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

The year that is about to end (2009) is a decade and a half after the "Subversive Proposal" of 1994: I did a (somewhat impatient, but light-hearted) 5-year millenarian retrospective in 1999 and then a somewhat more testy but whimsical critique at the 10-year mark in 2004. (See also Richard Poynder's "Ten Years After")

Here's a more aggressive critique, to mark the fifteenth frustrating year. I will try to reply (as "SH3") in the next posting, but please feel free to pour more oil on the roast!  --   SH2

---

On June 27, 1994, Stevan Harnad [SH1] wrote:

SH1: "esoteric 213 aj .es-o-'ter-ik
LL [italic esotericus], fr. Gk [italic es{o-}terikos], fr. [italic
es{o-}ter{o-}], compar. of [italic eis{o-}], [italic es{o-}] within,
fr. [italic eis] into, fr. [italic en] in -- more at [mini IN] - ¨1 a aj
designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone - 1 b aj of
or relating to knowledge that is restricted to a small group - ¨2 a aj
limited to a small circle <~ pursuits> - 2 b aj [mini PRIVATE], [mini
CONFIDENTIAL] - esoterically 21313 av -i-k(*-)l{e-}
(From the networked Merriam Webster Dictionary at Princeton University)"

SH2: What on earth do you mean by "esoteric"? Are we supposed to have different criteria for a publication depending on how big a readership it is likely to have? In that case we need a sliding scale whose value we cannot possibly know in advance for every candidate piece of writing.

SH1: "We have heard many sanguine predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off."

SH2: Paper publishing? Is this, then, merely about getting published articles online? That's not likely to be a very radical proposal, since (today, in 1994) it is surely a foregone conclusion that publishers will all have online editions within a few years.

SH1: "This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day."

SH2: Which day? When all paper publishing is also online, online only, or free online?

SH1: "It is applicable only to ESOTERIC (non-trade, no-market) scientific and scholarly publication (but that is the lion's share of the academic corpus anyway), namely, that body of work for which the author does not and never has expected to SELL the words."

SH2: Give-away writing might be a natural kind, but what distinguishes give-away writing from non-give-away writing? How does one recognize it in advance? And surely the distinction is not just based on probable market but on some other aspect of academic motivation. After all, textbooks are as "academic" as one can get, yet textbook authors are certainly motivated to sell their words, otherwise many would not do the work of writing them.

SH1: "The scholarly author wants only to PUBLISH them, that is, to reach the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over, so that they can build on one another's contributions in that cumulative, collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry."

SH2: Who are "peers"? And what is the reason for this obsession with reaching their "eyes and minds"? The fact that they are all in some sort of "esoteric" club surely is not the explanation.

And this "building on one another's contributions" sounds cosy enough, but what is really going on here. It's certainly not about verbal Lego Blocks!

SH1: "For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership, for that was the only way they could make their work public at all during the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was their only option."

SH2: Fine. These authors are saints, or monks. But why? For what?

SH1: "But today there is another way, and that is PUBLIC FTP: If every esoteric author in the world this very day established a globally accessible local ftp archive for every piece of esoteric writing from this day forward, the long-heralded transition from paper publication to purely electronic publication (of esoteric research) would follow suit almost immediately"

.SH2: There you go again: The criterion sounds like it's esotericity itself, but why? Besides, that's circular: Is give-away writing esoteric because its target readership is tiny? Or is its target readership tiny because the writing's esoteric?

And FTP archiving sounds fine, but isn't it already obsolete? This is June 27 1994, but Tim Berners-Lee created the Web 5 years ago!

And there you go again with "electronic publication"? Is this just about moving to electronic publication? But that's surely going to happen anyway.

And is "esoteric" publication, then, merely "vanity press" publication? If so, then it's no wonder its likely readership is so tiny...

SH1: "This is already beginning to happen in the physics community, thanks to Paul Ginsparg's HEP preprint network, with 20,000 users worldwide and 35,000 "hits" per day, and Paul Southworth's CICnet is ready to help follow suit in other disciplines."

SH2: But physicists (who are doing it on the Web, by the way, not via FTP) have already been doing much the same thing (sharing their pre-refereeing drafts) on paper for years now, even before the web, or FTP, email, or the online medium itself. Is that all you mean by "esoteric"? And if so, the online medium's there now: those who want to share drafts are free to share them that way. That isn't even "publication," it's just public sharing of work-in-progress.

SH1: "The only two factors standing in the way of this outcome at this moment are (1) quality control (i.e., peer review and editing), which today happens to be implemented almost exclusively by paper publishers"

SH2: Now that sounds more concrete. Why didn't you say that in the first place? "peer-reviewed" rather than "esoteric."

But, again, nothing stands in the way authors of sharing unrefereed drafts online with their tiny intended public prior to submitting them for peer-review and then publication, does it? What's your point?

SH1: "and (2) the patina of paper publishing, which results from this monopoly on quality control."

SH2: But is that really the "patina" of paper publishing, or the patina of peer-review, and a given publication's prior track record for peer-review quality standards?

And what, exactly, is the scope of "peer-reviewed publication"? Apart from journal articles (and refereed conference proceedings), aren't monographs, edited books and even textbooks "peer-reviewed"? And aren't some of them "non-esoteric," because revenue-seeking?

SH1: "If all scholars' preprints were universally available to all scholars by anonymous ftp (and gopher, and World-Wide Web, and the search/retrieval wonders of the future), NO scholar would ever consent to WITHDRAW any preprint of his from the public eye after the refereed version was accepted for paper "PUBLICation.""

SH2: It's about time you mentioned the Web. (Forget about the rest of the technology, obsolescent, apart from FTP, already today, in 1994.)

The (obvious) flaw with the hope of making all refereed publications free online by first making their unrefereed drafts free online is that, unlike physicists (and, before them, computer scientists, and economists), most authors in most disciplines do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public (either because they consider it unscholarly, or because they fear professional embarrassment, or because they don't want to immortalize their errors, or because they think unrefereed results could be dangerous, e.g. to public health).

Hence if the road to free online access is reserved for papers that their authors are willing to make publicly accessible as unrefereed drafts first, it will not cover much of refereed research in most disciplines.

SH1: "Instead, everyone would, quite naturally, substitute the refereed, published reprint for the unrefereed preprint."

SH2: And what about all the published reprints that authors would prefer not to have shared with the world when they were just unrefereed drafts?

SH1: "Paper publishers will then either restructure themselves (with the cooperation of the scholarly community)"

SH2: How and why did this "subversive proposal" (to the author community) turn into speculations about publishing and publishers?

SH1: "so as to arrange for the much-reduced electronic-only page costs (which I estimate to be less than 25% of paper-page costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears in most current publishers' estimates)"

SH2: In this speculation about publishing media and costs, what have "pages" to do with it? And what, exactly, does the 25% figure pay for (and what is the 75% that is no longer needed)?

SH1: "to be paid out of advance subsidies (from authors' page charges, learned society dues, university publication budgets and/or governmental publication subsidies) or they will have to watch as the peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic-only publishers who will."

SH2: You seem to be pretty generous with other people's money. And you seem to have forgotten the money already being paid for subscriptions.

But what, exactly, is this money supposed to be paying for? (Again, there seems to be conflation of online-only publication, and its costs, with free online access-provision: surely they are not the same thing.)

SH1: "The subversion will be complete, because the (esoteric -- no-market) peer-reviewed literature will have taken to the airwaves, where it always belonged, and those airwaves will be free (to the benefit of us all) because their true minimal expenses will be covered the optimal way for the unimpeded flow of esoteric knowledge to all: In advance."

SH2: This still sounds quite muddled and vague:

We've heard about "esoteric," give-away writings, but it has not yet been made clear what they are, and why they are give-ways. We have heard about online publication, and online-only publication. We have heard about (some) authors making their unrefereed drafts free online. But how (and why) do we get from that to free online refereed publication? And from there to paying to publish instead of paying to subscribe? (What needs to be paid for, how and why? And how do we get there from here, given that most authors do not wish to make their unrefereed drafts public?)

Sounds like a rather inchoate proposal to me... (And you reputedly expect this to happen overnight? Might we have some more details about what we might expect to happen on that fabled night?)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

« Dans tous les cas, il ne s’agira pas de gratuité, mais de libre accès. La nuance est d’importance, car la gratuité n’existe pas... »

Il y a non seulement deux voies vers la liberté d'accès -- la voie dorée de l'édition ouverte et la voie verte de l'autoarchivage ouvert -- mais il y a deux formes ou degrés de la liberté d'accès. (Leurs traductions -- maladroites -- seraient le libre accès « gratuit » [LAG] ("gratis open access") et le libre accès « libre » [LAL] ("libre open access").)

Le LAG est l'accès gratuit en ligne. Le LAL est le LAG plus certains droits de réutilisation, donc la « libération » d'un texte non seulement des barrières d'accès mais aussi des barrières de permission.

Mais la cible principale du mouvement pour le LA est la littérature lectorisée (contrôlée par les comités de lecture): les 2,5 millions d'articles publiés chaque année dans les 25,000 revues scientifiques qui se publient sur notre planète. Pour cette littérature-là, les auteurs/chercheurs ne souhaitent que ce que leurs textes soient accessibles gratuitement en ligne à tout utilisateur pour pouvoir les rechercher, télécharger, lire, imprimer, analyser, citer -- bref, pour utiliser leurs contenus -- mais pas pour réutiliser ou republier ou autrement tripoter avec leurs verbatims dans les sortes de « remixages » que souhaitent le mouvement pour les biens communs créatifs ( « creative commons » ) tels que dans le cas des dessins animés de Disney, remixés par les ados pour ensuite afficher sur youtube.

Donc vive la gratuité, le coeur du LA! Nous l'aurons dès que nos universités et nos subventionnaires de recherche adoptent des politiques obligatoires ( « mandats » ) tel qu'en font déja une centaine.

Reportons la recherche de la liberté « libre » au lendemain de l'arrivée éventuelle de la gratuité pour laquelle nous sommes déja si longtemps en attente...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum